Pops — a portly man with thick glasses and a pocketful of permanent markers — ran his "shop" from a foldable table under a frayed umbrella. His inventory: hundreds of VCDs in clear plastic sleeves, stacked like dominoes. Jackie Chan kicking sideways on one label. A grainy Titanic sinking on another. Jurassic Park with the subtitle misspelled as "Jurasic Par." Nobody cared.

In the late 1990s, before streaming queues and terabyte hard drives, there was the Video CD — a shimmering silver disc that held just about 74 minutes of pixelated magic. And in every neighborhood, there was a Pops Vcd Manager .

And when a disc got scratched beyond repair, Pops would solemnly snap it in two. "No use," he'd say. "This one joins the great coasters in the sky."