I guess I’ll throw in a couple more:
CD: Garth Brooks - The Hits
HD-DVD: It came with 300 and a Bourne movie
Blu-Ray: Wall-E
Nail on the head, brother. I think, though, that it wasn’t so much the video as the sound that was the selling point for Twister. Dolby Digital 5.1 sound was the bleeding edge at the time, and as I recall DVD was the only way to get it. That’s one of the reasons the DVD player I chose was so expensive: it had the DD decoder built in (bumped the price up by about $100). Of course, to actually make use of the decoder, I had to run six separate cables, one for each sound channel, from the player to my “Dolby Digital-ready” audio receiver. Not the most elegant way to make lovely sound happen, to say the least.
I don’t know the first DVD I bought. I received 5 free DVD’s with my first DVD player and one of them was Lost in Space. I gave away the other 4 without watching them. I do know the first VHS tape I purchased was Big Business.
I received 20 free DVD rentals with the player too. The closest location for the rental chain was 200 miles away. This was not disclosed in the advertising and you only found out the promotion was worthless after you purchased the player. The place of purchase was actually 250 miles from the nearest rental location.
First DVDs I bought were a septet of the first season-and-a-half of South Park “volumes”, plus the SP movie.
The first DVD I bought was Fast Times At Ridgemont High. I froze the film at the key moment and left it on-screen for a couple of hours, just because I could.
Not sure. Could be The Who film “The Kids are Alright” or a concert performance by Muddy Waters “Live at the Chicago Blues Festival”. I know the DVD player contained a James Taylor concert film, which for Sweet Baby Wimp was only a 98% crapfest
CD Tina Turner “Private Dancer” and Kinks “Living on the Edge”
VHS “Opening of Misty Beethoven”
8 track Uriah Heep “Demons and Wizards”
45 Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”
Easy - I couldn’t afford the player yet, but I had to get the special limited edition “Wicker Man” with both theatrical and restored versions and lots of specials, in a very cool wooden box.
Dr. No and Predator. You can tell they’re really old ones b/c they just start. Not even a menu screen.
Coincidentally, there’s a quick scene in Dr. No when Ursula Andress is on the decontamination conveyor belt on Crab Key (Caye?) - if you pause the DVD at the right spot you can see her completely naked.
May 1998. I bought Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and The Rock, for $30 each. The latter two had a trailer as a special feature, and the former didn’t even have that. Still, it was OAR and looked BEAUTIFUL.
Strangely enough, all 3 of those I later double dipped on for real Special Editions.
My first (and so far only) Bluray is Burn After Reading, which I bought about a year ago to watch at my dad’s house. Still don’t have my own Bluray player…
The Matrix
I remember being amazed at the main menu.
I certainly bought my first DVD before I had a specific player; I remember watching DVDs on my PS2 quite a lot. It may have been Monty Python and Quest for the Holy Grail, which I bought intending to give as a gift, and then decided not to for some reason.
Either “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” or “Some Like It Hot”.
The first one I rented was Young Frankenstein. The first one I bought was Fight Club.
I’d gotten this kick-ass 5 CD-DVD changer doo-hickey. Alas, it didn’t survive the trip from Cali to Maine.
I think Three Kings is hilarious. (Also, it depicts how we abandoned the Iraqi people after the war; but I don’t want to start a debate here.) I wish I could share it with my friend, a helicopter pilot for the 101st Airborne during the war, but she won’t watch it because she says it’s ‘too close’.
Pulp Fiction
I don’t know if this was the very first DVD I ever purchased, but it was definitely one of the first three: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
First LP: Barry Manilow Live
First casette: Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man
First CD: Golden Throats 2: More Celebrity Rock Oddities!
First VHS: Thriller/The Making of Thriller
First DVD: See above.
Likewise, my first DVD purchase was ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’ movie, “UHF”. I didn’t have a DVD player (or even a television) at the time, but it was out of print on VHS, I heard it was being released on DVD, and I suspected the DVD verson wouldn’t remain “in print” for very long, so I ordered it from Amazon while I could. Turns out you can still get it, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Oh yeah, the very first DVDs we rented were watched on the computer - Dark City and Clay Pigeons. Turned out not to be a fun way to watch movies, so we bought a dvd player soon afterwards.
I believe it was Spaceballs. I was under the impression that all DVDs were double sided.
The first DVD I bought with my own money was the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And that was scholarship money. (Oh, and not the movie, the old BBC TV series. The movie was to come out in theaters the following year.)