orangerunner

It's hard to believe but the DVD format was introduced to the North American market this week in 1997, apparently with the release of "Twister" from Warner Home Video.

Who would have thought with the release of Blu-ray 16 years ago and 4K 6 years ago, that DVD would still continue to be the most popular physical disc format.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainmen...-dvd-1.6245540

milo bloom

Hoorah!

It’s been a heck of a journey. I was initially only interested in Star Trek and Star Wars but the format opened my eyes to so many more amazing stories.

Travis McClain

Wow, that means DVD came out before I graduated high school--by a matter of months, but still, that's wild to me. I was the first of my circle of family and friends to get a DVD player, though I wasn't an immediate adopter. A coworker of mine was evangelical about original aspect ratio and finally convinced me some time in 1998. I collected widescreen VHS releases for awhile. One night after work, I finally got tired of waiting for Tombstone to get a widescreen VHS release so I splurged for an RCA RC5220P and the Tombstone DVD. I'm certain whenever I bought it was after 19 October 1999 because that was the day The Wizard of Oz Deluxe Edition came out and I bought it on VHS. There's no way I wouldn't have opted for DVD if I had the player at that time.

I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely appreciated that the DVD player included a navigable onscreen glossary. It helped me understand what all that machine could do to enhance my viewing experience beyond what VHS offered. I was especially fascinated by the foreign language audio dub tracks. My favorite of those tracks was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I showed that to some friends one night, just to marvel at the novelty of it. Years later, one friend admitted he resented me doing that because he thought I was trying to impress and steal his crush. I thought that hilarious. For the life of me, though, I cannot recall the first commentary track I ever played.

It came with a voucher for five free DVD's, but you had to pay the shipping. I passed at the time, as I didn't have enough interest in the offered group. A couple years ago, though, just on a lark I tracked down all of them. Somewhere around here I even started a thread about those offers but I'm too lazy to look for it. I do know that the quintet offered to me consisted of:

Lethal Weapon 4
Lost in Space
Six Days, Seven Nights
Stargate
Stepmom

Stargate was a flipper, and I don't mean WS on one side and FS on the other. I mean they actually broke the movie into two parts and you had to flip the disc to finish watching it. By far the most impressive of the lot was Lost in Space. That thing was packed to the gills with so many supplemental materials it puts contemporary Blu-ray treatments to shame. And it irks me that to this very day, that non-anamorphic DVD is the only disc release Six Days, Seven Nights has ever had.

Crocker Jarmen

I was a late adapter. I didn't get a DVD player until late 2000 or 2001. I actually bought my first two DVDs (Boogie Nights and Magnolia) months and months before I bought my player.

The player I bought also had a promo where you got a bunch of DVDs when mailed in your receipt. I got Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die, US Marshals, and one or two others I don't remember.

PhantomStranger

I had just gotten into collecting VHS tapes so I was very ready for the switch over to DVD. A friend had Laserdisc and DVD promised Laserdisc-like quality in a CD-sized package, so I was sold from the beginning.

Darkgod

I was late to the game and didn't get a player till 2001. My first dvd was Phantasm, as I only had like 12 dollaes after i bought the player and it was selling for 9.99

Eddie W

I had one of those rare CRT widescreen sets I bought in 1996 that weight about 500 lbs. The most impressive thing to me was the anamorphic squeeze trick that greatly reduced the scan lines vs zooming the 4x3 letterbox image like you had to do on laserdisc. I thought this was a good as video would ever get! It would be about 7 years in between my first DVD player and my first 16x9 HDTV, so I got a lot of use out of that.

It blows my mind that you go to Redbox and it's still dominated by DVD's. I don't understand why this format won't die.

morriscroy

Back in the late 1990s, my first foray into dvd died abruptly (ie. doa).

The first dvd I purchased was Terminator 2, which froze around 20 minutes into the movie. Once frozen, the remote control couldn't do anything. I had to pull the plug on the dvd player and plug it back in, in order to eject the disc out.

This defective T2 dvd went back to the retailer, where I got a refund. Any possible "dvd collecting hobby" for me at the time, died a stillborn death that day.

It wasn't until more than a decade later, that I started buying a lot of dvds / blurays in 2011.

Alan Smithee

Boogie Nights was the 3rd DVD I bought, and it rotted after more than 10 years. I managed to find a sealed copy of the original issue which played fine.

VHS lasted for roughly 30 years before it was finally put to rest. There's not even a big difference in prices on Blu-Ray players anymore and those still play regular DVDs, so no reason for DVD-only players to keep being made.

jjcool

I got the same offer. Watched the hell out of that Stargate disc. Lethal Weapon got spun up a few times as that was the one with Pesci and Jet Li. Six Days and Seven Nights got watched once. Somehow the chemistry between Harrison Ford and Anne Heche just wasn't believable. I have no memory of ever watching Lost in Space, but I'm sure I did because of Heather Graham. Stepmom I know I never watched. Ever.

milo bloom

I think Jumanji was one of my freebies, it was the one in the CD sized jewel case.
I remember having Lost In Space very early, not sure if it was a freebie or if I actually bought it. I enjoyed it actually, was never a fan of the old show, but the new movie was a lot of fun. I keep meaning to look for a cheap blu-ray copy to upgrade.

Travis McClain

I have a theory that the notion of Harrison Ford and Anne Heche being "unbelievable" was one of those things where someone started that narrative and it influenced everyone else. I went through contemporaneous reviews, and whenever that topic was addressed, it was linked to Heche having just come out of the closet. That peripheral subject became the thing everyone talked about. I loved the movie and thought they had terrific chemistry. I hadn't seen Ford play such a fun role in quite awhile by then, and Heche played great against him. I would encourage you to give it another viewing at some point. Just make sure you stream it and don't resort to its singular DVD release unless you like pillarboxing.

Regarding Stepmom, it's something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I think Julia Roberts is fantastic in it. And to pilfer from what I wrote elsewhere about it, there's just something wild to me about the very existence of a movie like this. Columbia spent $50 million to make this. Director Chris Columbus even secured John Williams to score it. John Williams! They opened it on Christmas, and it was #2 that weekend. All of that is unthinkable in today's movie landscape.

clckworang

Oh, memories. I was a fairly early adopter. I think I got my first player Christmas 1997. It came with one DVD, Jim Carrey's The Mask, and a form to send off for a couple more.

I know we often talk about the early Internet days and the crazy DVD deals that could be had, but I don't hear people talk as much about the WB and MGM free movie deals. Both distributors (they were completely separate then) offered deals. They might have both been buy 4 get 1 free, though one might have been buy 3. Anyway, you'd send in your receipts, proof of purchases, and select which DVD you wanted. Six weeks later or so, your new DVD would arrive. I got a number of movies that way.

DeanoBKN

I got my first player, an RCA for $399, in June of 1998 from Bradlees. I remember it came with your choice of two free movies. I got Hoodlum and Air Force One, then also purchased Tomorrow Never Dies. I still remember many of the free movie deals, the glory days of Reel.com, anxiously awaiting the Circuit City & Best Buy flyers to leak so I could plan my New Release buying, and of course finding this forum.

ViewAskewbian

I was graduating college and had some money to play around with so I got this new fangled thing called a 5.1 surround home theatre.

My first DVD was The Matrix.

jjcool

That was a small portion of it, but not the main issue I remember having with the film. The bigger factor for me was that Ford was almost twice her age. That just screamed creepy to me.

Travis McClain

That's a fair point. That can bother me, too. I got into Audrey Hepburn in the last few years and her filmography is terrifying in this regard. I didn't have an issue with it in Six Days, Seven Nights, though. I think it was in part because women I know in real life have kept him on the list of "older guys who still have it" so I believe Anne Heche's character would be attracted to him. His character is rather immature, which undercuts his age to an extent, too.

BobO'Link

My first "DVD player" was a top-of-the-line PC (custom built specifically for game playing) with a "huge" 19" CRT. I insisted on a DVD drive (as well as a CD burner - IIRC there were no combo CDRW/DVD drives at that time) as I envisioned PC software coming out on DVD rather than several CDs. It was purchased in the spring of 1999. The first *movie* disc I purchased was The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Extended edition. While the graphics card had video outputs its location in relation to the TV was not conducive for running the cables so I watch it on the 19" monitor. It would be 3 or 4 more years before I splurged on a stand-alone DVD player to connect to my TV. By then I had a small collection of movies. That stand-alone player was in the $100-$150 range (don't remember exactly - just that my wife complained about the amount and I thought I'd gotten a bargain).

milo bloom

My wife pushed me to get a DVD ROM drive in the early days but I really wanted a regular player to watch on our TV.
Looking back, I probably should have done that to get a cheaper drive to start off with, and had something to watch movies while browsing on the internet.

Travis McClain

Would your computer and internet speed have supported watching a movie while browsing on the internet at that time?

milo bloom

You know, after I posted that I had that thought regarding that.

But the stuff I was browsing at the time was text only message boards (like during ST Voyager's original run), so it might have been okay, plus my wife has been building her own computers since the late 80s and probably would have made sure it was souped up a bit to handle it.

stvn1974

Not sure what year I adopted the format but I remember I put a Sony DVD player, DVDs of Blade Runner The Director's Cut, Taxi Driver, 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Pink Floyd's The Wall in layaway.

mallratcal

I didn't get into it until 2003 when I bought a PS2. First DVD was Jackass: The Movie

orangerunner

I was late to the hobby with a Toshiba SD-1800 player that came with Eyes Wide Shut and Any Given Sunday. I still have the player and it still runs well.

Travis McClain

They gave you Eyes Wide Shut to inaugurate your new DVD player? There needs to be a documentary about how that decision was made.