The Return of Physical Media?
A few weeks ago I posed the question: Are Zoomers Saving Physical Media?
In the article, I dug into why I thought discs and books play a critical role in the way that we transmit our culture. I’m not gonna rehash that here, but you can go read the article if you haven’t.
But there’s another side to this that, at least for me, is undeniably a part of why I prefer physical media.
Having a Rad Time
A few years ago, the 1986 BMX racing movie Rad finally got a physical media release. For years, I’ve been beating up a bootleg VHS copy my sister bought me on Ebay for my birthday, and finally one of my favorite movies from the 80s was gonna get a proper release on disc.
My Vinegar Syndrome copy was well worth the wait. It came with a mini poster and a neat-o holographic slip cover. I would have totally settled for a crappy DVD version, so I was over the moon to get this totally awesome Ultra HD version loaded with cool extras and stuff.
But then a few days ago I was at my local Half Price books scanning through their movies, and I stumbled on the Mondo steelbook version of the same movie. I couldn’t believe it. Usually, looking at movies at Half Price involves scanning through hundreds of movies like Jerry Maguire. You’re lucky to walk away with maybe one or two hard-to-find or lesser-known movies, and most of those are older DVD copies.
But I had found that rarest of things. Practically the unicorn of movies. Rad in steelback format.
But you already have this movie, my adult inner voice whispered.
But this one’s shiny, my inner hunter-gatherer voice whispered back.
I was momentarily stunned. I put the small stack of movies I was holding down on the floor, no longer concerned with the riff raff I had scrounged into a potential haul. I was mesmerized by the metallic cover.
Mine’s cool, but this one is cool in a different way, the hunter-gatherer voice whispered. We wants it. We needs it, the voice said.
Now I’ll tell you, I’ve never been the type to buy a movie multiple times when the format changes. There are exceptions, but they are very few. And I have also never been the type to buy a movie I already have because the packaging is new or cooler or whathaveyou. But if I’m being honest, I would have been tempted to buy this copy even if it had been the same version as the one I already owned.
But why? You might be asking.That’s mad.
And it kinda is. But it illustrates the first point I am coming to in this rambling editorial:
The hunt is almost as important as the kill.
The Hunt
Before you could buy everything from toothpaste to dishwasher parts online and have them delivered within a matter of hours, people shopped in stores.
Sometimes kids would come to school on a Monday and be sporting some cool band t-shirt that everyone else would ooh and ahh over. Or they’d have the latest Star Wars or He-Man figure.
You could ask where they got it, but even if you went to the same store in the mall where they bought it, the likelihood of finding that specific thing your friend had was slim. Things sell out. Stores have to restock. And sometimes, especially in the case of things like band tees, when they ran out, they were out for good.
There was no going online and finding them. There weren’t places that reprinted old, out-of-print tees. Not everything was ubiquitous like it is now.
And that had its downsides, sure. It meant that some demand was not being met. It often meant not getting what you wanted, even if you had the money.
But it also meant novelty still existed.
It meant wandering through a store like Spencers and stumbling onto something you’d never seen before. Something you’d end up wearing until it was threadbare or you’d grown out of it. But it also meant being disappointed in not being able to have the thing you wanted.
But what’s all this got to do with buying physical media?
Finding Novelty in a World of Sameness
I could have bought that Mondo steelbook of Rad whenever I wanted. It’s been in one of my Amazon lists for months. But I’ve never bothered to pull the trigger.
Why?
Because I can have it any time I want it (not to mention I already have the Vinegar Syndrome release). In fact, I can order it right now and have it here tomorrow. But I haven’t. It’s not limited in any way, as far as I can tell. And as I was writing this article, I stumbled onto yet another release of the movie that I was unaware of–this one is the Special Edition and has the Rad documentary that came out last year. I can also have that one here tomorrow if I want.
But I probably won’t.
But finding it in the wild, holding it in my hand, and having that tactile experience was completely different than adding it to a list in Amazon and maybe eventually adding to my cart and clicking “buy”. I’d found a gem. I’d stumbled onto something unexpected. Wedged in between the Jerry Maguires and Spider-Mans. It was special, simply by virtue of having encountered it in the real world.
So did I buy it? No.
But as I wrote this article, I felt the urge to go back to that Half Price and snag it.
Ultimately, my decision was practical. I already own Rad. And the copy I’d found was selling for only a few bucks less than a new copy on Amazon, and the slipcover wasn’t in the best shape. But if I hadn’t already had my copy, I would have bought it without hesitation. And I would have been glad to have it.
American Samurai & the Importance of Disappointment
A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a DVD copy of American Samurai at a Half Price. I was elated. American Samurai is a terrible movie, but it’s one that I watched a lot as a teen. I was dimly aware DVD copies existed, but I thought the movie was out of print and hard to find. This was yet another unicorn moment, and best of all? The movie was in the clearance section. Bonus!
So I was horrified when I opened the box and found no disc inside. I went to the counter to double check, but I was out of luck. It had either been misplaced or someone else with less scruples than me had decided they had to have the movie too.
I went home disappointed and still coming down from the experience of (almost) finding the unexpected.
Probably some of you may be thinking I need therapy and that pining for pieces of plastic is silly. It probably is. But the bigger point I am making is that the ubiquity of everything has its downsides.
I think one of the things people are hunting for when they hunt physical media is novelty. Finding the unexpected.
The internet has all but killed that.
Yep, It’s the Internet’s Fault
And going out hunting for physical movies is a way of clawing back some of those novel experiences. It’s a way of reclaiming the human experience part of the hobby of watching movies. When I’m out hunting movies, I run into others doing the same. We talk. We commiserate. We lament. We recommend. Sure some of us are a little weird and can be a bit extra. But that’s also part of life. You gotta take the good with the bad. The novel with the ordinary. The moments of excitement with the moments of disappointment.
Because one really can’t exist without the other.
A few years back, in my article An Argument for Going in Blind to Movies, I argued that it’s often the experiences that don’t go as planned that we end up remembering and retelling to our friends over and over again. Somehow, disappointment is formative in a way my pea brain doesn’t really understand. I don’t have a sociology degree and can’t really tell you why it’s so important. But I just know that it is.
But the modern world (driven primarily by the internet) has insulated us from the unexpected and from disappointment. You would think that would be a good thing.
But I don’t think that it is.
Because not being disappointed also means never being pleasantly surprised.
Save Physical Media, Save the World
Saving physical media isn’t the point. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I would rather be able to buy physical media online than not at all.
But stumbling onto a copy of Rad or an empty case for American Samurai in a store is doing more than just contributing to our collections. It’s reminding us that there is far more to this hobby than just buying things. It’s giving us a space to experience the unexpected in a world made drab by ubiquity. It’s doing what movies, books, music, and even video games almost universally do: it’s reminding us what it means to feel human. If all of those spaces go away–the video store, Half Price books, the video game store–these experiences vanish with them.
And that sounds like an awfully dystopian world to me.
