Gushing with nostalgia: Suncoast Motion Picture Company lives on in Texas oil town

The store in Beaumont is one of two in America still operating exclusively as a Suncoast.

The Suncoast Motion Picture Company at the Parkdale Mall in Beaumont, Texas. (Rolando Pujol)

About 90 minutes northeast of Houston, in the historic oil-boom town of Beaumont, lies the equivalent –  for me anyway –  of striking oil.

My spindletop, if you will, can be found in the Parkdale Mall, where one of two remaining Suncoast Motion Picture Company stores is still putting on a show for shoppers – and stopping nostalgists like me cold in their tracks.

Unlike the one that survives in Jacksonville, North Carolina, which I've also visited – you can see it at the Retrologist link embedded below – this store still sports its neon sign. Inside, it hardly resembles the Suncoasts of yore – long gone are the racks upon racks of VHS tapes and movie memorabilia, though DVDs and Blu-rays can be found aplenty.

Some of the Suncoast offerings (Rolando Pujol)

If you’re a plush toy and Funko Pop collector, you’ll find plenty to explore here, along with tumblers, T-shirts, backpacks and other stuff that cinephiles might enjoy but can live without.

Yet somehow, the sun has not yet set on this Suncoast. There used to be hundreds at the chain’s peak. Musicland – remember them? – once owned Suncoast, then Best Buy bought Musicland in early 2000s, and their business instincts were right – right about 10 years too late. Worst Buy is more like it. They soon unloaded Suncoast and slowly the chain atrophied to just about nothing.

Suncoast’s light – at least its corporate heritage – still shines through FYE stores, which survive in more prodigious numbers. There’s even a third Suncoast that’s reportedly co-branded with FYE, in Ohio.

But aside from the odd label scars in malls here and there, Suncoast is mostly a memory, heaped in with names like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video as names that define a different decade.

Suncoast began with the iconic name Paramount Pictures, when the movie studio saw hawking VHS tapes as a gusher for revenue, a new frontier to conquer. 

Today, the green is bubbling up in the verdant fields of streaming, and I suppose you could call — ever so generously — Paramount Plus the Suncoast of our day.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. But in Beaumont, at the Suncoast Motion Picture Company, it’s still the 1990s – and that gets two thumbs up from me.