This morning at VTOR I wrote about one of two DVDs I bought last night. The other DVD was Sliders (pictured) which was a good deal for $19.99 at the local Fred Meyer for both season 1 & 2. Sliders was in a partially translucent package with creatively spaced in foam holding the DVDs.

The package I was most interested in, however, was Dungeons & Dragons - The Complete Series (affiliate).

Not only does this come with the complete series on DVD which I’m looking forward to watching, it also contains:

the official Dungeons & Dragons Animated Series Handbook Game Supplement which is 30 pages of character profiles from the series, stats, magic items and an adventure that is a prelude the animated episode “The Dragon’s Graveyard.” This bridges the gap between the game and the animated TV series.

This package is among the best DVD packages we’ve ever bought.

That’s saying something since we’ve now bought over 500 DVDs (see me standing in front of our DVD collection). Who says creative packaging doesn’t sell DVDs? Collectors eat up cool packaging and should fuel Hollywood’s hopes in their relentless fight against piracy. The media itself isn’t the only thing of value and hopefully they continue to use that to their marketing advantage.

Here are some of my other favorite DVD packages with special content we’ve bought over the years (not an all-inclusive list, just a few that stick out):

• clear packaging with mock-up ice pick for Basic Instinct
• Grease leather jacket cover edition as well as My Earl T-Shirt edition [see creative DVD packaging]
• Forbidden Planet 50th Anniversary Collector’s Tin
• The various Simpsons collector’s editions shaped like different characters
• Star Trek The Original Series and Animated Series packaging
• Seinfeld box set Season 1-3 (40 episodes) with playing cards, salt and pepper shaker and mini napkin holder
• Alien Quadrilogy containing 9 different Alien movies. Great for Alien fans

Possibly of related interest: the site eeggs.com covers hidden goodies inside DVDs, games and more.

Do you have any favorite collector’s edition DVD packages to add to the list that I’ve missed worth hunting around on eBay or elsewhere?

The previews for Ghost Rider have had me stoked for awhile and this afternoon our whole family watched the fiery skull and bones dude ride. At the official Ghost Rider Sony website, you can put in your zip code and find movie times in your area.

In Ghost Rider daredevil Johnny Bravo Blaze (played by Nicholas Cage) who was tricked into selling his soul to the devil when he was younger must be the devil’s right hand man in the future when the night goes down, chasing down the souls of evil. He transforms into this skeleton with leather, chains and a tricked out motorcycle to punish the evil living and dead.

As with other comic book characters like Spiderman, Ghost Rider has a love interest in a character played by Eva Mendes who appears with significant cleavage showing in just about every frame. There is a puzzling, unexplained part where she works as a news reporter and yet just seems to totally abandon her job to chase after Johnny Bravo Blaze. Then there is this weird caretaker dude with a killer low gutteral voice that also serves as the story narrator.

Without going into futher detail and spoiling the movie, the storyline is a mess, including the ending which screams sequel. I thought the movie was about as good as Hulk. If you’re a fan of comic book movies you might like this one which is better than Daredevil, but a long ways from being in the league of X-Men or Spiderman.

Family grades
Me: C
Mother: D
Oldest son, age 16: A-
Middle son, age 15: C-
Youngest son, age 13: B+

Any readers see Ghost Rider yet? If so, what’s your grade?

Where do you check for local movie times in your area? I check Fandango and have been disappointed how quickly it forgets my zip code on their site. There is a Fandango Google gadget (see below) that keeps the zip code active longer than the Fandango website. Set the cookie to expire in six months or a year already, Fandango. There are widgets that automatically retrieve the local movie times, have readers tried out any of the following?

Google Gadgets
Fandango
Movies

Yahoo movie widgets
Show Time
Now Playing
Movie Times

Apple Dashboard movie widgets
Ticket Widget

Microsoft / Live Gadgets
Moviescout

“Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” — Martin Luther King, JR

Reading through the Wikipedia entry on Martin Luther King, Jr. it reminded me there has been similar controversy surrounding his assassination as John F. Kennedy:

Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray’s petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude;

I’m fascinated by the numerous conspiracy theories, but don’t take them very seriously. It’s probably way too late to hope that we’ll ever find out who was really behind JFK’s assassination. The Oliver Stone movie, considered to be fiction by those who actually believed the pack of garbage put out by the Warren Commission, asked some interesting questions but took too much literary license. So if it’s too late to find out who was really behind Kennedy’s assassination, what about MLK?

Audiotapes of electronic surveillance of King obtained by the FBI are in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

I haven’t seen any Martin Luther King Jr. movies but a cursory Google search turned up a 1978 documentary called King: The Martin Luther King Story. Amazon has King’s famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963 (pictured to right), or you can watch it on Google Video. Playback was a little jerky though, when I tried checking it out, understandable considering today is the day people all over the US are honoring Dr. King.

Any other good movies or documentaries on MLK worth seeing?

HD-VMD. There’s a name you probably won’t remember since none of the major studios are signed on board to support the format yet, but it isn’t completely without potential, especially considering the text I bolded below.

Variety (emphasis mine):

Initial HD VMD discs will have similar capacity as the first hi-def discs released by the majors. But players will cost much less: Next month, the company will release software enabling users to play the discs on their computers, likely for free. Actual players cost less than than $300 — a significant savings vs. the $500 to $800 HD DVD players or the $1,000 Blu-ray decks — due to lower manufacturing cost.

With Microsoft already fortified on the HD-DVD front and Sony with Blu-Ray and a smattering of major studios choosing sides where does this leave HD-VMD? Without major studio content support can HD-VMD be a contender? The nmeinc.com website succeeds in telling us how great it is, but the online store simply carries the sometimes ominous words: “coming soon.”

It seems silly to suggest HD-VMD has any chance, but compared against Blu-Ray and HD-DVD which aren’t exactly off to a disruptive start replacing — or even supplementing — DVD, almost anything is possible. I’m still going with DVD not being seriously threatened by any of the HD options available to date. Yes, the high and low end technophile crowd will continue to eat up HD, but we’re still a couple years away from the mainstream public en masse buying into a different physical format than DVDs. And I still think the replacement format will be something without moving parts and vastly more storage space like holographic or perhaps even protein based storage.

Moving parts wear out. Think of the heads of a VCR and tape versus the replay factor in a DVD and there was a definite advantage since nothing was physically touching the DVD (yes, the laser is reading it, but there is no head on the DVD essentially wearing it down with each play). Surely there is some theoretical limit of wearing out a DVD as the more cycles it will eventually weaken and crack, but it is nothing to the effect of taping running across a head. Also, it can be rough on CD/DVD media just taking it out of the protective case.

Now imagine something that doesn’t require spinning of the media. Imagine a credit-card sized object being able to hold your entire families music and movie libraries. Something like that would be disruptive media, not yet another spinning object of any kind read by more effective lasers.

Several people have been asking me to comment on the story below which we’ll definitely be talking about on today’s weekly radio show a couple hours away. Since there is some tech crossover into something I’ve been talking a lot about lately, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, I’ll hit the topic here briefly.

No Blu-ray disk manufacturer would make their disks because Sony doesn’t want porn on Blu-ray (just as with Betamax) … the porn industry overwhelmingly favors HD-DVD because it’s much cheaper and easier to produce. As noted in the tgdaily article, porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though many people don’t like to acknowledge it.

In short, I think Sony is conceding HD-DVD a major victory in the format wars with an anti-porn stance. Aren’t they going to have — or don’t they already have — writeable Blu-Ray drives? When they do have offer those, then how is Sony going to prevent people from storing whatever they want there? Putting adult content on any format, whether it be floppy disk, CD, etc has and will always happen as long as the format is viable. Heck if you do some searching around, and I’m not going to link it up, there are people (no, not me Toby) who get their freak on checking out ASCII erotic art.

I can understand companies like Sony discouraging the adult industry from using the format and hopefully that is what Sony has really been saying here, but outright denying them is business suicide (and considering the First Amendment, questionable legally). This might make the anti-adult crowd happy with Sony, but it’s going to drive a lot of people that otherwise are neutral on the two formats and who like viewing adult material in the privacy of their homes to HD-DVD.

Though I don’t have the exact numbers, I’m pretty certain our family didn’t buy less DVDs in 2006 than 2005. Our VHS purchase days are over and that seems to align with a recent study that a surprising $100 million VHS were still purchased in 2006. We’ve mostly divested our VHS collection except for family videos we’ve shot and still need to convert to digital.

DVD rentals rose strongly from 2005’s $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion, while DVD sales inched up from $16.3 billion in 2005 to $16.6 billion last year, according to figures due today from the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade group. Overall, $24.2 billion was spent on DVD and VHS, lower than in 2004 ($24.5 billion) and 2005 ($24.3 billion). VHS accounted for just $100 million in spending last year; as recently as 2004, VHS spending topped $3 billion.

$100 million is a lot for the clearly inferior and near dead VHS media format. I wonder if this is people raiding VHS bargain bins?

Tipping point for DVDs or no?
Does this study above show we’ve reached a tipping point for DVDs? I don’t think so. Too many DVD players out there and as I noted in last Thursday’s Hmmcast, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray isn’t as dramatic as it is going from VHS to DVD.

I think the DVD format still has a good couple years, even if they aren’t selling more. There are still some great TV shows and seasons yet to be released, not to mention the new shows being developed.

With CES 2007 this week it will be interesting to see what developments come out as far as replacement media. I’ve already seen a post on the promise of a dual HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format player which if it is affordable (it won’t be in the forseeable future) it could help consumers decide on one over the other.

Right now, not counting the HDTV or cable, $500 will get you into HD-DVD (Xbox 360 + HD-DVD player or a standalone player) and about the same for Blu-Ray ($599 for PS3). Until either of these formats are available on players under $100 you can forget about any hope of widespread adoption. It’s the same thing with HDTVs which were supposed to already be here. We have seven TVs and two of them are HDTV and we like buying next generation technology. It’s like going from dial-up to broadband. It takes time meaured not in months, but years, and most people wait to buy these things until the prices come down.

I still think HD-DVD and Blu-Ray won’t be the next generation format. They will be at best an interim solution until something with moving parts comes into play like holographic storage. Sure I’ve said that before, but when there are no moving parts, when you and I can carry our entire movie collections around on data the size of a credit card, then we’ll have the next breakthrough in the format wars. What we have now with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray — and admittedly I don’t have an HD-DVD player yet — seems more like an intermission than a new movie.

What will your 2007 movie/TV purchases be like?
I predict we’ll buy less DVDs in 2007 than 2006, but not because we think the format is going away because we’ll be buying in different formats like renting movies through the Xbox Live Marketplace, the iTunes store for transfer to the iPod and perhaps even reinstating our Hollywood video unlimited rental plan. Oh and yes, we will probably buy an HD-DVD player and a few more Blu-Ray movies.

With a collection of DVDs around 500 and still growing, we’re watching this closely so we can sell most of our collection before the format starts to tank like it did with VHS. I don’t think this will be in 2007, but it’s possible we could be in the market to sell in late 2008 maybe.

What’s your story on the movie front? How many DVDs/VHS/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD did you buy in 2006? Was it more or less than 2005? What’s your outlook for purchases in 2007?

Adios Shatner DVD Club:

A year ago I wrote about coming across the Shatner DVD Club and wondered if anybody else had signed up? It was a club where for $47.99 a year every month you were mailed a new sci-fi DVD picked my Shatner himself that you could keep.

The only reply to that post was from one of the people responsible for building the website for Mr. Shatner giving prices on Amazon for some of the movies. The deal appeared to be pretty good actually but by looking at the screenshot above, there weren’t enough takers interested in Shatner’s picks and it was killed a mere year later. The original Star Trek series lasted three years. I thought about joining the Shatner DVD Club, but never did. I wasn’t alone.

Snail mail DVD club days numbered too
Might get some pushback for writing this, and I’m not alone or the first person with these thoughts, but I don’t think snail mail DVD services like Netflix have much more time in the tank, especially as more and more bandwidth becomes available. In fact I’d say 2007 and 2008 are the transition years that Netflix turns into just another movie download service.

What they could do now to stave off death is try and cut a deal with Microsoft or Apple to join their stores somehow, someway. I’m not sure how or why either of those two companies would be interested but in my opinion those are the major two TV/movie distribution points going forward. At least until something bigger and better comes along.

Netflix is still viable but they have clearly peaked. The Hacking Netflix blogger (a good blogger by the way) whom tipped me off to this Shatner DVD club closing story might want to start working on another blog now, if he isn’t already doing so, before he runs out of source material. I guess he could prolong the inevitable by sharing memories of what Netflix used to be like or branch into other movie-related sites (he already reports on Blockbuster online, who is equally doomed), but the name is going to haunt the site the way the iTunes Music Store haunted Apple when they started selling TV and videos.

This is the risk in using a website to focus on niche content and the reason when we started our VTOR blogging group we chose to focus on all virtual reality sites and not only one site in particular (although we currently focus on Second Life the most at the moment).

Any Shatner DVD Club bloggers — unlikely there were any — are now floating in a boat without oars.

I’m sure Netflix execs are hoping and praying that HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray catches fire because it takes a lot longer to download HD movies than it does DVDs. Mark Cuban had this wild idea of sending a hard drive loaded with a bunch of movies already on it but that idea won’t catch on any more than the Shatner DVD Club. Ok, maybe it could have some legs if 300 TB drives become a reality.

If you look at current technology some sort of P2P solution would seem to be the most affordable scalable solution, but Hollywood seems to be acting like it’s the tool of the devil.

When Sony bought the Grouper P2P video service for $65 million in August 2006, they positioned themselves nicely to utilyze P2P if indeed that becomes the chosen method of legal movie distribution in the future. So far though, Sony hasn’t done anything significant with this property. Would be a shame to not see them find some way to incorporate this into their Playstation Store (PS3) and offer TV, movies and videos, including video blogs. I wonder if that’s what they are thinking about?

Download Hmmcast #34 (mp4)

Last night I watched my first Blu-Ray movie in 1080i via the Sony Playstation 3. It was of a movie I’d already seen but didn’t own on DVD. I could have bought the package in DVD format of all three movies for about half (or less) what we paid for the Blu-Ray format, but I wanted to watch something in Blu-Ray format.

Even though we received Talledega Nights in Blu-Ray format with the PS3, I wanted my first experience with Blu-Ray to be with something I actually bought separately. Might seem hokey, but hey, that’s the way I roll sometimes.

I’ve had my eye on the Mission Impossible set for a little while having just finished watching the first season of the TV series.

For those with PS3, I’m curious how often you’ll buy the Blu-ray version vs. the DVD. As mentioned in the video at the top of this post (if you don’t see it for some reason, clickthru to this post), Snakes on a Plane and Beer League came out this Tuesday and I did look for both on Blu-ray but neither we’re available.

Just got back from watching Rocky Balboa, the sixth and probably last one in the series.

Movies don’t work without a suspension of belief. In the best films you forget you’re in a theater and become immersed in the story. With Rocky Balboa I tried really, really hard to get over the baggage from the past films and just couldn’t. I kept thinking: how on earth could the Rock still be walking and speaking, much less getting a license to fight again? Stallone painted himself into a corner as a storyteller that was simply too great to escape.

With that said, Rocky Balboa is a better movie than a few others in the series. It takes the story where we should have gone after Rocky IV. It feels like a do-over for the series. Uncle Pauly and Duke are about the only characters besides Rock to keep the continuity alive. Pauly has a few signature wisecracks but doesn’t really get a chance to redeem himself; a character subplot hole that we may never see repaired.

Now onto the rankings before I come back and grade this one.

Ranking the Rocks
1. Rocky I - more a love story than a boxing story and one could make an argument that Adrian was the main character. Her power would endure through all six films but none stronger than here. When Rocky became more about boxing than love, Stallone lost the edge.
2. Rocky III - Mr. T was easily the best Rocky foe. Mean, a warrior. His line in Rocky 3 is priceless: “I live alone, train alone and I’ll win the title alone.” Also factor in Apollo Creed coming back to train Rocky and the drama surrounding Mick. This was the pinnacle of the franchise after the classic first.
3. Rocky II - My favorite boxing storyline of all the films. The interplay between Rocky and Apollo is outstanding. Burgess Meredith is at his best in this film.
4. Rocky Balboa - A better Rocky 5. Clearly Stallone has had time to think of the plot and the logical progression from Rocky 4. Too bad there is all the weight of the medical stuff. How on earth did he get a “clean bill of health” to be able to fight again?
5. Rocky IV - the blood doping Russian Ivan Drago is the most unrealistic fight of the series. From the beating Rocky took here the future films should have been with Rocky dead and not others. Recently I ranked this as the worst Rocky film but I’ve changed my mind and put this slightly ahead of Rocky 5.
6. Rocky V - This is the movie that tried to be Rocky Balboa and I think Stallone is grateful for the chance to get a rewrite. Even Stallone admits he made Rocky too human in this movie and paid the price. Rocky needed to be the hero and his inability to get into the ring spoiled this ring. When the fight does come in this movie, it’s too late to save it.

Grading the Rock
Despite the film’s shortcomings, Rocky Balboa is still a story worth telling and I’m glad Stallone fought to see this movie being made. It’s a much better ending to the franchise than Rocky V. It’s too bad the other flicks exist or it would be easier to appreciate. It feels a little bit like Rocky I and V hybrid without the love story and an over the hill Rocky. What the Rock doesn’t have in physical assets he still has in heart.

I haven’t read any other reviews — on purpose — before watching and judging this film myself but I’m curious now after seeing it and writing this what others have to say. I had a major curiosity in the film ruined by a comment left in an older Rocky-related thread. As it turned out that didn’t have as much bearing on the film as I thought it would. All in all, this is a respectable Rocky movie that had a full theater cheering at one point, but not the point one might expect. That’s what I remember about Rocky III in the theater. At the end a few people clapped which best sums up my feelings about the picture. Grade: C+.