I’ve been a DVD collector for quite some time now, and I recently bought a new DVD player from Amazon so I can watch my movies and shows. It even plays CD’s. I have over 350 DVD’s.
What DVD’s are in your collections? I haven’t concentrated on any one specific genre and I have a good collection of drama, comedy, documentary, animation, and even television series.
What DVD’s stands out in your collection?
What are your sources for DVD’s? I get my DVD’s from Amazon and outfits like Movies Unlimited.
Today I watched Macbeth(1948) starring Orson Welles and Lucy(2014) starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman.
Do you have any DVD’s in your collection that might be considered rare due to their unavailability? What are you looking for that might not be out on DVD yet?
I have somewhere north of 750. We have a good used store, so I buy a lot of DVDs “on spec”. Chaeper to buy them than rent them, so I have a lot I haven’t seen yet.
Primarily I collect ones I like to rewatch. I have a lot of TV series as well.
I have the original criterion of This Is Spinal Tap. It was worth a lot (like $200) for a while, but I don’t know if it is any longer. I’m not selling it anyway. I have The Monkees set 1, but managed to not get set 2. They are going for like $60, maybe someday they’ll go down again.
There are several obscure movies and TV shows I wish they would put out, but there’s probably no market for them. I wish the TV series Memphis Beat was available, but I suspect that’s likely music issues. It’s not that it is a great show, I just want to watch it again.
One I fear will never be out is Glass Onion. For some reason, that is streaming only.
I have 150ish. I prefer to buy if I like it, so I can watch when I want. Also who knows if some of the TV shows (Galavant, The Exorcist, Hannibal) will ever stream.
My rarest? Hmmmm… No idea. I’m fairly mainstream. Maybe my PBS seasons 1-5 of The Great British Bake Off.
I used to own a lot of DVDs, in contrast I only owned a handful of VHS tapes over the years, but my collection is close to non-existent now. I have a few DVDs my wife bought me.
Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple
Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island
Seven Samurai
Brick (birthday gift)
Batman: The Aminated Series complete collection (bought while I recovered from having my wisdom teeth pulled)
Kung Fu Hustle (another birthday gift)
I own a few more but I don’t feel like going to look. The funny thing is that I don’t have a DVD player. I have no way to watch any of these movies.
My eldest son and DIL have hundreds of them, including something called “steel case” versions which are apparently collectible. She does something online that is probably not completely licit in order to get more than the normal amount and sells the extras for a profit.
Keep your eye out for sales/discount codes on Rhino for The Complete Series Blu-ray. At $200 list it’s pricey but I’ve seen it as low as $150. That’s still a lot, but the restoration job is stellar and with the extras (including Head in 5.1 surround) it’s well worth it if you’re a fan.
The reason may be because it was released by Netflix. Streaming services seem to be unwilling to put their original content on physical media.
One DVD that I’ve been looking for is the PBS, stop-motion animation feature called The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship (1991). I know it came out on VHS Tape but never so far on DVD.
I bought my first DVDs before I got my first player, back in late 1997. The local Electric Ave. and More was in the last days of liquidation and everything was 95% off. By that time the stire had been pretty much completely picked bare but they had two DVD titles left for $1.25 each (yes, they were originally $25) and I bought both: Fly Away Home and something anime that I don’t recall. I took advantage of the online price wars of the late 1990s to buy many DVDs at far below retail (doing my part to help several companies to burn through their cash and disappear).
I stopped buying after around 350-400 DVDs. As for rarity, I have only three that were ever scarce:
The Devil’s Advocate, bought before the recall so that scenes could be mangled because of copyright infringement.
Little Shop of Horrors, which I didn’t manage to get a copy of before it was recalled because of unauthorized inclusion of an alternate ending. But I did find a very decent person online who sold me a spare copy for only 1.5x retail immediately afterward when they were already people selling copies for much higher than that.
An imported Japanese copy of Leon bought online from Ken Crane’s before even the deeply cut The Professional was on DVD in the US.
Edited to add that I haven’t watched any of my DVDs in a number of years. (I’ve rewatched movies/tv shows, just not from those physical discs.)
I probably have that one. I know I have the movie, don’t remember for sure if it is Criterion.
Oooh, does she sell the online redemption codes that come inside DVD/Bluray cases? I wonder if I’ve ever bought from her! My movie collection is purely online now - I have several hundred that I watch on Fandango/Vudu and iTunes.
I have 1208 DVD titles in my collection, however, thirty-eight of those titles are collections (e.g. 100 Sci-Fi Classics) which contain hundred of obscure titles that I’ve never added to the database - so upwards of 2000?
We live in a very rural part of Northeastern NV - no TV, no cable. I’ve been a Dish Network subscriber for more than 30 years, but there’s seldom something worth watching on when we’re looking for entertainment. Our DVD collection comprises various genres from Abbott & Costello to The Sound of Music, Series such as Star Trek TOS and The Outer Limits, classic war movies and westerns, and all the goodies with Vampires, Goonies, Mummies, and Assorted Aliens. From the Wizard of Oz to the most recent Star Wars, you name it, we’ve probably got it.
The single rarest and most difficult title I’ve ever added to my collection is Killer Condoms. We saw it at about 3:00 AM on Showtime back in the early 90’s - it was so absurd that no one believed us when we told them about it. It took me until 2011 to find it on DVD on a rare movie site where it is no longer available. Apparently. We still show it to everyone who disbelieves us when we tell them about it.
Now that I’m retired I’ve starting to go back through the collection with the goal of watching everything at least once before I die. Except Killer Condoms. I’ve seen that about nine times more than any sentient being should.
Lucy
Time to upgrade to the deluxe Blu-ray box set?
How about DVDs you wish you had? I’d go for the Criterion Kurosawa box set, out of print and no longer available at the mere price of $400. (There’s one copy on Amazon for $1200.)
https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/678-ak-100-25-films-by-akira-kurosawa
That sounds familiar.
I made the shift to BluRay in 2011 or so; I still have a couple of racks of DVDs, some of it just that I haven’t gotten around to tossing yet (no used disc shop would want most of them, because they’re pretty common titles) but there are a handful that I’ve never seen on BluRay or streaming (Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive, Human Traffic)
And I really need to get rid of a lot of my BluRays. I have a shelf devoted to Criterion Collection discs, some of which are out of print but which I managed to find for regular used disc price: there’s a chain of used book/disc stores here in Toronto that typically sells singe-disc Criterions for $25.
And don’t get me started on my horror film collection. If I lived to a hundred and stopped going to work or sleeping, maybe I could watch my collection from beginning to end. I’ve unfortunately allways been a sucker for “Hey, that’s only $8 and I haven’t seen it in forever…” and then it’s one more thing I need to dust.
I’ve got quite a few sub-collections:
1.) Silent Movies, especially restorations. Inrecent years we’ve seen phenomenal recreations of Metropolis and The Lost World. Criterion video’s Phantom of the Opera contains a LOT of unfamiliar material. I also have several Douglas Fairbanks films, Buster Keaton, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, and others.
2.) 3D movies – I’ve got quite a few 3D “Anaglyphic” movies (the kind that use red-and-blue or red-and-green glasses, and no other special equipment). There are quite a few of them out there. I showed a series of these at the Arisia science fiction convention last year.
3.) James Bond movies
4.) Different versions or interpretations of the same story. I’ve got multiple versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and, for some reason, a slew of adaptations of Beowulf that all came out around 2000. There are a LOT of those
5.) Obscure Science Fiction and Fantasy films, especially the original non-dubbed versions that haven’t been cut by American distributors. This list includes Gojira, Rodan, Ilya Mourometz (butchered and released as The Sword and the Dragon in the US), Ikarie XB-1 (ending changed and dubbed, released as Voyage to the End of the Universe in the US), The Silent Star (redubbed and released as First Spaceship on Venus in the US)
5.) Interesting Science Documentaries – James Burke’s series, The Atomic Cafe
6.) Ray Harryhausen movies.
It’s not just streaming services. Fox/Disney made the decision years ago to stop releasing The Simpsons on physical media.
Of course that’s related to the availability of The Simpsons on one of Disney’s streaming services, so it’s the same reason. And few people are going to buy Simpsons series on DVD/Blu-ray. I did for the first few seasons but of course haven’t in years.
We just ditched most of our DVDs a few weeks ago because streaming has gotten so much easier, but I kept ones I thought would be difficult to find or where I liked the extras:
Winter’s Bone (some good extras on there)
Fanny & Alexander, the five-hour televised version (it also has the 3-hour, but that’s easy to find)
The collected Up series from Michael Apted
The series Good Neighbors (The Good Life in the UK), you can’t make us give that up
Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom (season 1)
Criterion: Wings of Desire, and The Third Man
Laura
That’s basically all we kept!