6 Considerations in the lost art of curating a DVD collection.

DVDs are of course still around, you can easily find them at big box stores or online. They don’t have the same cultural cache they once did though. I still occasionally pick up a DVD, but there’s a good chance it’ll just sit in my TV cabinet, unopened. That’s how convenient streaming services have become--I can’t be bothered to watch a DVD I bought. On the off chance the internet is destroyed by mischievous raccoons or buying physical copies of movies comes back into style à la vinyl records, here’s a guide to creating a quality DVD collection.

1. Your collection is like an offline profile.

When DVDs were the preferred method of watching movies you didn’t just keep them in your closet. You put them out on display, possibly buying a rack specifically designed to show off your DVD collection. When other people came by you wanted to be able to show off your good taste in movies. If I wandered into your dorm room and saw that your DVD collection was just the top 10 movies that came out in the last year, I’d think you were a philistine. It’s not that I’d necessarily even dislike those movies, it would just seem like you had no real taste. I’d much rather examine the collection of someone who was really into Hammer horror movies. It’s not that 1970’s vampires are my favorite, it’s that this person has a viewpoint on what makes a good film. I want to hang out with them. This brings us to...

2. Having films you want to show to other people.

Part of having a DVD collection was being able to sit other people down and try to blow their mind with a movie they’d never seen before. If someone said they’d enjoyed Desperado I’d sit them down to watch El Mariachi. If you wanted to impress how intelligent you were you could put on Donnie Darko or A Scanner Darkly. Or you could show how worldly you were by putting a foreign film like Run Lola Run or Brotherhood of the Wolf. Cause no date was going to be impressed by your ownership of The Phantom Menace. Of course having critical darlings in your collection didn’t mean you were going to impress anyone. My eyes rolled pretty hard anytime I saw someone had The Godfather trilogy.

At the same time you also wanted to go to the opposite end of the spectrum with…

3. Undemanding movies for unfocused watching.

Sometimes you want to put everything else aside and totally immerse yourself in a film. Other times you wanted to have something light running in the background while you had friends over to play a board game. I might put on a quotable comedy that everyone had already seen before like Austin Powers or Office Space. Or I would put on a classic film that would be too slow paced for modern audiences but contained elements I wanted people to see like One Million Years B.C. or Jason and the Argonauts.

There was another reason people bought DVDs in the 2000’s that hasn’t aged well…

4. Did you get enough special features?

In the early 21st century people had an insatiable appetite for special features. Deleted scenes, interviews with the cast, how the special effects were done, audio commentaries, theatrical trailers, concept art--we wanted it all. A fantasy film like King Kong (2005) might make an entire matter-of-fact documentary about the fictional Skull Island. The most notorious special feature packer was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To just own the theatrical release on DVD was kind of gauche and would earn you no credibility among fantasy fans. No, if you were a real fan then you would have the 4 disc set for each of the three films. That’s over 11 hours of view time just to see the extended versions of the films before you even get into the behind the scenes features.

In my book the film that did bonus features the best was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The special edition included the Camelot song in Lego and subtitles for people who don’t like the film.

There was also a more pragmatic reason to buy DVDs…

5. Sometimes the only way to see something was to buy the DVD.

Buying a DVD could be a crapshoot. If you really wanted to see something that never appeared in theaters and wasn’t at Blockbuster, you just had to buckle down and buy it. For me this was largely about getting to see anime. Like many others, Adult Swim whetted my appetite for Japanese animation. I wanted more than what they could show (when the series Cowboy Bebop first aired three episodes just weren’t broadcast). But you didn’t really know what you were getting. For every time I bought Princess Mononoke or Neon Genesis Evangelion I also bought an A.D. Police or insert forgettable anime here. If you made a bad buy you could resell that DVD, but that was always a rip off--DVDs were not an investment. What I’m saying is don’t judge too harshly if someone has Labyrinth of Flames in their collection.

And that’s about it… wait, I’m being told there was one other reason to consider…

6. You might get a DVD just for that one scene *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*

Sure the internet existed 20 years ago, but it was a different beast back then. Most people’s connections were too slow to watch videos, and there weren’t many available anyway. If you wanted to see a famous person naked, you couldn’t just Google it, you actually needed to go get a DVD copy of the film they were naked in. At least I’m told people would buy DVDs for this reason, I own Wild Things and Mulholland Dr. purely because they are great neo-noir films.

Studios got people to buy DVDs of movies they’d already seen in theaters by releasing unrated editions on DVD. There usually wasn’t much more to unrated editions, but then there could be anything and everything, there were no limits, it was unrated! The best way to get the gullible/horny consumer to spring for DVD was with that unrated label.

So now you know how to not just buy a DVD but curate a DVD collection. If you want some specific film suggestions, click here.