'Clerks' Hit Theaters on This Day in 1994

10/19/2018 12:26 pm EDT

On this day in 1994, Kevin Smith's independent film Clerks hit theaters and catapulted Smith to indie filmmaking icon.

Smith would spend the next decade exploring the stories of stoners, slackers, and geeks in movies like Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Eventually he would start to move out of that comfort zone, but by then he had become a hero within nerd culture, and while his current crop of bizarre films have a dedicated fan base, he is probably best known for either his initial work or for Comic Book Men, his unscripted series on AMC.

Smith will return to the "Askewniverse" of interconnected movies -- and to the Quick Stop, where he was working as a convenience store employee when he shot Clerks -- next year with Jay & Silent Bob Reboot.

You can see him talking about the anniversary on Instagram below.

In a weird coincidence, today is also the anniversary of the first Blockbuster Video opening.

The video rental giant has only one remaining location at this point, but in the '90s it was a cultural icon ever-present enough to be the establishing shot in the Captain Marvel trailer.

And, because of Clerks's limited initial run and the cult following that Smith garnered, it is likely that a great many fans first saw the movie through home video rentals, at Blockbuster or similar stores.

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