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DVDs and Cancel Culture
My wife tried to see if any of the mothers at church with younger children wanted some of our old Veggie Tales and Superbook DVDs. Most said that they don’t have a DVD player.
Streaming services have reduced the need for DVDs. Still, hundreds of millions of DVDs are sold every year. My assumption would be it is older people, like me, getting their movies on discs. Turns out, that isn’t the case. According to the MPAA, “those aged 25 to 39 are more likely than most to watch DVDs.” Some of the reasons for buying DVD’s is better quality and availability. In the old days of streaming, Netflix had most of the movies. Since then, other services have popped up and access to all of the movies you want, when you want them, would require subscriptions to lots of different streaming services which can get expensive.
For movies you will want to watch multiple times, I think there is another reason to buy DVDs. We live in a time where they show warnings before movies to let you know the film includes “historical smoking.” The same people activity promoting legalization of marijuana are worried that you might see a fictional character smoke a cigarette. Classic novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird often show up on lists of banned books. With this culture of censorship, can you be sure that your favorite films will even be available on your streaming service a year from now?
Want to watch Blazing Saddles? I read that HBOMAX requires you to be lectured about racism for three minutes before they let you start the film. How long until they just ban such films altogether. And now we have to worry if something might be “Anti-trans.” Psycho might be considered a classic, but only if you are a trans-phobe. The only man in the movie who likes to dress up as a woman is a mass murderer. And he is the one referred to as a psycho, rather than just a guy who was born that way.
There are lots of reasons to love the convenience and selections available through various streaming services. But for me, if there is something I plan to watch over and over, I am not going to let Big Tech tell me what I can and can’t watch. I guess that could sound a little paranoid, but from what I have seen over the past year or two, the Left has no issue with censorship and actually prefer it to debate. Am I wrong?
Published in General
Fox removed the Michael Jackson episode from The Simpsons on streaming, and I think they’ve removed it from new box sets. You are not being paranoid.
A rather spooky tweet from Marc Andreessen:
“Buy physical copies of any book you plan to read in the future. Do it now.”
Link
Could apply equally well to video.
Even more than the outright elimination of art from the past I fear the selective edit, the “tidying up” of a scene with the power the computer effects industry that is now at the disposal of the latest generation.
You’re not alone, I always choose to go with physical media as opposed some “service” I cannot entirely trust.
And music too. A lot of un-PC lyrics out there.
a) I really miss getting my DVD rentals in the mail and then ripping ’em as avi files for repeat viewing. I know Netflix still does DVD-by-mail in the US, but up here in Soviet Canuckistan we’re out of luck.
b) Don’t most public libraries still loan out DVDs?
Is he trying to argue that even sites like gutenberg.org and archive.org are gonna go the way of the dodo? The vast majority of the books I have on my e-reader are public domain.
Marc seems to be very, very concerned about the advance of censorship-thinking. A tweet from 10 days ago:
“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the legacy Internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.”
Link
For anyone who doesn’t know who Marc is: he was co-creator of the first widely-used web browser and is a general partner in the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Very thoughtful guy, worth reading his tweets.
Marc A did not specifically address sites like gutenberg and archive, but one can easily imagine such sites being pressured to delete certain works or to prefix them with ‘that is badthink’ disclaimers.
And to keep track of who accesses them…
They’ve done a really good job of resisting the pressure so far. One can find a heck of a lot of “problematic” material at Archive.org.
If they don’t already use offshore hosting, they probably should.
Last I checked, a basic DVD player is like $20 at walmart. They’re practically disposable.
Reportedly, they started looking into making offshore copies of the archive in 2016 because they were afraid the Trump administration would be heavily into censorship.
The irony is delicious.
I hope the irony is pointed out to them, frequently. And maybe with a hot poker at that.
It is far too easy to alter digitally produced books.
The other thing that bothers me about digital versus print copy is that the publishers don’t invest the editorial time in them that they used to invest in print books. It’s obvious why: digital copy is cheap to produce and they don’t care as much about it. The shelf life is much shorter, and it’s easy to fix if something is found to be wrong. Most importantly, the publishers aren’t worried about 10,000 error-filled copies sitting in a warehouse somewhere. There’s very little incentive to have the books edited carefully. And even though editors drive their authors nuts from time to time, editors do catch a lot of errors.
We have a gazillion DVDs. They can’t be banned, altered to be made more PC, or taken away because producers want to destroy their works. Long live DVDs!
True. Selective editing can be worse than outright censorship.
For me, I’m starting to view the “badthink” disclaimers in the same way that teens purchasing CDs in the Nineties viewed “parental advisory: explicit lyrics” labels.
Meh, I don’t mind if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
It’s about the only thing I go to the library for anymore.
So, . . . uh, yes.
My cow-orkers mock me because I still prefer to watch things on disc rather than on a streaming service.
Movies are about the only thing you can get at my town library anymore. The new librarian removed books from The lower two shelves and the upper shelf in all rows throughout the library because they weren’t handicap accessible, or something like that. Because no one can say, “Excuse me, can you reach that for me?” So now it is just videos . . . except for the display of Gay and Trans children’s books by the front door.
Weird how that seems to be the case at all libraries.
I wonder if I could start a private library.
I have a few blu-rays and DVDs, largely the ones we rewatch and what the kids watch in the van on car rides.
We just got a Jurassic Park collection on hard copy.
We use the Xbox for a player. I’m surprised there are families without a DVD player. I like streaming, but I have favorites that aren’t easily accessible.
When Disney’s copyrights go the way of the dodo bird, I hope to get access to their older stuff on hard copy.
The librarians are now the most active of censors.
Jurassic Park is a terrible movie!
Dinosaurs. Find me a better one with dinosaurs and I’ll abdicate.
I also disagree. Waiting to see the last one to see the end to the trajectory, but the trailers look promising. The story ark that so readily displays the folly of doing what you shouldn’t just because you can and the attendant fallout of such hubris is also really great to me and I’m still incredibly entertained.
And T-rex eats a lawyer . . . what’s not to like?
I have registered my complaint in the “Ricochet Film Society” group if you want to read it. It’s basically a horror film where all the trauma is visited upon children, and for that I consign it to the ash heap!
Anybody got a copy of Song of the South?