The funny thing is that it’s really academic. Don’t like commentaries and deleted scenes? Don’t watch or listen the farkin’ things. If all you want to do is watch the movie, what difference does it make to you if it’s on a DVD or a VHS tape? It costs the same to rent it at Blockbuster or Hollywood whichever format it’s on; and if you’re buying them, they aren’t any more expensive than VHS tapes were when they first started offering them at sell-through prices. And they’ll get less expensive as market penetration increases.
So if it costs the same to rent as a VHS version, and gives you the same movie as the VHS version (actually better), then it serves the same purpose as the VHS version, so what difference does it make to you if it’s on a plastic disc or in a tape cartridge? It isn’t as if you rent the movies then record over them and return them, I hope.
And I still don’t get this deal about “The sound and picture quality don’t matter.” Of course they matter. Anyone who has seen a shitty pan & scan transfer of Lawrence of Arabia, then watched the DVD transfer in the original aspect ratio, can tell you it matters. If it didn’t matter, directors would still film in 1.33:1 and record their sound in mono. Do you think Alfred Hitchcock just stood there when filming Vertigo and said, “Oh, just put the camera any old place; it doesn’t matter?”
Would you say that Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” was just as good if half the canvas was missing and it was in black-and-white? Is the “1812 Overture” as good if played with the brass section missing? Cripes, I hope not. How an artist composes the elements of his work has a direct bearing on how the work is experienced by the audience.
Adding to Fenris’s point about “real versions” of films, here are two more examples. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was rushed into theaters in 1979 because the studio had committed to an opening date. It was sent out with unfinished special effects and temp music in places, and that’s what people have seen since 1979. The recent DVD release is, according to director Robert Wise and everyone else involved, the “real version.”
Similarly Close Encounters of the Third Kind has gone through many permutations. The original release was not what Spielberg wanted, but again, the studio had committed to an opening date and needed the movie. Spielberg asked for permission to re-edit and re-release the movie, and the studio agreed on the condition that he add footage of the inside of the mothership. He agreed to do so, and that was the second version. There have been combinations of the two cuts throughout the years, but the version recently released on DVD – without the mothership footage* – is, according to Spielberg, his cut, the “real version.”
That DVD also contains several deleted scenes, particularly with Francois Truffaut’s character, that reveal a great deal about how the pacing and focus of the movie changed during the shooting, and how material was moved around in order to provide better structure. There are some of us who, as film students (in the amateur sense of the word) find that interesting, and enjoy seeing it. Just because some people like to passively absorb a movie and then forget it doesn’t mean everyone does.
