Rebecca and George Latsios opened Scarecrow Video in 1988 on Latona Avenue in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood with a starting inventory of 600 titles. John McCullough co-founded the store with them. From the beginning, the operation distinguished itself by stocking films that mainstream chains ignored: obscure international cinema, silent-era oddities, underground horror, deep anime catalogs. By 1993, the collection had outgrown its original space, and Scarecrow relocated to a larger two-story building on Roosevelt Way in the University District, occupying 8,300 square feet. The move cemented its reputation. Celebrity patrons reportedly included directors John Woo and Bernardo Bertolucci, actors Bridget Fonda, Courtney Love, and Winona Ryder, and the legendary film critic Roger Ebert. George Latsios died in 2003 at just 44 years old, but the store he built endured.

The numbers tell an astonishing story. As of 2025, Scarecrow held more than 150,000 titles. Some 14,676 items exist only on VHS, and 263 only on laserdisc. Many are out of print, with deposit requirements ranging from $150 to $1,000 for the rarest. The earliest original release date in the collection is from 1891, predating the motion picture industry as most people understand it. Scarecrow is not just large; it is irreplaceable. The collection functions as a de facto public archive, holding films that no university library, no national institution, and no streaming platform makes available. In 2004, the staff distilled some of this expertise into The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide, published by Sasquatch Books. The store now rents roughly 1,800 titles per month, both in person and through a DVD-by-mail service launched nationwide in 2021 after a successful trial during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By 2014, the streaming revolution had thinned the herd of American video stores almost to extinction. Scarecrow was no exception. Facing closure, owners Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough donated the entire catalog to the Scarecrow Project, a nonprofit formed by current and former employees and longtime patrons. A Kickstarter campaign raised over $100,000, and Scarecrow reopened as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving what it called "one of the world's largest publicly available libraries of film and television." The conversion worked, at least for a while. Seattle's other holdouts were not so fortunate: the 32-year-old Video Isle closed in January 2019, and Reckless Video followed in July 2021, leaving Scarecrow as the last store standing within city limits.

Survival kept demanding new acts of reinvention. In June 2024, the Scarecrow Project launched a Save Our Scarecrow campaign with a goal of raising $1.8 million to sign a new lease and continue operating. The campaign succeeded, reaching its $1.8 million target by the end of 2024 through nearly 7,600 individual contributions. Then, in January 2026, SV Archive, the nonprofit managing the store, announced something nobody had expected: it had purchased the building Scarecrow occupies for $5.5 million, securing the store's physical home for good. The weekly YouTube show "Viva Physical Media" carries on, employees still host free community screenings and film classes, and visitors still walk the aisles where physical media refuses to die. In a city that has reinvented itself several times over since 1988, Scarecrow Video endures as a monument to the stubborn conviction that some things are worth holding in your hands.