One of the generally underappreciated features of DVD as opposed to VHS–how quickly we get spoiled–is how much bang you used to get for your buck. Back in the bad old days, pretty much any movie on VHS cost $20. Therefore, my rule of thumb was $10 per hour (although in the case of an 80m movie, you actually didn’t even get that rate).
That why I was always annoyed when they’d put one friggin’ episode of some TV show—Maverick, Wild Wild West—on a tape for $15. First, damn, those shows ran for years, and you couldn’t stick two episodes on a tape? Second, that means they were trying to get $15 for a measly 45 or 50m of material. Jerks.
DVD, needless to say, is vastly cheaper on a per-hour basis. Last week was rich in newly released sets, which provide your best bargains. Let’s take a look at what I bought, from Amazon as it happens (free shipping/no tax), which all arrived this morning.
The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume 4
I got sets 1 and 2 (although not 3), and probably could have skipped this one. The other sets had like eight movies (on two discs) for around $20. This one has 3 movies, one compilation ‘best of’ film, a TV special (Abbott and Costello Meet Jerry Seinfeld) and a half hour documentary on the A&C “Meet the Monster” films, ported over from the earlier Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein disc, which I already own.
Obviously, Universal have run through their A&C stock, given the lame offerings here—Meet the Mummy and Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the only reasons I bothered getting this—so I don’t forsee a fifth such set.
Even so, and despite a bit of buyer’s regret, for $19 I got six and a half hours of material. Even if I only watch the two monster movies, I didn’t pay more than I would have for the same movies on VHS, and the discs are lighter, take up less space, and are way more durable.
$19 Five movies/TV specials. A measly 357 Minutes, or six hours.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
All twenty episodes of the classic series. To admit I’m a fool, I years ago—before DVD—bought the “one a month” tapes from Columbia that had two episodes each on them for about $25 a shot (including monthly shipping charges). I ended up with a shelf full of tapes that cost me about $250, and that (here’s really the worst part) that I only watched one tape of.
Now I have all the same material—a bit over 17 hours of material, for $28, a little over what one of the videotapes cost me. The image quality will be better, the set is about an inch wide, and they will (according to what we’ve been told) play as well in thirty years as they do now.
The Alfred Hitchcock Presents — Season 1
Collects all 39 (!) episodes. (Back in the day, they didn’t rerun network shows—this being back when there were but three networks—but ran them nine months straight, with little or no preemption, and then put in a summer show for the remaining three months.) Also features a documentary on the show.
Alarmingly, though, all this material is on three discs, and there have been reports of faulty DVDs. Hopefully I won’t get one of the bad ones. Still, for $28 I’m getting nearly 17 hours of material, less than two dollars per programming hour. And not fake hours (as when you got a 90 minute movie for $20, or ten bucks an ‘hour’), but full ones.
The Val Lewton Horror Collection
No exact hour count available. However, the set features nine complete classic movies on five discs—many previously unavailable even on VHS—at, I would figure, around 80 minutes a movie. Right there, that’s about twelve hours of material.
The set also features commentaries on seven of the movies (including one by recently deceased director Robert Wise). Functionally, if you like commentaries—and I do—that’s adding seven more entire movie-lengths of material. Also included is a documentary on Lewton, length unknown.
To put this in perspective, back in the days of VHS (had all these films been available, which they again were not), with no extras—which in this set probably equal nine to ten hours of material—and in a format inferior in all ways to DVD, buying each film represented here would have run right around $180. Plus tax. I paid $42, for a longer lasting format with improved quality, etc. And all those extras.
Also, I haven’t seen a lot of these films (five of them, to be exact), which I can’t say about many horror films from the ‘classic’ era. So I’m really thrilled.
Good times. You whippersnappers have no idea.
