Happy news today from Jahnke’s Electric Theater over on Facebook: it seems that one of my personal “holy grail movies,” i.e., the handful of films I’d like to own but which have been long been unavailable on DVD or any other home-video format, is finally on the way. In this case, it’s High Road to China, a 1983 adventure flick starring Tom Selleck. Although High Road is often dismissed as a knock-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s actually a fun little B-movie romp on its own terms, and not really that much like an Indiana Jones movie. High Road is being released on both DVD and Blu-Ray by Hen’s Tooth Video on April 17. Here’s a peek at the sales sheet:

With this release, my list of MIAs is down to only three (well, okay, technically six) items: another early-80s Selleck vehicle called Lassiter; FM, which was sort of a forerunner to the WKRP in Cincinnati series; and, of course, decent-quality anamorphic transfers of the pre-1997 Star Wars trilogy, my perennial hobbyhorse.

It’s funny… the movie industry obviously feels the DVD is on its way into the landfill of history, and it seems to me that Blu-Ray really hasn’t caught on the way everyone hoped. The future, we are constantly hearing, is going to be all streaming and clouds. Maybe so… and yet it’s only now, supposedly at the end of the medium’s life cycle, that a lot of obscure titles are finally finding their way onto shiny silver discs. I almost wonder if the attention being given to streaming is making it possible… maybe because nobody expects big DVD sales anymore, niche titles are free to move in modest numbers without being considered a failure. Maybe… it’s just an idea I had…