Some people collect stamps, some baseball cards. Some people collect porcelain figurines, some shot glasses. My mother used to collect horses and elephants, albeit ceramic ones at 1/50th actual scale and thus more practical to set grazing. This guy I knew in college once cheekily proclaimed that he collected parking tickets, that is until I assume his unconventional hobby became cost prohibitive. I don’t remember him being around much Sophomore year. Everybody has a lane to maintain. Everybody, if they’re lucky, eventually locates their niche and sets up housekeeping. My abiding passion of possession is for movies. I think it’s only slightly irrational as compulsions go, but consider the source. I have collected movies in one way or another for as long as I care to remember. Years before that hobby was a known commodity to me, I still took unreasonable pride in estimating how many times I’d seen a given classic. I basically spent the summers of 1984-87 exploiting replay-heavy second-generation HBO’s weird but undeniable superpower that could allow a kid like me with sufficient bandwidth, motivation, and lack of conventional social opportunities to have seen the legendary likes of Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Fletch, Big Trouble in Little China, et al some three times in a 24-hour period. I memorized huge swaths of dialogue with a diligence I would never apply to either my academic or professional careers and gleefully obsessed over big pictures and little details alike. Over the course of those formative summers, the die was cast and my course was set.
Life outside the TV’s glow having proven unfulfilling, I opted for a better, more interesting one. From the age of nine, watching movies became my alternate reality. I was already developing an abiding love of rock music along a parallel track, and soon found my burgeoning music collection growing beyond the confines of first a 12, then a 36, and finally a 60-cassette carrying case. A neophyte collector even then, I spent more time packing tapes for family trips than clothes. Then technology changed everything. Our first VCR arrived for Christmas 1988. Drunk with possibility if not yet power, I set about putting it to use. As it happens, my step-uncle was a fledgling video pirate, and he let us (by which I mean me) borrow a care package that, in addition to a clutch of Westerns for my stepfather, included soon-to-be favorites like Superman: The Movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and WrestleMania I. As a tween, I routinely hopped the backyard fence and braved unpaved suburban badlands to an adjacent neighborhood and, at its fore like the figurehead adorning a Viking warship, a sneakily unassuming video store. Making my latest solitary rounds, taking in with awe the visual and thematic breadth of its poster-plastered walls, diligently perusing tape-laden shelves for my latest in an impressive line of discoveries, fascinated by a horror section veritably teeming with life, death, and more death in all its wondrous variety, I felt truly at home. Veterans of DAE’s back pages may understand how monumental that realization was to middle school me.
By the time HBO finally exited our lives as an unaffordable luxury, I was entering high school and had seized the initiative as an aspirational video pirate myself. It was a crucial evolutionary step. I’d by then spent month upon month deploying my VCR and bottomless reserves of free time to record inferior edited movies from the likes of WGN, USA, and any other basic cable waystation that would deign to show them, privately relishing the idea that, due to my efforts, I now “owned” a personal copy of these titles, free of commercials (and profanity, and nudity, and graphic violence, and, sometimes, free-flowing story structure/simple coherence) though hardly of compromise. After over a year of personal overindulgence, we did eventually return my step-uncle’s subsistence-level VHS cache only for me to discover my own beloved blood uncle was secretly far more buccaneer than the former would ever be. In a cunning ruse, I spent the summer of 1988 at that uncle’s house, ostensibly learning to swim, though in truth far more consumed with exploring and, eventually, raiding his expansive unedited video collection. Expansive. Unedited. Video. Collection. The words clicked together in my imagination with the impact of Titanic sideswiping its fateful iceberg. My last three late-summer days spent by my uncle’s poolside each ended with negligibly improved form or function – I never did really learn to tread water – but, notably, with a new 3-movie, 6-hour custom VHS tape as a consolation prize…a tantalizing taste of bigger things to come.
Our second VCR, which did not long sit idle, arrived for Christmas 1989, and with it the official abandonment by my mother and stepfather of any claim to either the den or its contents outside of loosely defined, irregularly observed “visiting hours”. The converted side porch turned TV lounge was now my personal laboratory. Tethered to its predecessor by a set of those color-coded A/V cables you still find at yard sales, the new VCR soon became the workhorse of a fairly impressive and scary expansive DIY movie dubbing operation. With the cooperation of three local video stores and their competing weekly specials, production soared to a level that would’ve been the envy of other, far more illicit, even more ambitious aspiring cartels, if not for one technicality: I had no intent to distribute. I was far too gluttonous to ever wish to share my bounty, for fun or profit. One tape per night, three movies per tape, one to three nights per week, every week, for just under three years. You can attempt the math. Having already read much of Stephen King’s seminal early work as a tween and early teen, I largely occupied my downtime by browsing various pocket movie guides, and devouring Roger Ebert’s latest “Movie Yearbook”, a battering ram tome that split the difference in physical size, accumulated knowledge, and applied wisdom between Encyclopedia Britannica and the King James Bible, but with more authority. Movies were my passion, my preoccupation, and, if not technically my vocation, without doubt my fervent avocation.
In college, I came to grips with new realities and infatuations in equal measure. As an amateur drummer, I joined a garage band perhaps too ambitious for the area it serviced, factoring in extensive practice time, gigging, and, much to my happy surprise, songwriting. I met, pursued, lost, regained, and lost again my first legitimate romantic love, one whose memory lingered with me for decades. I made new friend (singular) and acclimated, wide-eyed, to life off the farm. With a cultural black hole as my base of operations, I still became a concert maven, and quickly learned that college coursework is far more demanding than the high school equivalent I’d often bluffed my way through. Life got a hell of a lot more complicated overnight, and video piracy fell by the wayside as a result. It was a bittersweet fate for an identity that had often provided the only positive terms through which my high school years could be defined. Still, extricating myself from the collector’s itch proved impossible. When I returned to the farm to do free laundry, I still occasionally dubbed a few high profile new releases. More importantly, this period intersected with the time when, apropos of nothing, home video, long an impossibly expensive hobby to pursue by wholly legal, transactional means, decided to simultaneously lower its prices, expand its retail reach, and popularize within the marketplace a relatively new, incredibly loaded term: “Collector’s Edition”. Pristine, widescreen Star Wars Trilogy? Pristine, widescreen Halloween? Indy Jones, Jaws, Alien, and a stupid amount of so much more? Color me intrigued.
So it came to pass that, the itch pervasive, unscratched, and ascendant, my cinephile’s journey moved station to station, accumulating media formats much the same way I greedily gathered their spoils at each stop. HBO binging begat VHS piracy, VHS piracy begat VHS consumerism, VHS consumerism begat DVD collection in extremis, and DVD collection begat Blu-Ray collection ad nauseum. 4K has so far been a fringe dalliance – though certain newer titles look spectacular, I don’t see it as a summary upgrade over existing tech – but my Blu-Ray collection currently pushes 1,000 and continues to grow unchecked. A child of the upper lower class, cost always sat front of mind whenever I’d change lanes. At first, I wanted to only ever procure the movies that meant something to me, though that sentiment never withstood excess scrutiny. VHS “special editions” distinguished themselves from the video store rabble via unanimous adoption of the widescreen format – now ubiquitous, then a grudging, overdue concession to the geometric disparity between rectangular theater screens and the boxy televisions of the late twentieth century – and the occasional tacked on trailer or featurette. DVD “standard editions” were a comparative revelation, widescreen by default, with outstanding sound, and boasting a smorgasbord of possible additional features – trailers, featurettes, commentaries, interviews, deleted/alternate scenes, full blown documentaries, and even, infrequently, separate director’s cuts or whole other related movies. As the format matured, theoretically expanded DVD “collector’s editions” began to appear to mark anniversaries and the like, eventually giving way to the markedly improved Blu-Ray format, which, predictably, I devoured wholesale as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
To paraphrase the late Robin Williams, I try to never “half ass” any endeavor that might benefit from the dedicated deployment of my whole ass. So has it been with collecting Blu-Rays. By the time I moved in 2019 from a legit subterranean dungeon to my current fortified media bunker, I had proven unsurprisingly prolific at upgrading choice titles of mine from DVD to Blu-Ray, much as I had done converting my considerable music library from cassette to compact disc some 30 years earlier. That process had seemed a matter of necessity at the time. CDs were such a dramatic upgrade over cassettes that I worried I’d be left behind if I didn’t adopt the format. Blu-Rays were admittedly more of a luxury, less a quantum leap than an evolutionary step, adding to the overall equation noticeably improved fidelity of both sight and sound and expanded memory that allowed for fun aesthetic touches and menu depth but no true improvements on the order of the many problems with VHS tapes that DVDs solved once upon a time. Didn’t matter. Once I realized that upgrading my overall home presentation might just require reassembling my existing collection from scratch, I was not only undaunted but hooked. Again. These movies mean something to me, proclaimed my brain reassuringly. MOVIES mean something to me. Yes, but… And THESE are pristine, presentation-level copies of movies you sincerely LOVE and want to view again and again, complete with all the Thanksgiving trimmings. Yeah, I suppose… No argument there? Well, no. Then dig in!
And why should someone want to own a copy of a movie other than to control when, where, and, most importantly, that it can be viewed? Doesn’t seem it should even be an issue almost two decades into the age of streaming, does it? Technological advances may exist to simplify human life, but they have certainly complicated matters for movie collectors. I’m still animated by a time aeons ago when there wasn’t the slightest hint of democracy to watching a movie at home. Network “Movies of the Week” and, later, HBO, Showtime, and basic cable dictated not only when a movie could be seen, but which movie, and in what form. While a chasm of time now separates those two realities, they share more common ground than is readily apparent. Conventional wisdom holds that internet streaming, via one of a baker’s dozen of prominent current TV or smartphone apps, is so ubiquitous because of its utility and selection. HBO, after all, once stood for “Home Box Office”, an implicit promise to viewers that all the fun of the local multiplex could be experienced from your couch, or at least until the introduction of home video forced the channel to innovate or risk irrelevance. Netflix pioneered streaming in the late aughts, matured, and now promises everything that peak-era HBO offered – movies, original series, music, comedy, sports, documentaries, et al – versatile and portable, up to and including watching from the palm of your hand. That’s the problem with progress, though. Everyone else offers much the same now, including HBO itself, and expansion and innovation have been summarily replaced by cutthroat competition.
I’m not on some kind of anti-streaming crusade here. I recognize Netflix and its ilk as not so much a necessary evil as a useful if frustrating, and frustratingly incomplete, augmentation to the work I’m already doing collecting movies. They run independently on parallel tracks, allowing me to build, maintain, and expand a personally meaningful movie collection while also dabbling in and sampling new, obscure, and/or original programming without having to purchase it. Instead, I’m paying every month for the opportunity to order a la carte off a deep, flashy, but still inherently limited tasting menu, and multiplying that outlay by the number of services I use. There are limits, beyond the fact that maintaining oh let’s say a conservative five streaming subscriptions per month (on top of traditional cable or some other cord-cutting option) adds up financially, with a return that cannot possibly be worth the overall investment since there aren’t enough hours in the day. The cardinal mistake is to assume that streaming is somehow or could ever possibly be a one-to-one replacement for collecting. Streaming services should, frankly, be notorious for the agility and minimal warning with which they routinely shed established titles altogether, but it’s dismissed as a cost of doing business. In my experience, this practice seems especially prevalent with the kind of legacy titles (cult classics and personal faves from the ‘70s forward) that I’m most keen to collect to begin with. First and foremost, I collect movies to have a presentation-quality, supplement-rich copy on hand to watch at my whim, but if it also serves as a hedge against that title being randomly declared a missing person by its streaming halfway house, well, that’s certainly a bonus.
Of course, streaming services have to license any/all content that they didn’t create in order to present it, and those contracts inevitably expire. I’d actually argue this is exhibit A in the case for collecting and thus preserving movies that mean something to you, but your mileage may vary. This is perhaps less an issue for Netflix, who long ago made the strategic pivot toward disproportionate content creation from straight movie exhibition – and all but forced the market to grudgingly and unevenly follow suit – but it also builds in the potentially tricky caveat that you really have to value their original programming to continue coughing up increasingly stiff monthly premiums to rent it. How safe homegrown programming is from being similarly purged in a fit of pique or other cost-cutting calculation is an open question, one not at all satisfied by the fact that those originals often meander their way to disc too – though that’s also at least partially attributable to simple greed. Average consumers have just become used to this reality, I can hear some saying, which is unassailably true. They neither expect nor demand more than a pleasant variety of novel comfort food and/or background noise from which to choose. If I may paint with a broad editorial brush, you can add that to the long list of things of which average Americans are blissfully ignorant at present, and there are admittedly much more consequential matters far closer to the top. So the fact I might care enough about a particular movie to want to own and potentially watch it again, years from now, becomes a “me” problem entirely. That’s fine. Movie collection is a niche sport, and I never claimed to represent the masses.
A word then in support of the concept of film preservation, another benefit of movie collecting invisible to your average Joe. In a world of consumers gorging on their monthly rentals of between two and six varieties of pot luck, film preservation mustn’t seem a high priority. Surely there’s enough content to go around? Only if you consider it “content”. Such thinking also discounts how drastically different today’s media environment is from those of yesteryears, when new releases were generally far rarer (and the product arguably superior). The sliver of the home viewing market that still embraces physical media over streaming or VOD does so with gusto, but it’s ever tricky to find worthwhile titles of any vintage amongst the glut of new and re-releases, The more recent the movie, the easier it is to marshall for mass production, the more oxygen it sucks out of the room. Comparative obscurities of any age are, as a rule, harder for independent distributors to identify as points of interest and secure rights for, and, with their far smaller (if more vocal) potential buyer pool, are generally seen as poor investments. Pursuant to those and other realities/difficulties, countless dozens of movies that were standard issue during the VHS and DVD eras maddeningly just never migrated to Blu-Ray, and, I increasingly fear, never will. I keep a fervent vigil for any hint of the important movies of my youth and later that haven’t yet seen daylight. It is lately through independent distributors rather than studio arms that the occasional buried treasure is unearthed. Everyone wants to make money, of course. The indies just employ a better understanding of the audience they serve. They’re fans themselves. They’re doing the lord’s work.
Since you asked, here are six shortlist titles on my current radar that, as wide studio releases in their day, should absolutely already be on domestic Blu-Ray but instead are mind bogglingly MIA: “All of Me”, the wonderful 1984 body-switch farce whose time in the HBO rotation introduced me at an impressionable age to the genius of Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, and Carl Reiner; “As Good As It Gets”, the unconventional 1997 Rom-Com that garnered acting Oscars for Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt atop near universal acclaim; “Cabin Fever”, the cleverly gnarly 2002 infection horror that introduced the world to writer/director Eli Roth; “Club Dread”, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe’s loving and criminally underrated tropical ode to 1980s Slasher movies; “Ruthless People”, the brilliant, brutally funny 1986 kidnapping caper that is an underappreciated Mad Libs blank in the career trajectory of comedic brain trust Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker; and “Strange Days”, Kathryn Bigelow’s mesmerizing 1995 neo-noir that made virtual reality look life-changing years before the disappointing truth was revealed. Such a most wanted list is merely the tip of the iceberg, of course, though every once in a while paying attention does pay dividends when a major title dramatically surfaces (the relatively recent 4K reveal of slept-on Cameron classics “The Abyss” and “True Lies” springs to mind). I’ll have to come to terms with aesthetic aversions to “Steelbook” collector’s editions in order to grab DePalma’s sleazy but delish Hitchcock homage “Body Double”, or else wait longer for it to be issued in standard packaging too. Either way, the wait so far, as with so many of these, has been damned near interminable.
There are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Point proven, market dominance established, limitations enumerated if largely ignored, our inexorable march toward the digital subjugation of all physical media has in recent years slowed somewhat. No worries if you hadn’t noticed. As long as independent distributors like, among others, The Criterion Collection, Shout/Scream Factory, Kino Lorber, Arrow, and Synapse exist, and seem at least as committed to releasing new titles as they are to upgrading their own back catalogs from Blu-Ray to 4K (a distinction that might as well be invisible for older films, IMO), progress will be made. Then again, any collector worth their salt has a little bit of vigilante in them, and will do what needs to be done when opportunity presents itself. Topping my most wanted list until just recently was a cornerstone of my HBO apprenticeship, Robert Harmon’s intense open road odyssey, 1986’s The Hitcher. After circling it, buzzard-like, for more years than I care to admit, I received the blessed news that The Hitcher was finally being released on Blu-Ray at an undetermined date in 2024. That was in mid-2023, and as of press time, which, for the record, is late 2024, no further news has floated beyond that initial trial balloon. Seeing as how the vast majority of Facebook content in recent years has proven to be outright fiction, authored in Russia, or both, I should have been more dubious. Frustrated to my breaking point, I reached across several oceans to reluctantly pull the trigger on my first (but hopefully not last) ever shipment of “region-free” Blu-Rays from Umbrella, from what I can tell Australia’s premier distribution house of cult genre cinema.*
*This is but one man’s hastily-made if still well-informed opinion. As I give Umbrella their flowers, I obviously invite any concerned Aussie competitor to prove to me otherwise. If more foreign distributors would take pains to sidestep the compatibility limitations built into global Blu-Ray commerce and commit to shipping usable copies of cult classics and other regional curiosities to America, I’d be a simultaneously richer and poorer – though undeniably happier – man. I’m just sick the jet black 1989 class warfare amorality play “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” was out of stock.
Roger Ebert, who often, especially in his later years, asserted the need for critics of all stripes to assess movies on their own terms and as examples of their own genres rather than something off the one-size-fits-all sale rack, paradoxically gave The Hitcher zero stars in his 1986 review. By the time I encountered that outlier in whichever of his Movie Yearbooks, I had both read so many of his other dispatches and seen The Hitcher enough on HBO that I was stopped cold. Beyond cinematic appreciation/literacy and basic empathy for humanity in all its troubled forms, a major lesson I learned from Ebert was the importance of leading with your heart. Intellectual exercises are fine and all, useful and often substantial, but there’s little chance of connection, or commiseration, or transcendence to them. I recall he found The Hitcher a nihilistic, repulsive, irredeemable affair; I thought it a fascinating and engaging white-knuckle ride – with an all-time antihero star turn from the late Rutger Hauer – worth three-and-a-half stars, easy. I like to think we could’ve had a respectful discussion about it and our other differences, which were few, before turning happily to our similarities, which were not. Either way, it’s what our hearts told us about the movie that was important, and what delivered the final verdict, one that for me was validated all over again upon my first viewing in forever once the overseas shipment finally arrived. Another in the panoply of movies I covet either for a personal connection or because my overarching appreciation of cinema suggests I should – that it’s not simply entertaining but worthwhile, a part of film history I would be poorer for not possessing – The Hitcher is finally home. It feels somehow like a wrong righted.
As ever, the moviegoing masses meet my obsessive quirks with a collective shrug. They’re nothing if not predictable. I’ve tried it their way before. Streaming is a fun option for those seeking non-specific entertainment on demand, but it’s neither be all, nor end all. The best streaming services get plenty right and offer solid value. Yet I feel a pinprick of annoyance every time I’m force-fed another commercial block, or add an intriguing title to my queue only to then see the tacked-on label, “Leaving Soon”. Such benevolent absentee landlords to advertise to their already paying clientele, or allow them rental access to a long-lost favorite for a necessarily limited time. On disc, I click through ads as a matter of course, and once a movie joins my collection, it’s not going anywhere. Every failed streaming search attempt ending in some variation of the boilerplate response, “Sorry, we don’t have ‘Movie X’. Try these others instead!” only gives me more incentive to own that title on Blu-Ray, not watch some algorithm-approved stand-in, nor stream my intended some indeterminate time in the future through metaphorical plexiglass during visiting hours. There’s a reason, for example, I’ve owned the original Star Wars trilogy six times across five formats through the years, four of them still valid, three of them technically “collector’s” editions. Quite frankly, they’re worth it. Bureaucratic bullshit dictates that you can’t find the beloved original theatrical versions on Disney+, but they’re in my collection alongside the shinier new toys. When Lucasfilm inevitably relents and releases them on 4K, multiple generations, including yours truly, will beat an immediate path to their door. I prefer to own, not rent. Period. I value comprehensiveness over simple convenience. I don’t want the theoretical ability to watch every frigging movie ever made. I want to choose the movies that matter to me, and then enjoy the security of watching them whenever I want, wherever I want. There may be no point trying to explain such feelings further to readers who don’t themselves understand The Collector’s Edition Addition Addiction, or at least sympathize, but I have a hunch those tourists abandoned ship untold paragraphs ago. That leaves you and me, friend, both of us movie lovers, talking shop forever over a common passion. Just as it should be.
—
ABC Family is Dead. Long Live ABC Family:
Post No. 25: Powder Burns and Uncertain Terms
Post No. 50: Iron Maiden Saved My Life.
Post No. 75: Unlimited Mileage
Post No. 100: Centennial Homesick Blues
Post No. 125: Alone in the Dark
Post No. 150: Various Forks in the Road (v.3)
Post No. 175: (In Defense Of) Brazen Idolatry
Post No. 200: Pay Attention to the Road
Post No. 225: Destinata Non Grata
darkadaptedeye 
Fascinating idea, Eric! It makes good sense to me. Enjoy!