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.
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