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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
I’m not a racist…
*actually, it’s been vaulted my entire adult life
I do. It’s on a VHS tape and has Japanese subtitles. The movie is sweet, sentimental, and portrays a South not depicted as a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe . . .
Another nice thing about modern times, people can make their own DVDs.
DVD is on Amazon. Probably a pirated copy, but it is there
I was going to post this link. It’s also available through a couple of other sources, cheaper. Found via bad ol’ google.
I once bought a DVD of “The Man From UNCLE: The Fifteen-Years Later Affair” from Amazon, it looked like it had been copied from a VHS tape or something, especially at the start. My own DVR recording from TV (don’t remember which channel) was better.
There are a number of 30 Rock episodes that have been banned from streaming, including the classic Black Swan/Lynn Swann cosplay episode. Making fun of Blackface IS Blackface.
(And another place to get Song of the South.)
Any information if any of the online versions have been previously edited? That wouldn’t surprise me. It could be that to get a fully original version, you need to get the laserdisc and copy that to dvd.
I went to get a dvd of “The Harrad Experiment” a while back, and found that all the “commercial” versions have been edited because Don Johnson didn’t want people to see how little he was, or something. A few enterprising people have created “restored” versions that very carefully and almost seamlessly put all that stuff back in, from original VHS tapes I suppose.
I was thinking of 30 Rock before you mentioned it. I almost sent the box set I have to the charity shop last year but decided to hold on to it because of that episode. So then I rewatched the series and cringed when Alec Baldwin’s character faked a fatal shooting with a prop gun.
The “official” boxed set of the Monty Python episodes I got years ago, had similar problems. Although I think they only changed music a few times. For example, when the Old Ladies are turning the couch and getting ready to talk about the Penguin On The TV Set, they’re originally semi-singing “Girl From Ipanema.” On the DVD set, and some broadcast versions, that’s been re-dubbed with “I Dream Of Jeanie.”
It’s possible that they could not get the rights to use Girl from Ipanema on the DVD release, or that the copyright holder demanded too much money. In the original broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Marvin the Paranoid Android hums like Pink Floyd. That segment was removed in the DVD release for copyright reasons.
As parler has shown, the cloud Giveth and the cloud Taketh away
They can and do disappear books at times. It doesn’t really scare me. I have lost physical books as well in moves, lending to friends, and just giving them away to increase room for new books.
Mine aren’t and never will be. I like reading the classics every now and again but I also enjoy many “new” writers. You know like from the last 50 years or so.
Lot of people enjoy it. I’m one.
I’d say the first half is. When they first see the dinosaurs, it begins to move along . . .
My son is a big fan of all of those movies. When the first Jurassic World came out he saw some reviews complaining about plot. Then I explained, “You have dinosaurs and some of them are going to eat people. Do you need any more plot or character development than that?” He saw the movie and really liked it.
Yes, I bought a “copy” many years ago to complete my classic Disney animated collection. One of the best purchases I have ever made.
In anticipation of the coming media “purge” I have copies of Gone with the Wind, Birth of a Nation, Apocalypto, Psycho and Song of the South. There are probably more that I should get, but these will do for starters. I also have the complete Tex Avery set on Laser Disc, which contains cartoons not on the two volume Tex Avery Blu-ray sets released recently, in addition to a five volume Loony Tune Laser Disc set with cartoons I cannot find anywhere on DVD, plus I have a recently released Puppetoon Movie 2 volume Blu-rays which include the now verboten Dr. Suess’ The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and especially To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street plus more.
I ran across a Blu-Ray of Blazing Saddles at the thrift store last week, and I should have snapped it up. Alas!
:-(
Similar story with me. I bought a set of all the Mel Brooks major comedies, a full set of the Monty Python tv show, “spaghetti” westerns, Warner Brothers cartoons, Idiocracy, etc.
I also got a full set of the Mad Max movies but that’s more as a potential instruction manual for the future.
But it is much better than The Lost World.
LD players don’t last forever, you should get that stuff copied over to digital archives, and keep multiple copies.
Thanks to advances in technology, the “memory hole” process is becoming ever more efficient.
I know, that has been on my to do list for a very long time.
I don’t believe you are wrong at all. Looking back in time, I recall Hollywood started obsessing with lecturing back in the 70s.
On the subject of DVDs and why they are still relevant is the changing technology we have come to expect in the computerized age. Remember 8-track tapes? Remember the Betamax? VCRs? I no longer have any of those items despite embracing them enthusiastically at the time and devoting lots of $$ to the movies, etc. When I look at the streaming movies I have purchased on Prime, I wonder if the day will come when they will disappear as some other new and better thing takes their place. For that reason I have built an extensive collection of DVDs containing those special movies I want to keep forever.
I would encourage you to use S-Video rather than Composite, if possible. My home-made DVRs always had S-Video input and most LD players have an S-Video output. (Mine did.) I would also record satellite TV programming from the S-Video output of the “tuner box.”
On the plus side, even new blu-ray players can still play dvd.