Finish Line Ahead

Close to the end now.  August has proven an even crappier month personally than July, so these posts have been short and to the point.  With my previous diatribe against Blu-Ray I started thinking: not that my entertainment is *THAT* important to me anymore (thus the upcoming end of this blog) but what is important to me when it comes to the media I watch my movies and shows on?  Obviously DRM is important, thus DVD over Blu-Ray, but what about my DVDs?  What is important when considering to buy or even keep certain things on DVD?  I am assuming of course that I like whatever it is I am considering.

Well, my wants have changed over the years.  Back when I first started this blog, for example, extras were very important to me.  Given the choice between a bare-bones edition DVD and a Special Ultra Limited Edition with 50 making of features and an audio commentary I was never going to listen to, I was going to choose the amped up version every time.  Nowadays I don't really need that for every movie I own, in fact I only need that for a very small percentage of the stuff I have because obsessing on entertainment and how it's made is now less important to me.  I recently re-bought some of my favorite anime movies because the picture quality was supposed to be better than the versions I already had.  Also, when it came to Wings of Honneamise and the Patlabor movies they were supposed to take up less space than the behemoth boxset versions I had on my shelves.  Well, the picture quality on the two Patlabor films was much better than on the old deluxe boxsets, while Honneamise looked exactly the same - but still took up less space, thus I kept it over the old one.  The two huge Patlabor boxsets I had were superior to the new release in every other way - they had theatrical trailers and documentaries as bonuses on the discs, they had super-informative booklets and even the complete storyboards for both movies.  But in the end the picture quality was vastly superior on the new DVDs, and I refuse to own two versions of the exact same movie (not counting Director's Cuts, etc), so I weighed my options and chose to get rid of my once beloved Patlabor boxsets.  Why?  Because picture quality trumps everything else.  All the extras are just icing on the cake, and the cake itself is more important to me anymore.  I also repurchased Vampire Hunter D (which I knew would have vastly superior picture quality seeing as how the quality on the old 2000 DVD was really poor - I was right) and again, the new release does not have as many bonus features but video quality is what counts the most.  A lot of VHD fans are up in arms about the new DVD having a new English dub rather than the old Streamline dub, but I have always watched it in Japanese anyway so I don't care.  Yes, it would have been nice to have both dubs as an option but again picture quality trumps all.

Now that I have my priorities straight when it comes to buying DVDs I feel that it easier to purchase movies and TV shows than in the past.  Life is all about priorities.  If you can learn that you'll be golden, instead of wasting time on a crappy movie blog that nobody reads.