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Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank

2025-04-143:43139113www.latimes.com

Wondering what happened to the Fry’s Electronics in Burbank? After seeing a post on @americanaatbrandmemes that it was being torn down, Rebecca Castillo stopped by the site in time to witness the demolition of the iconic spaceship.The store opened its Burbank location in 1995 and closed in 2021. Although the demolition crew wasn’t able to save the spaceship, they did preserve one alien relic from the building.

The lot, which is on the corner of Hollywood Way and Vanowen Street, is slated for the construction of apartment buildings with around 800 units.


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Comments

  • By pjs_ 2025-04-170:598 reply

    Where else could you simultaneously purchase through-hole transistors, a gaming motherboard, a 19" rack, a leafblower, a loudspeaker disguised as a plastic rock, pornography, a taser, a sandwich and a decent cup of coffee while surrounded by fiberglass cowboys and aliens... sad to see

    • By classichasclass 2025-04-171:282 reply

      Sandwiches, too. Ate at the cafe a fair bit. When my buddy was living on Victory and Hollywood we hit Burbank on a regular basis.

      Of the Burbank, Fountain Valley, San Marcos, San Diego, Anaheim Hills, Roseville, Sacramento, Fremont, Las Vegas and Sunnyvale locations, I think I liked the San Diego one most for selection (it was a former Incredible Universe), but the Roseville and Las Vegas ones had the wildest themes, even more than the Burbank UFO. But the Fremont location when I ended up there in 2019 was deader than a doornail, and it was like waiting for the next hit to kill them. The next hit came sooner than I thought.

      • By Cerium 2025-04-173:53

        I used to stop by the Fremont location for a sandwich when traffic on the Sunol grade was bad.

      • By donio 2025-04-172:26

        And a decent tiramisu.

    • By bwfan123 2025-04-171:312 reply

      if you looked hard, you might even find the offices of the American Institute of Math at a fry's location... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_of_Mathemat...

      • By Animats 2025-04-174:36

        Fry's American Institute of Mathematics built and operated a 192-acre golf course in Morgan Hill.[1] There was some suspicion that was the real purpose of the Institute. They'd been trying to build a large clubhouse (er, "headquarters") on the site, built to look like the Alahambra castle and equipped with guest rooms, a wine cellar, and "a gourmet-industrial kitchen with master chefs from a San Francisco seafood restaurant and a Napa Valley resort." That was not, apparently, built. Here's what it was supposed to look like.[2]

        [1] https://www.greenfoothills.org/pga-tour-eyes-frys-course

        [2] https://archive.is/1sukx

      • By CalRobert 2025-04-174:59

        Not to mention the history of having been an Incredible Universe on Tandy drive in the case of the Sacramento one

    • By JKCalhoun 2025-04-174:203 reply

      When I first moved out to the Bay Area in 1995 and discovered Fry's it was wire-wrapping tools, sockets, enclosures, electronic components, porn magazines, junk food, soft drinks, Computer Shopper magazines....

      • By hbarka 2025-04-175:571 reply

        The Computer Shopper magazine. How it was 3/4” thick full of content every edition just amazed me.

        • By corysama 2025-04-177:281 reply

          5/8” of that was ads. But, before the consumer internet, those ads were as interesting and valuable to readers as the articles.

          • By ghaff 2025-04-178:131 reply

            The articles in Computer Shopper were pretty much fairly low effort filler. Not that there weren’t tons of ads in things like PC Magazine but the articles/columns/reviews were of pretty good quality for the most part.

            • By jhbadger 2025-04-1718:051 reply

              While the point of the articles was to keep it legally qualified as a "magazine" rather than a "catalog" (as postal rates then favored the former over the latter), there were some good things there. Don Lancaster wrote some amazing articles about Postscript and how you can write Postscript code to make figures rather than using a drawing program. And Stan Veit, who was editor of Computer Shopper for a time, wrote some good history articles about the early personal computer scene in the 1970s (Veit had opened in 1976 the first computer store in NYC, and one of the first in the USA as a whole)

              • By ghaff 2025-04-1719:42

                Fair. I had forgotten about Don Lancaster, probably because that was never an area of particular interest. Mostly only bought Computer Shopper if I were building a PC or something like that.

      • By AStonesThrow 2025-04-175:391 reply

        You could literally purchase a bag of chips (SIMMs) on one aisle, and a bag of chips (Fritos) in another!

        I must admit that “Big Boob Babes” was my favorite CD-ROM purchase in 1994. No, it was not a DVD

        This morning, I was just watching the video of “The Distance” by Cake, and I vividly recall when that was released and played on my car radio, and the metaphor of corporate slavery was not lost on 24-year-old me.

        My favorite store was the one with the Mesoamerican temples and stuff.

        Also, remember Weird Stuff Warehouse?

        • By JKCalhoun 2025-04-1716:11

          I have an extension cable that still has the bright orange Weird Stuff Warehouse sticker on it. I will never remove it.

      • By iancmceachern 2025-04-175:081 reply

        Computer shopper!

    • By unclebucknasty 2025-04-171:461 reply

      And each one of those items would somehow have a dead pixel.

      • By 01100011 2025-04-174:022 reply

        I loved Fry's and shopped there often in the 90s and 00s but it did seem like half of the things I bought there had to be returned for one reason or another.

        • By flomo 2025-04-174:121 reply

          Once I was returning something at the Palo Alto Fry's and the couple ahead of me had a laptop where someone had removed the battery and replaced it with a sandwich. Only at Fry's.

          • By martinpw 2025-04-177:50

            I once returned a product that was not working to the Burbank Fry's location. I walked around the store for a bit, then passed by the section where that product was sold - and saw the product I had returned back on the shelf. Could tell by the way I had torn it open - they had just wrapped it back up and put a small discount on it.

        • By unclebucknasty 2025-04-1712:22

          >for one reason or another.

          Exactly that. It was never that it straight-up didn't work. It was just that there was some issue.

          I first encountered it with a TV that literally had a dead pixel. From there, the next 3-4 purchases featured something wrong. Monitor's built-in settings menu didn't display, cordless phone speaker issue, etc.

          Dead pixels.

          No way it was random. Funniest part was they'd get snippy with their return policy, like you were the problem.

    • By LeoPanthera 2025-04-171:07

      Don't forgot the knock-off cologne!

    • By rmason 2025-04-172:471 reply

      Whenever I was out in the Valley I'd visit one or more Fry's. Then there was Weird Stuff Warehouse and Computer Literacy Bookstore. There probably wasn't any area the size of Silicon Valley that had stores that even remotely compared. Always spent more than I budgeted but never felt bad about it.

      • By Gibbon1 2025-04-174:37

        There was Halted and this other one I liked better Alltronics? run by an old amateur radio guy. Originally it was in Los Gatos. But then moved north new Zanker Rd.

        Just being able to look at all the various components was a good education.

    • By charcircuit 2025-04-175:411 reply

      Ebay? Amazon? Temu?

    • By MrTrvp 2025-04-173:26

      porn magazines! haha man

  • By aresant 2025-04-170:561 reply

    Drooling over PC part reviews in magazines that I could never afford, checking the weekly printed Fry's ad in the local paper to find deals, convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"

    Iconic building, nostalgic time.

    • By johnvanommen 2025-04-172:12

      > convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"

      I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.

      When you first start doing a job like that, you imagine that you'll be doing all kinds of sightseeing. I thought I'd be traipsing through Central Park and eating Cubanos in Miami.

      None of that happens IRL; you're so busy working, by the time you have a few hours to kill, all you want to do is space out. Doing tourist stuff gets to be WORK.

      After a few months of this, I started to just obsessively spend time at Fry's.

      I didn't even really need anything from Fry's. It was just this place I could reliably visit at any tech hub on the west coast. Doesn't matter if you're in Burbank or San Diego or Sacramento or Portland or Seattle: if it's 2010, there's a Fry's you can wander around in for a couple of hours.

      I've never been to The Space Needle in Seattle, but I've been to Fry's Electronics numerous times.

  • By taggart 2025-04-171:252 reply

    While attending the University of Arizona in Tucson in the early 90s, I got very confused by posts on Usenet talking about buying computers at Fry’s. You see, the Fry’s grocery store chain still existed in Tucson at the time, so I could not figure out where a grocery store would stock computers!

    Needless to say when I moved to the Bay Area after college graduation, I wasted no time visiting the closest Fry’s Electronics. For me, that was the original Fremont location - the one in an office park off Mission Blvd with the space theme inside. I never see that location mentioned any more. It was closed after Fry’s bought the Incredible Universe stores and they moved the Fremont Fry’s to the IU store on Auto Mall Parkway.

    • By topato 2025-04-171:58

      Fry's grocery is still the branding of Kroger in the PHX area

    • By kevinpet 2025-04-174:371 reply

      I was confused when I moved out to Phoenix especially because the logos are pretty similar. Turns out Fry's electronics was started by the sons of the founder of Fry's food.

      • By paradox460 2025-04-179:00

        Phoenix used to have two Fry's electronics too

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