DVD THROUGH THE DECADES
Although I've once again lost my supply from the local op-shop, I
have managed to keep picking up second-hand movies from various
other places. Before the op-shop closed due to the pandemic (then
burnt down, then flooded) the ready supply of unwanted VHS tapes
was already starting to dry up. Interestingly this seems to have
coincided with the appearance of Blu-Ray discs among the stocks of
the sorts of places where I buy these, but they're still so rare as
to be irrelevent and I don't even have a player for them set up (I
was given a semi-broken one recently though). Therefore what I have
ended up with are a lot more DVDs.
I've never really liked buying second-hand DVDs. The trouble is
always scratches. Generally my rule is to always check the disc
before purchase, but some second-hand stores annoyingly put tape
over the cases to stop you doing this, and then it ends up a game
of chance. Worst is when I take that chance and then forget to
check when I go to watch the disc, so I get half way through a
movie before it gets choppy and then ends up at a "cannot read
disc". Then there's also the occasional solitary deep scratch that
I miss, yet ends up causing huge jumps during playback.
Occasionally you get a worn-out VHS tape which is barely watchable
(still better than "Luke, I am your fa-fa... CANNOT READ DISC"
though) or infected with mould (since recently ending up with a
whole bag-full of the latter, I'm now looking into building a DIY
tape cleaning machine), but it's much rarer than with second-hand
DVDs. This also means that I almost never buy second-hand DVDs from
the internet because then there's no way to check until you've got
the thing. Even with one new DVD that I bought from Ebay the seller
sent a region 2 (UK etc.) disc instead of Region 4 (Australia etc.)
in contradiction of the description in their listing.
But in spite of all that, now I'm mostly stuck with DVDs as my only
option for movies in the $2 or less price-range (higher also than
the previously usual $0.20 - $1 VHS price range, though now those
are often priced the same as the DVDs). So I've been accumulating
more of them and, as is my way, starting to obsess over the minor
differences in packaging and presentation that have evolved over
the course of the format. So, at the risk of being exceedingly
uninteresting, here are some anecdotal notes on minor changes to
DVD movies over the last two and a half decades.
EARLY DAYS
I don't think DVDs really went mainstream in Australia until the
early 2000s. I'm sure the official introduction was earlier, but in
practice I think they were rare enough in the late 90s that the
average VHS user wouldn't have even heard of them. Certainly discs
from the 90s are very rarely encountered in my second-hand
selections, and actually I couldn't find any Australian DVDs from
that time frame with a brief scan through my (uncatlogued)
collection. I did recently pick up a Region 2 copy of The Green
Berets (1968) published in 1999. This is notable for using a
combined plastic/cardboard case which I'm guessing never really
took off even within the UK. The plastic section holds the DVD and
also has a lip that clips in place to secure the cover which is
entirely printed cardboard and wraps around from the back. It's
clearly an attempt at a minimum-cost packaging design, which
presumably turned out a little too minimal for public acceptance.
The disc itself is also my only DVD flippy-disc made by a major
distributor (Warner Bros.) rather than in a discount bulk movie
publisher who wanted to fit multiple movies on one disc. Although
the movie only runs for 136min, they chose the rare 2-sided DVD
format instead of the now commonplace multilayer format. I'm not
sure what limitations would have caused them to do this back in the
90s, but it does mean that mid-way through the movie a dignified
hand animation breaks the news that you've got to get up off your
backside and turn the disc over to watch the rest of the film.
I did get to experience that for myself as well, because it turns
out that the habit of cost-cutting DVD publishers to label discs
region 2 but actually make them region 2+4 so they don't have to do
a separate run of discs just for the Australian/NZ market, was
established even back then. Shame that wasn't the case for that
disc I bought off Ebay (the BBC always seem to ensure that their
DVDs are truely region-specific).
21ST CENTURY DISCS
Going into the early 2000s, it's not surprising that the industry
moved away from the 'flippy-disc' 2-sided format pretty fast, but
the cardboard cases also gave way to much sturdier whole-plastic
cases. As with VHS tapes before (where regional differences in
cases and general presentation were also much more significant),
the cases, although varying widely, don't exactly match those
common in the USA. Many were porobably made in Australia, as was
also the case with VHS tapes. First releases tended to come in the
most secure cases, usually clear and with a reliable, secure,
disc-holding mechanism. Re-releases on the other hand tended to be
in black plastic cases, much thinner and more easily bent about
while opening or pressing on the front cover. These usually has
less tactile and often less reliable disc holding mechanisms.
Special features evolved during the 2000s. One thing lost after the
rise of the internet was the once-traditional filmography and
production notes features. These little slideshows of text on
graphical backgrounds were little summaries of information that
anyone today, and no doubt many of the more technological people
back then, could find on websites like the Internet Movie DataBase.
Single-paragraph biographies of each key actor, followed by
multiple screen-fulls listing movies that they'd been in before,
were the typical thing.
Rarer, but equally antiquated within just a few years, were
catalogues. These were more common with VHS tapes, but one recently
jumped out at me from the DVD case for the movie Traffic, published
by Roadshow Entertainment in 2001. They're little booklets of all
the new and upcoming DVD releases that you were expected to hunt
down at your local store. New movies are accompanied by many
releases "New to DVD".
THE INTERNET AGE
The inclusion of those little bits of information soon to be widely
available online look rather quaint today, but of course now the
internet is now replacing the DVDs themselves. You can see an
interesting cross-over point with one disc published by Roadshow
Entertainment in 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street. Actually it claims
to come from the future, because in two places the copyright is
marked as "MMXXIII", which of course is next year, but I think a
first-release from 2013 is more likely. This is, I think, the only
disc I've picked up caiming to be a "DVD + DIGITAL ULTRAVIOLET",
which sounds at first potentially damaging to eyesight, but turns
out to be Roadshow Entertainment's attmpt at a DVD-linked streaming
platform. Inside, clipped in where the DVD catalogue could be found
with their discs sold twelve years earlier, is a bit of paper with
a website URL (roadshow.com.au/wolfofwallstreet), an alphanumeric
code, and a whole lot of fine print. Interestingly the link does
still seem to work, though I don't pay for enough internet data (or
get enough internet speed, my modem's back to 3G again most of the
time lately) for wasting on downloading stuff that I've already
got, so I didn't enable the Javascript.
Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about "Digital Ultraviolet", so it
was probably just an Australian thing. The information link to
roadshow.com.au/ultraviolet on the paper slip now just redirects to
Roadshow's main page, and somehow the Wayback Machine never grabbed
it, but DuckDuckGo pulled up this webpage which announces that the
service closed in 2019:
https://page.my.roadshow.com.au/uv
What also happened in the 2010s was that the quality of the cases
for first-releases dropped down to the level of cheap re-release
publications from the 2000s. They're now all thin black plastic,
and different distributors seem to be more commonly sharing the
same cheap case design. The discs themselves have also lost the
multi-colour printing that was standard in the 2000s. Good designs
using the reflective aspect of the disc could be very effective
too, but the single-colour designs that are used now, even for
sci-fi movies, are far more basic and functional than the sort of
thing seen ten years earlier.
Generally publishers don't seem to be putting much effort into DVDs
anymore. I realised this particularly last night when I watched
Ready Player One (2018) for the first time on a first-release
Roadshow Entertainment DVD that I picked up from the op-shop before
it flooded (the movie was better than I expected actually). For the
first time on a DVD that wasn't from some dodgy budget distributor
of very old and low-budget movies, they actually had USA copyright
notices at the start and end instead of Australian ones! The disc
is marked region 4, PAL (so unlikely to be the same as the US disc
even if it's actually region-free), and has Australian ratings
labels. They simply didn't bother to insert an Australian version
of the copyright notices! That's a level of disinterest that never
happened at the end of the VHS era so far as I've seen.
On another note. I use a DVD player made in around the mid-2000s
and I've noticed that with some recently made discs like Ready
Player One, it tends to stall briefly during playback. Not enough
to count as a skip, but noticable, and more frequent than a layer
change. I thought this was just from very small scratches in discs,
but it also happened with a sealed copy of a recently-made DVD of
the 1962 film Hud (great film - doesn't deserve any glitches) that
I bought second-hand. Is there something about the way they're
making DVDs now that's actually slightly incompatible with 15-20
year old players? It seems doubtful that there would be cause to
introduce an incompatible feature at this point, but the evidence
is mounting.
THE END?
Those late 2010s DVDs are about the peak of my exposure to new
discs (and to a large extent, movies), so the current state of DVDs
in the industry isn't clear to me. Even Ready Player One was
apparantly released online weeks before the DVD according to the
Wikipedia page, and then DVD was accompanied by various types of
Blu-Ray. Although I've bought a couple of new DVDs online over the
last couple of years and not seen much presence of Blu-Ray stuff
(for old TV shows though, so it probably wouldn't be expected), I
haven't actually been into a shop selling new DVDs in the 2020s at
all. At least one department store that I've been to used to sell
them but now doesn't stock entertainment stuff at all (at that
particular country branch). Have Blu-Ray discs started to replace
DVDs as expected, or are they both going down together in the face
of competition from streaming services? I really don't know. But in
5-10 years time, when the stuff is all trickling down to op-shops
and similar retailers of near-worthless used goods, I guess I'll
find out.
- The Free Thinker
