Greetings from deep inside my Apple TV account where, apparently, we’re just buying licenses to access content because late-stage capitalism and the streaming economy are a special form of bullshit.
Given the state of streaming - the availability of some pablum; the absolute unavailability of the old, the odd, and the unloved - it’s time to talk about collecting physical media as a willful act of preemptive anthropology. Because if we don’t, we can’t get mad at corporations behaving unlike libraries and very much like banks. And we should all be livid with corporations.
What I mean:
I’ve been on a DVD/Blu-ray buying spree. Mostly because it’s the end of the semester and I am up to my earballs1 in grading, student requests for extra credit, and I will do damn near anything to avoid my desk, including braving actual stores with actual people.
In the used media store2 I found a series of cheaply produced collections of forgotten Hollywood films. For example, one collection boasts ten westerns, none of which I had ever heard of, none of which have been in print for at least thirty years. Yet, here they are, bundled together with some sketchy subtitles slapped on the bottom of the screen, and sold for less than a thousand yen. Sold!
Crucially, none of the films listed on these DVDs are available on streaming. There might be one or two on a specialty service like Criterion, but they’re not on the main platforms.
By contrast, if I wanted to watch Young Sheldon (I don’t, but if I did) I could watch it on three different streaming services (that I know of) or I could buy ‘access’ via Amazon or Apple. Or I could buy the DVD, the Blu-ray, and probably some form of enriched uranium sphere that will be good until the year 20,260. However, the movie I actually want to watch, Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys3 is not available. Like at all. On any streaming service I have access to. It’s not even available for sale digitally - excuse me, ‘access’ is not even available for sale. And good luck finding a DVD or Blu-ray. You might find a VHS if you hang around eBay long enough. Maybe.
But the thing is, for every Young Sheldon, there are a thousand titles like The Arizona Kid, Guns of the Law, and Fighting Frontier out there, completely forgotten except for DVD publishers trying to lure in crate diving film junkies. This is only going to get worse.
This past January 1st, Public Domain Day, we saw the usual avalanche of classic media enter the public domain with a brief splash of excitement before the world went back to doing whatever the hell it’s doing right now. Like every year, there were a couple of big names in the mix, The Maltese Falcon, Popeye, but there were far, far more titles, characters, and properties that are all but forgotten. And, okay, maybe that’s just time and cultural memory doing what they do - evaporate what was once most precious - but what about when it’s deliberate?
Last year, Disney earned itself some negative press by announcing that it would soon be removing some of its classic titles from Disney+, its online streaming platform. That wouldn’t be a big deal except that Disney doesn’t always bother to keep its print (e.g. Blu-ray, DVD, hell even VHS would be something) library up to date. There are several titles that are thus no longer available on physical media or streaming. It would be marginally defensible if these were racist cartoons from the 1940s. But Willow? From 2022? With Warwick Davis? Bullshit.
And I’m not even saying that all these abandoned properties are hidden gems and therefore must be preserved! I mean, if you’ve actually seen Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys then you know my taste is suspect at best. But they were real, they represent who we are, were, or wanted to be, and that means they are a part of our identity and legacy. They should be preserved exactly for that if for no other reason.
But, another example: Kevin Smith’s 1999 classic, Dogma, is finally back in print after several decades of unavailability - this time the reason was more ethical than financial, as the rights were controlled by Harvey Weinstein and that was a quagmire that it just seemed better to avoid altogether.4 At least that’s been sorted and we can once again sigh with wounded fascination at Alanis Morissette as God while being offended on behalf of the platypi.
My point, and I do have one, I promise, is that, we owe it to ourselves and our cultural heritage to retain libraries of physical media. Call it insurance, call it preservation, call it preemptive anthropology, but it’s well past time we stop relying on an increasingly pyramidically-nested series of corporations to hold on to our culture for us. Let them produce it (or not; I’m all for breaking up the mega-corporations and building a world where small groups of people can make really cool things even if they don’t have billionaire funding) but let’s then make sure we’re the ones holding on to it.
Now, we cannot, obviously, each and every one of us build libraries that hold every book, movie, record, and who knows what else. But you can be selective, you can be deliberate and intentional in making your choices. If there’s a given story that’s important to you, get a physical copy of it. Get the best one you can, the one with all the extras and the beautiful cover art. Enjoy it and revel in the series of small miracles that enabled its creation. Just don’t stream the damned thing.
Now get off my lawn while I yell at these clouds some more.
It’s a word.
You can’t just call it the used book store anymore, can you? I mean, it feels like books don’t even make up 40% of the inventory these days.
Do not make that face at me. It’s Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, and L.L. fucking Cool J with a soundtrack featuring both Thomas Dolby and Tori Amos. It is a valuable, nay, treasured cultural artifact and yes, I will die on this hill.
For what it’s worth, I think Smith did the right thing by playing the long, slow game until he could get the rights back without giving the Weinsteins any more money than could be helped. That said, had I known, 25 years ago, what the future would hold, I would never have let go of my VHS tape.