In Wednesday’s Trib, TV columnist Vince Horiuchi addressed a subject near and dear to my heart, the DVD. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I wasn’t an early adopter of this home video format. I’d seen DVDs demonstrated and was impressed with their capabilities, but I’d spent years (and a helluva lot of money) building a huge movie collection on VHS tape, and I was frankly annoyed that my collection was suddenly obsolete. I know myself and I knew that as soon as I started buying those shiny silver platters with their amazing picture quality, I would want to replace all my fuzzy old tapes, and that really galled me. Eventually, however, I saw the writing on the walls. It happened the day I spotted X-Men on DVD for a better price than its VHS counterpart. The future had arrived. I caved. I bought my first disc before I even had a player. And I never looked back. Now I’ve got a collection of nearly 200 films and TV series on DVD, and yes, I have replaced many (though not all) of my older VHS movies.

Replacing older copies of your favorite movies is what Horiuchi addresses in Wednesday’s column; however, he’s not talking about making the switch from one format to another. What’s put a bee in his bonnet is the way the studios keep coming out with newer and better versions of movies that have already been released on DVD. You know what I’m talking about, even if you think you don’t. Here’s the usual scenario: you see a flick in the theaters and you like it enough that you think you want to own it. Six months later, it appears on a “bare bones” DVD that contains only the movie and a trailer. Maybe you wish it had a few more extra features on it, but you buy it anyhow. You really liked this movie, after all, and you want to add it to your home library now. But then another six months pass, maybe a year. And then one day you’re at Costco and you see that this very same movie has now been re-released on DVD in a new “special edition” with five hours of documentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, and whatever other “value-added material” the studio execs have thrown on the disc in order to entice you. Now you’re faced with a choice — buy the new-and-improved version or be satisfied with the one you’ve already got? If you’re any kind of collector at all, you probably buy the new version, at least for the films that you really, really like. You feel like a chump for buying and storing the same title twice, but you do it anyway. It’s what the hard-core DVD afficionados on the Home Theater Forum refer to as “double-dipping,” and it can be annoying as hell. However, I think Horiuchi is wrong to denounce the entire practice and ask for only one version of each movie title, just to save him from his own lack of self-restraint.

For one thing, Vince seems to misunderstand the reasons behind the double-dippage. Or rather, he only sees one reason: greed. Basically, his argument goes, the studio execs release these multiple versions so they can make more money on existing properties. By way of example, he mentions a Miramax executive who was recently quoted in The New York Times on his plans for the Kill Bill films. This front-office suit was downright gleeful about the prospects of releasing this pair of related movies multiple times and essentially forcing true fans of them to take “multiple bites of the apple.” (Interesting choice of words there, since the apple often represents temptation that we’d all have been better off to resist… but I digress.)

This sort of blatant opportunism — not to mention disregard for the intelligence of consumers — is indeed distasteful, and there’s no doubt in my mind that at least some studio execs view these releases as a means of gouging movie fans. They also see multiple DVD releases as a marketing tool for new product. A good example is the way Universal always seems to issue an “ultimate edition” of whatever film has a sequel opening soon. The Mummy and American Pie both come to mind. These Ultimate Editions are nothing more than a repackaging of the exact same materials that were on the previous DVD versions, adding only a few more tidbits about the original film and a whole lot of promotional junk for the upcoming sequel. (This was especially annoying on the UE for The Mummy, a film I really liked, because The Mummy Returns was so awful that I don’t even want trailers for it in my collection… but I digress again.)

What Vince doesn’t fully acknowledge, however, is that the consumer occasionally benefits from a newer version, and I’m not just talking about getting a few more extras. (The truth is, extra features are rarely a big draw for me anymore. I was fascinated by them when I first got into DVD because behind-the-scenes material was so hard to find in the days of VHS. I’ve always enjoyed knowing “how they did that,” but it was a lot more fun when it was an arcane field that only a handful of dedicated buffs like me knew about. The novelty has worn off, I suppose. In addition, the extras being produced now that DVD has gotten so popular aren’t nearly as high in quality as the documentary features made only a couple of years ago, the mammoth [and excellent] Lord of the Rings packages notwithstanding. In general, DVD extras are getting shorter, cheaper and fluffier, a progression driven by “talent” deciding they need to be paid for their talking-head segments and by the overall tendency to dumb things down once they go mainstream. Then there’s the issue of all the extra time that now goes into watching a movie at home. It’s not just the two hours required by the flick; now you’ve got another two or three or even more hours of supplements. I just don’t have the time to watch all that stuff, and so I end up feeling guilty because I’m not fully utilizing these things that I’ve paid good money to get.) No, what I’m talking about is the fact that sometimes the newer version really is better in terms of quality.

A lot of consumers don’t realize this, but DVD is still an emerging and evolving technology, and improvements are being made all the time. Only a few years ago, when DVD was a brand-new technology, a lot of catalog titles were rushed out onto the market to give consumers something to buy. The picture and sound on these titles were a quantum leap beyond anything that we’d seen up to that point, but now, with rapid advances in transfer methods, digital encoding, digital film restoration, and overall disc-production techniques (not to mention the rise of digital filmmaking, the product of which usually looks better on disc than projected in a theater), those early DVDs look a little shabby compared to the newer ones, and by sprucing them up, the studios are actually doing us fans a favor. Don’t believe me? Check out the first-edition release of Highlander, if you can still find a copy somewhere; it’s absolutely ghastly, not much better than watching it on tape. Actually, in places, it looks worse than my old VHS copy. I was absolutely thrilled to double-dip this monster.

A related concern is the introduction of anamorphic encoding on most new releases. (A lot of my readers probably just said, “ana-whatsis?” Bear with me, please…) This little technique was developed for the benefit of the rich kids with those new-fangled high-definition television monitors, who require the absolutely best picture that current technology can give them. However, it also ends up benefiting us plebian types who are still watching our fifteen-year-old sets by giving us a slightly sharper image than “ordinary” encoding offers. Many of the original DVD releases are now being reissued with anamorphic transfers, which means that they look even better than the earlier versions did. In his column, Horiuchi mentions a number of titles that he’s had to double-dip, including Sneakers, Lawrence of Arabia, The Right Stuff, and the Star Trek movies — all of which were early, non-anamorphic releases that have since been remastered and reprinted with the new coding techniques. You could argue that weak-willed consumers are being taken advantage of because they feel like they need to get the “latest and greatest,” and maybe some are compelled to lay out more cash for that reason. Personally, I just feel like I’m getting a better product, like trading in an older car for a new one. Of course, I was aware of the coming anamorphic technology and so I’ve been careful with my purchases. More on that in a moment. (Vince does address this “newer and better” compulsion, but he’s focused entirely on the issue of extras and doesn’t seem to know about the improvements in picture quality.)

Another factor that must be acknowledged is that DVD marketing and what consumers want from the format is evolving as rapidly as the technology. When DVD was first introduced, the studios basically followed the same paradigm they’d used for movies on VHS. Extras were rarely offered because they hadn’t been practical (or much requested) on tape. Laserdiscs often had supplementary material like what we’ve come to expect on DVD, but laserdiscs had never made significant entry into the mainstream market so it’s likely that the suits who made the early decisions didn’t even think about them when deciding how to handle this new format. Either that, or they made a conscious decision to try and market DVD to the widest possible audience and assumed that laserdisc-style supplements would only be of interest to the hardcore minority. They were wrong, of course; supplements have become a major force in DVD content, and consumers by and large seem to want them. So, from that perspective, you could say that studios are only giving consumers what they want by offering them a new, extras-laden version of an older title. Sometimes the connection between consumer demand and a re-release is direct, as in the case of that X-Men disc I mentioned a couple thousand words ago. The first release of that movie was pretty light on extras — it came out early in the life of the format, so I don’t believe this particular case was motivated by greed — and all the comic-book guys and fanboys complained about it. Surprisingly enough, the suits listened. So, on the eve of the big-screen release of X2, a new DVD called X-Men 1.5 came out. This was a marketing tool similar to those Ultimate Editions I mentioned, but it was also closer to the disc release that fans really wanted, so everyone wins. If, that is, you were dissatisfied enough with the first version to want 1.5. Personally, I was content with the original release and won’t be bothering to pick up the re-issue.

And that’s something that Horiuchi just glosses over in his piece: you do have a choice. You don’t have to give in to the hype and buy the newer version. You really don’t. Ol’ Vince essentially says, “yes, I do, because I’m a real movie buff.” Sorry, Vince, those are the words either of a junkie or someone who suffers from OCD. The guy who tried to tell him that he really didn’t need the “Double-Secret Probation Edition” of Animal House was dead on-target. I’ll admit that there is a lot of corporate greed on display with these constant reissues. (Universal Studios — the studio behind that Animal House disc as well as the Ultimate Editions — seems to be the worst of the bunch in this regard.) But there’s also a lot of consumers who truly want the newer versions, either for the reasons I’ve given or for reasons of their own. But they don’t have to buy them. They can make the decision to stick with the bare-bones version — after all, isn’t the film itself the most important bit of content of the disc? I think so, myself. And that’s not to say that I’ve never double-dipped. I have, several times — notably with Almost Famous and Casablanca, both of which are films I absolutely adore and wanted more of, so I didn’t mind rebuying these titles. But there are plenty of other titles that have had “newer and better” versions that I haven’t upgraded. X-Men, for one. Spider-Man is another title that has a new version coming soon — just in time for Spider-Man 2, naturally — but I won’t be buying that again. Perhaps the best example is the original Star Trek television series, which was originally issued as individual discs containing two episodes each. I’ve read that they will be reissued this fall in the season-spanning box-set format that has become the standard since TV-on-DVD has taken off. Some fans view this as Paramount Studios trying to get them to repurchase something for the umpteenth time. Possibly. But you can also argue that when the studio first started issuing those individual discs, they were only following the paradigm that had been successful for them in the days of VHS. Now, when it’s obvious that people prefer to have an entire season of their favorite shows in a collective box instead of picking and choosing their favorite episodes, they’re giving the fans what they seem to want. And here’s the bottom line: the fanboys don’t have to repurchase those episodes if they don’t want to. Paramount isn’t holding phasers to their heads. I myself have made the decision to just live with the Trek discs I already own, even though I must admit the box-sets probably have their advantages. Horiuchi could do the same with the titles in his collection.

Finally, the point in Horiuchi’s column that really set me off was his remark that he has to buy these re-issues because he didn’t know when he bought the first version that a better one was coming. Sorry, Vince, I don’t buy that one. There’s no excuse for an uneducated consumer in this day and age of the Internet, which gives us the ability to find out just about any damn thing we want to know. The studios broadcast months in advance what their intentions are for any given title, through official press releases and sit down chats on message boards, and there is a plethora of web sites that supply this information. There are a lot of films I haven’t bought because I’ve read either rumors or confirmed plans of a forthcoming special edition. If double-dipping is really that big a deal to you, you need to take a little time to consult an oracle for its predictions. My favorite DVD-related oracles, for those who might wish to consult them, are DVDfile.com and The Digital Bits. The Bits usually seems to get the news a day or two before DVDfile, and the site has an excellent section called The Rumor Mill, which is exactly what the name suggests, a source of unverified rumblings about what’s happening in the industry (they were talking about the upcoming Star Wars box set weeks before Lucasfilm issued a press release). If these sources aren’t enough, try the Home Theater Forum, which I linked to above as well as at the bottom of my own main page. Oftentimes the fanboys and online message-board community are able to ferret out information that pro journalists can only dream of.

This one has gotten long, and I apologize to any of my readers who have made it this far. To wrap up, I guess I’d say that film collectors need to be smart about their hobby. Educate yourself, kids, know what’s out there and what’s likely to come out, and only buy the things you really want to have. Don’t listen to the hype. And happy viewing!