The previous entry on home theaters started me thinking about consumer video technology, specifically the preferred video format of the moment, the DVD.
I’ve been collecting DVDs for about five years now. I wasn’t what you’d call an early adopter of the technology, but I did get in on it before it became hugely popular and started suffering the problems that inevitably come with ramped-up manufacturing and “lowest-common denominator” thinking. (Yes, I am a bit of a snob when it comes to these things, and I do think it’s fair to say that DVD content and overall presentation was much smarter when the format was still a niche market. But that’s a rant for another time.) At this point, I own roughly 230 unique DVD titles, comprising both movies and television programming, and I think my collection includes a pretty good sampling of product from all the major DVD producers, except maybe Disney. (I don’t have kids and I’m not a big animation fan, so very few Disney offerings appeal to me.)
What’s interesting about all of this — aside from the value of idle boasting, of course — is that the size and diversity of my collection has allowed me to recognize distinct differences in the product coming from each of the major labels. Just like each studio was known for making a particular kind of film back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, so too are their modern descendents easy to equate with specific DVD characteristics.
For example, Warner Brothers is synonymous in my mind with the right way to do classic films on DVD. Their two-disc “Night at the Movies” packages are simply brilliant, from the appealing graphic design of the covers (which are based on original poster art, a personal interest of mine) to the wonderful extra features (which simulate a full theatrical program from the days when “going to the movies” meant much more than seeing just a single feature) to beautiful presentations of the films themselves. Even lesser-known titles in Warner’s catalog are receiving fine treatment, including appropriate restoration work and a smart pricing plan that makes it cheaper to buy an entire box set of six or seven flicks than three individual titles.
Unfortunately, most of the other studios are more easily defined by what they’re doing wrong with their DVD products. For example, Columbia-TriStar is the poster child for the annoying practice known among DVD enthusiasts as “double-dipping” — which means they keep re-releasing titles that have already come out in perfectly serviceable editions, to try and entice fans into “upgrading” to the newer edition — while MGM is notorious for having the ugliest cover art in the whole field.
The absolute worst DVD producer, however, has got to be Universal Pictures. Universal screws up so consistently and in so many ways that I’m not sure of where to even begin griping. I guess we ought to start where the DVD experience does, with the packaging.
Universal’s feature films are packaged in the industry standard, a plastic clamshell affair called the keepcase, and although the cover art tends toward bland photoshopped montages, Uni’s art isn’t typically as disturbingly awful as MGM’s. When it comes to packaging their TV products, however, Universal makes some truly… eccentric… choices. Take, for example, the high-concept mess they came up with to house the original Battlestar Galactica series.
Officially known as the Battlestar Galactica Complete Epic Series DVD Collector’s Box Set, I like to call this monstrosity by a shorter and more descriptive name: “The Big Stupid Cylon Head.” The outer layer of this thing is a cardboard box that measures 8-1/2 by 10 inches, twice as tall as a standard DVD case and an inch deeper. That would be tricky enough to store on the low shelves of the average media cabinet, but the box also features a relief sculpture of a Cylon face that protrudes another couple of inches from the surface of the box. This cheesy-looking bit of detail makes it absolutely impossible to shelve the box alongside anything else, because you can’t place another disc up close to it. You end up with a lot of wasted space around the Cylon’s face. The box’s interior is full of wasted space, too; all this ridiculous boondoggle contains is an oversized booklet (which is actually rather nicely done) and a perfectly ordinary digipak, one of those cardboard fold-out things that are used by several DVD producers to house multi-disc sets. I have issues with digipaks, but the big problem is the outer box with the relief sculpture; it just isn’t practical in any way, and it isn’t cool enough to make up for the hassle it produces. You can always put the inner digipak on the shelf by itself, but digipaks are pretty flimsy without the usual protective slipcover, and there’s nothing to keep dust out of your discs, either. Not to mention the question of what you’re supposed to do with an empty Cylon head.
Another good — and by good, I mean bad — example is the first two seasons of Universal’s Northern Exposure, which come in little zip-up nylon parkas. These novelties are a lot more practical than the Big Stupid Cylon Head — the parka fits snugly around an ordinary keepcase so you can at least shelve these sets with everything else in your collection — but they introduce several unnecessary steps to reaching your discs. As with the Galactica set, you can always take the discs out of the parkas and store them separately, but I’d much rather see Uni ditch the parkas and drop the suggested retail on these sets by ten bucks than have to store another useless “collectible” in my basement. (And don’t tell me I can just throw them away, because that level of wastefulness is as aggravating to me as the uselessness of the objects themselves.)
Even when Uni does try to do something more in line with what other producers are using, the results still aren’t right. For example, the recently released Miami Vice set uses a slipcover and digipak arrangement, but the slip-cover is open at the top so we’re back to dealing with the dust issue. And the digipaks Universal uses are different from those everyone else has — the trays that hold the discs aren’t very well attached to the cardboard parts, a problem I’ve found in several Universal sets. The hubs that hold the discs to the trays are different, too, stiffer and less user-friendly — I had to return my first Buck Rogers in the 25th Century set after I snapped a disc in two while trying to get it off its hub.
Once you get past the packaging and get the disc into the player, you discover other problems, things that result from deliberate company policies. Take forced trailers, for example.
When DVDs first came along, they were a radical departure from the VHS paradigm, where you just had to suffer through whatever material the studio saw fit to place before the main feature — commercials, trailers, that stupid FBI warning, whatever. DVDs, on the other hand, enabled you to navigate at will. You could choose to watch trailers and ads if you wanted, or go directly to the feature program. But then Universal decided they wanted their products to cross-sell other titles; the result was trailers that play before the DVD’s menu boots up. They’re called “forced trailers” because you can’t avoid seeing at least a bit of them before getting to what you really want to see. In their earliest incarnations you absolutely could not avoid sitting through these trailers; the disc would ignore your instructions to fast-forward or skip to the menu. (See Animal House: Double Secret Probation Edition for an example.) Universal changed the coding slightly after receiving a bunch of complaints, so you can now fast-forward past them, but you still have to wait until they begin playing before you can hit the button, and there is no option to skip them altogether. As with the awkward packaging that decreases convenience, these trailers take a little bit of the pleasure out of using Universal DVDs. Even worse, other studios are beginning to adopt Universal’s model. We’re going right back to the worst aspects of the VHS format, one damn commercial at a time.
And then there is the ubiquitous Universal branding. This is a problem you mostly encounter on Uni’s TV sets. Basically, the studio wants you to be damn sure you know that you’re watching a Universal product. So the logo runs at the beginning of the disc. Then it runs before each individual episode of the program. If you’re watching a vintage program, you’ll likely see an older version of the logo at the end of the episode, too. And if you have a set with bonus features, you’ll see the logo on them, too. I get incredibly sick of hearing the studio’s fanfare over and over, especially if I watch more than one episode at a time. It just isn’t necessary.
The biggest problem with Universal DVDs, however, is their apparent lack of quality control in the manufacturing process. Every defective disc I’ve ever encountered has come from Universal. Every one. There was the widely-publicized framing and audio problems with Back to the Future II, of course, but Uni is really dropping the ball — again — with their TV sets. Unlike other producers who use single-sided discs, even if it means having six or eight discs in a season set, Universal insists on using double-sided “DVD-18s” so they can squash an entire season of your favorite TV series onto only three or four DVDs. That would be a great space-saver if the DVDs actually worked (and if we didn’t have Big Stupid Cylon Head packaging), but they don’t. Double-sided Universal discs have a nasty tendency to freeze up in the middle of an episode, and no amount of disc-cleaning or tinkering with my player seems to help. I’ve had to return a second Buck Rogers set, a couple of movies and, just this week, a Magnum PI set.
It really is infuriating to sit through 20 episodes of a 22-episode set and then suddenly encounter a defect in episode 21. It would be best if Universal was willing to replace just the defective disc instead of the entire set, but so far I’ve had no luck in finding such a customer service program. Which means I have to take the entire season back to the store, get a new one, and begin the crap shoot all over again, eagle-eying each and every hour-long installment and hoping that there’s nothing wrong with this one. Who has that kind of time? It happens often enough to suggest some kind of systemic problem with Universal’s process, and it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit that it continues to happen, despite plenty of discussion in places like the Home Theater Forum (which the DVD industry does monitor to see what DVD fans are talking about). It suggests to me that the suits are less concerned with making a decent product than with saving a few pennies. It’s almost enough to make me swear off buying anything with the Universal name.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of my favorite vintage television shows were, of course, made by Universal. I want to have these shows in my library. So like a good little consumer-drone, I just keep rolling the dice, and hoping against hope that just this one time, Universal won’t disappoint me.
