The last 20 or so years have seen an amazing advancement in home video technology. I grew up in the VHS cassette era, but I got to see home video grow and expand into the digital realm with DVD and subsequently HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Now, digital streaming using platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are almost commonplace now. In fact, a lot of people and industry insiders believe that digital streaming is the future of home video. That may be, but there are still people like me who are kind of old-fashioned in that we still prefer to have physical copies of movies. I like having a hard copy of a movie, because I can hold it in my hands. I’ve got myself a pretty large collection of films on various formats. While I don’t think that Blu-Ray will be going anywhere anytime soon, I’ve been hearing rumors about another high-definition format that isn’t 4k. Starting with DVD, home video releases have seen extra content in addition to the movie itself. Behind-the-scenes footage, movie trailers and other marketing materials. It’s really spectacular. This trend has continued with Blu-Ray. I’ve seen some really spectacular packages released in the past two decades. That being said, there have also been releases that were not so good. Quality of the films aside, I’m going to specifically target home video releases that were pretty awful. There was one movie that I picked up over the weekend that inspired this post:
I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu
This isn’t a good movie at all, even when compared to the original, but that’s not why this on this list. When I ordered the film on Amazon, I read a review that said the film was put on a BD-R disc. BD-R is a recordable Blu-Ray disc that’s generally available to the public. I didn’t believe it at first until I actually got the movie. They were right, the movie is on a BD-R. The distributors were so cheap they couldn’t even bother to get the release professionally done. Basically, they took the film that was on somebody’s computer and burned onto a disc. Usually, the production of a Blu-Ray disc takes a while and uses equipment and material that makes it look good. Not here. While the film quality isn’t awful, there are no special features here. In fact, there are no menus whatsoever, no previews, nothing. They don’t even bother putting in audio and subtitle options for people who might have hearing issues. Nope. All you get is a main screen showing clips from the film and an option that says “play movie.” That’s it. I thought the film was amateurish at best, but the actual disc release is one of the most unprofessional things I’ve seen in years. It would’ve been just better to have the movie automatically play when you put it in the player. I knew I was going to have to buy the film to see it, because it wasn’t available on Redbox or most digital platforms. Fine, but it absolutely wasn’t worth the 22 bucks I paid for it.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
The early days of DVD were fairly experimental. Movie studios were trying to adapt to the new format for a new age of home video. While some early discs were decent enough to be demo disc-worthy, others really weren’t. Perfect example? The initial DVD release of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The film would get a proper DVD release some years later with an extended version of the film, but the original release was a disaster. This was one of the first double-sided discs to come out. For some movies, the film was on one side and the special features on the other. It made sense. But where Robin Hood failed was putting one half of the film on one side and the second half on the other, meaning you had to flip the disc to see the rest of the movie. For VHS tapes, having two tapes to contain a three-to-four hour film was standard. You really couldn’t put all that one tape without sacrificing visual quality. I believe that Warner Bros. thought that was the case here. The movie wasn’t even 2.5 hours long, but they split it up so they could add SOME special features, which is okay, I guess, but still. Honestly, having a double-sided disc was risky anyway, because you could inadvertently get your finger oils on the disc that would possibly keep it from functioning properly.
Star Wars Trilogy 2006 DVD Re-release
While the original Star Wars Trilogy has seen subsequent releases on DVD and Blu-Ray, the DVD releases piss me off the most, specifically the 2006 re-release. When George Lucas did the Special Editions of the original films in 1997, people were mixed about the results. While some of the redone visual effects were good, others weren’t. When the films were released on DVD in 2004, people were excited, except to find out the original versions of the films were nowhere to be found and that Lucas had continued to tinker with his movies. It wouldn’t be until 2006 that audiences would finally get the original versions of the trilogy on DVD with the re-release. There’s just one problem: The visual quality sucked. They took the transfer from the 1994 VHS wide-screen versions and slapped them on a DVD, with barely any effort. Not only that, it was for a limited time only. It’s great that we finally got the original theatrical versions on DVD, but we will never see them on Blu-Ray, even though Fox was bought out by Disney, so while there is a possibility it could happen, Disney has no plans to. This one hurt a lot of people, myself included.
DiVX and Self-Destructing DVDs
This clip belongs to Oddity Archive, so all credit goes to him for the video and the information presented within. When DVD first came out, some geniuses came up with a new way of renting out DVDs without having audiences return the discs. The format that I had heard of was DiVX, even though FlexPlay came out afterwards, but both of these formats operated in similar ways: Rent a movie and you have 48 hours to watch the movie before the disc becomes unusable. The main difference between the two was the DiVX required a specific player for those discs to work while FlexPlay could be used in any standard DVD player. It was supposed to be a cheaper alternative to buying and renting discs from a store. Part of the problem was that DiVX required a phone line to operate so it could verify the disc, FlexPlay actually used a specific dye that would render the disc unusable within 48 hours of opening the package. The discs had an expiration date. Renting videos was commonplace already, but movie studios wanted to try and do something better: Planned obsolescence. DiVX died within months of rolling out and Flexplay finally closed up shop by 2013. I never bought into these ideas, because it sounded incredibly stupid and remarkably redundant. The fact that you had to have a specific player for DiVX was astoundingly short-sided. Not everybody had DVD at the time and players were fairly expensive. So, yeah, disposable DVDs were a very bad idea.
It’s not a whole lot, but those are what I consider to be some of the worst home video releases when it comes to DVDs and Blu-Rays. This last entry with DiVX was more about a trend that movie studios were trying to get started, but it still counts. Those are some of the worst releases that I’VE encountered, and they really had nothing to with the actual film. So, yeah.