Retro Tech and Movie Blog

It has taken quite a while for me to reach it, but today I finally hit the 100 mark for the number of LaserDiscs in our movie library! I bought my first LaserDisc (which was Beverly Hills Cop 2) back in 1994. It, along with the Pioneer CLD-1091 LD player I purchased at the same time, was the start of my (I guess what you could call) “love affair” with the LaserDisc media format, which has lasted these past twenty eight years.

I’m sure that for most movie collectors, taking 28 years to gather up 100 LaserDiscs seems like a pretty long time. But, the ability for me to purchase them has always been a bit of an up-hill battle. First of all, I’ve always seemed to have lived in places where LDs were never popular or easily obtainable. So, I usually had to buy via mail order, which also incurred shipping costs. Secondly, living on a limited budget also kept me from being able to spend much money on such extravagances. And third, when I decided to get married and raise a family, all priorities from that point changed dramatically. Adding to the LaserDisc collection wasn’t one of my top priorities.

For many years, the LaserDisc collection has been pretty much stagnant. Apart from the odd movie I could afford to buy from eBay, my collection has been what it was for much of the 2000s. Fortunately enough, recently I happened to come across a very reasonable eBay seller who lives right “next door” to us, in Manitoba, who was selling a collection of 1,000+ LaserDiscs he obtained. The LDs he’s selling on eBay have been at very reasonable prices with very fair shipping fees. Being a returning customer, he offered me some very deep discounted lots that I just couldn’t pass up.

As a Christmas present for ourselves, my wife and I took much of the money we would have otherwise spent on gifts for each other and splurged on expanding our movie collection. These LDs we know we’ll enjoy watching over the next few months of winter and beyond. As of this moment, they have all been given a PVC slip cover and sitting nicely on our media shelf, which also houses our vinyl LP and VHS collections.

Is there a possibility of ever reaching the 200 LaserDisc mark? I really don’t think so; not in this economy. We don’t have the disposable income we once had. So, unless I find a stack of them at an estate sale with an asking price of pennies on the disc, it’s probably not going to happen. But, you never know what the future will bring. And, hey, this is at least one hundred LaserDiscs that will be enjoyed and cared for, and not wind up in a landfill.

If you’re a LaserDisc collector, I can’t say enough good things about The Corner Store Emporium and encourage you to check them out! You will not be disappointed.

Of the small collection of LDs that put me over the 100 mark, two of them were really special to me. Both of them were classics from 1972, “The Cowboys” and “Jeremiah Johnson”. I haven’t seen either of these movies since I was a kid. So it was great to watch them after all of these years and have them in the library.

The Cowboys is a double disc production, with a beautiful gate-fold jacket. They could have made this movie fit on to one CLV disc, but they included the theatrical Overture and Intermission segments of the film. You don’t see that very often. So, disc one is encoded as CLV and disc two is CAV. The movie is presented in beautiful widescreen format and looks fantastic. The soundtrack was also CX encoded and sound really good. Johnny Williams wrote the music for this movie, so the digital track was well worth the effort.

Jeremiah Johnson also looks and sounds fine, but it has to be the most “primitive” LaserDiscs I have in the library. It’s a simple pan-and-scan transfer, with no real enhancements that I can see or hear; the soundtrack is just a mono track. This is also the only LD that I have with no chapters encoded on the disc. All this aside, I still think it’s a great movie, albeit a fairly sad tale. I’m glad I was able to find a copy of this movie on LaserDisc in such great condition.

These are the kind of movies that my father liked, too. So, watching them makes me feel closer to him. I miss him a great deal.
[tag]movies, laserdisc, collection[/tag]