THOMAS VIDEO: A SLIGHTLY GRIM FAIRY TALE Once upon a time, in the infamous town of Royal Oak, Michigan, a small store started selling Super 8 movies on reels for home projector use. This was back in the stoned age, the '70s, before Royal Oak earned its national reputation as the Macabre Mecca, home of Dr. Death (Jack Kevorkian) and site of the very first post office massacre, the inspiration for the many that followed. In 1974, Royal Oak was just a pleasant blue-collar suburb of Detroit, a small city in which Dennis Thomas set up his shop, Thomas Film Classics. A few years later, in a brilliantly prescient moment, before Blockbuster was remotely visible on the horizon, the store sold its first movies on videocassettes. Thomas Video was born, one of the very first video stores in America. During his first years in operation, Thomas hired two members of a punk rock band called (whose "Gutless Radio" is considered to be the first punk record out of Detroit) and let them develop the inventory in the store. Guitarist Jim Olenski and singer Gary Reichel went to work filling the shelves with one of the best collections of foreign and cult films anywhere in the country. In 1984 Thomas sold the business to Olenski and Reichel and the two have owned and operated the company for more than fifteen years. By 1991 the store had amassed more than 10,000 titles and moved to a larger space in nearby Clawson, Michigan. Now in its 25th year, Thomas Video stocks over 30,000 movies on video. Although the store always provides all of the popular Hollywood hits of the day and an extensive stock of classics, its national reputation has been stoked by its extensive list of hard-to-find cult and foreign films. Serious fans and collectors from all over the country now regularly contact Thomas Video for help in finding the films that the chains don't carry. Perhaps it should have been expected that the town that gave us Dr. Death and "going postal" would give rise to one of the few video sources in the country to stock the Brazilian film, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul and the so-bad-it's-great Curse of the Queerwolf. Coincidence? Maybe. Not content to rest with providing the most eclectic selection of films on video, Thomas Video has also played an important part in suburban Detroit's cultural enrichment by regularly featuring in-store and off-site events. The store has hosted numerous parties celebrating film releases (Tromeo and Juliet), book publications (VideoHound's World Cinema), and introducing important film personages to the community, such as William Lustig (Maniac Cop), who attended the Thomas Video screening of his 1998 film Uncle Sam, and Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Films and director of The Toxic Avenger. In 1997 co-owner Jim Olenski hosted a film series called "Thomas Video's Cult Classic Tuesdays" at a local theater and celebrity characters such as Sgt. Kabukiman (of Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D.) made frequent appearances. In 1998 Thomas Video became a charter sponsor of the first Detroit Windsor International Film Festival. The store can always be counted on to provide wholesome entertainment for the masses. And so, we have a happy ending: the country's first video store survives the chains, prospers, gains a national reputation, becomes an important community asset, and sets up a website to help even more desperate customers locate that copy of The Monster and the Girl. But what about Royal Oak, you ask. Has it recovered from its tainted past now that Dr. Jack is in jail and massacres are taking place in schoolhouses instead of post offices? Unfortunately, no. All was well for a while, but not long after Thomas Video moved to Clawson, Royal Oak suffered an invasion of a new and insidious power that would change its face forever: it was taken over by coffee bars.