almost done with dvds

Believe it or not, my collection is almost complete.  Of movies, that is.  My Amazon.com wishlist only has five more DVDs to go before I’m done.  Although, caught up is more the word I’d like to use.  I originally estimated I’d hit the ceiling at 300 movies, but it’s actually much lower .. around 200, I think.

There’s still a few more movies I’d like to get that have been released, but I’m putting them off because they were already released as fullscreen only.  Disney is the main problem in this case.  I don’t know why they don’t release them as widescreen.  My biggest guess is that they are too lazy to dig up the original print, and instead just do a transfer of the home video.

In fact, as I recall, Disney was the slowest to come to grips with the DVD market in the first place.  They have always had the worst set of features on their discs, it seems.  I know ‘Mary Poppins’ alone has seen at least three releases, and each time they got progressively better.  The first release was just a widescreen release, and didn’t even have the trailer, I think.  Not really nice treatment for one of their most signature films, handled by old Walt himself.  Fortunately, in some cases, the studio will come back later and re-release them as a better edition.  I’m really glad they did that with TRON, since the first release of that one was equally crappy.

In fact, Disney has lately picked up on re-releasing movies with more content as a cool marketing scheme, and what they will do is release a classic once on a single disc edition, and then years later as a two-disc edition.  Recent releases like that have been ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Robin Hood.’  The catch is that each time they get to say “First time to DVD!” with the second time adding in ‘two-disc’.  Sneaky.

I doubt that I’ll get to see some of my favorite movies on widescreen re-released special editions anytime soon though.  ‘Max Keeble’s Big Move’ probably just isn’t gonna make the cut, which is a real shame.

I still do have some options though … you can buy it in another region, provided they also have an English translation.  That’s what I had to do with ‘Shipwrecked’, another awesome Disney movie which I don’t think has even been released in the US yet.  I bought it from Amazon.co.uk, and then had the change the region code on my DVD player to rip it.  So now I have a perpetual movie.vob sitting on my harddrive that I better not lose, since I can only change my drive’s region code a few times before it locks up for good.

The Ultimate Disney website has a great page bout which ones have only had pan and scan releases (fullscreen), and where you can buy the widescreen ones.  Sometimes it’s a pain being a perfectionist, but that’s what comes with the territory in being a collector.  Besides, it’s a lot of fun hunting these down and finding them as well.

Once I’m done with my wishlist queue, I’m still going to go looking for some more movies.  I’ve still got my Netflix queue, which has 465 movies in there right now.  The success rate is pretty small though.  I remember doing the math once, and it was something like 5% of movies I watch, I end up buying.  However, the ones I do find, are usually great treasures, so it’s all worth it.

I still have a lot of TV shows on DVD to collect as well.  There’s more coming out every month too of stuff that I want to get, and I imagine it’s going to be that way for a while.  However, I’m also going to shift to collecting old records.  I’ve got a few at home, and I’ve got my record player too.  I want to get one that has an audio output jack as well, so I can record MP3s of them.  There is some great stuff out there, I tell you what.  Pretty exciting. 🙂