Today's Entertainment Thought

One of my favorite blogs, News From ME, posits a hypothesis that the home video market exists for the purpose of seeing how many times they can get him to buy the movie Goldfinger (somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 at last count). Time was, the home entertainment industry would at least go to the trouble of developing a new, supposedly superior, media format to get us to re-purchase movies and shows we already owned. Now, they don't even do that. They just slap new "bonus features" on the DVD, use some foil stamping on the box and call it the Ultimate Collector's Edition.

What they don't seem to realize is that the Ultimate Collectors are the people who have been lining up on Tuesdays during the entire run of the series to get the individual seasons of the TV show on the day they come out. Or, for those of us in the boonies where Tuesday releases hit the stores somewhere around the following Thursday, we pre-order from Amazon and tear the package out of the UPS guy's hands before he can finish scanning it. These Ultimate Collector's Editions are really starting to cheese us off.

I have spent six years collecting the complete series of Stargate SG-1 (seasons 1-8 anyway...the series could have done without seasons 9 and 10) on DVD. I have devoted a full two feet of DVD shelf space to this series, since I couldn't wait for the Thinpak edition that would have taken up less than a foot. I don't remember just how much cash is sunk into this collection, but if one buys all 10 seasons individually at list price, that's only 50 cents shy of $500; even Amazon's discounting only brings the total down to $363.50. We can assume my figure is closer to the latter. I camped out at Comic-Con to get a seat (not a good seat, just a seat) at the SG-1 panel. How does MGM reward this kind of fan loyalty? Tomorrow, they are releasing Stargate: SG-1 The Complete Series box set with all 10 seasons plus four disks of bonus features not found on my individually-compiled set, list price of $329.98 (Amazon pre-order $230.99).

I don't know if these TV studios think that the fans are suckers, but I'm certainly starting to feel like one. I spent more to get less--unless you count packaging volume--than fans-come-lately to the series who waited until the show's run ended before they sunk any cash into the DVDs. Fans have begun to realize that buying the first release of a TV show on home video is a sucker's game. The first release will be followed in a few months by a better edition. If we just wait, we'll be able to get even more of the bonus features that make buying DVDs worth it; were it not for the bonus features and removal of the ads, we would just hook up the DVD recorder to the TiVo. Except here is the Catch-22 of the whole thing: if we buy the first iteration, a better one comes out. If we don't buy the first iteration, the studio decides it's not worth releasing the rest of the series at all, so not only do we not get the better edition, we don't even get Season 2 of the crappy edition.