Remember how great DVDs were when they came out? Can’t we all just go back to thinking that was as good as it would ever get?

At one point in the mid-to-late ‘80s, anybody who was still paying attention to the Atari 2600 was able to buy up armloads of game cartridges for pennies. The audiocassette tape plummeted from the most widely used music format on Earth to something you might pay two bucks for at a truck stop – but probably not. And selling one’s CDs used to be a reliable source of petty cash during periods of, er, personal financial austerity. Now, they’re worth about as much as those AOL sign-up CDs.

Right now, the DVD is at that point in its life cycle. Hammered by the higher quality of Blu-ray and the greater convenience of streaming video, the DVD is barely more popular than plain old VD. Did Hollywood somehow beat the odds and make something you might actually want to see? Sit tight and eventually just about every movie worth seeing trickles down to the ”$5 each or 3 for $10” bin. If you’re more into value than quality, you can buy one of those mammoth tins full of 25 discs with 100 war movies or Westerns, or whatever. So you won’t have any trouble stocking a comprehensive library of titles to watch on your Sylvania 9” Portable DVD Player.

It’s like carrying a second-run movie theater in your pocket, only without the asbestos and the pigeons. And if you have larger-than-average pockets. And if you only watch the DVDs you buy once, at these prices, so what? One child’s size packet of salt at the cinema concession stand costs more than that DVD. Just find someplace to put it where it won’t get messed up.

Eventually someone will take the same lesson retro-gamers learned with the Atari 2600, and music nerds are learning with cassettes, and even what some very eccentric AOL CD collectors came to believe: there’s value in this old format’s strengths, and there’s charm in its defects. Like totems left by a vanished tribe, like envoys from a ghostly kingdom, DVDs will come to carry the emotional charge of a thousand ineffable moments. These future DVD collectors can never quite acquire the thing that they’re truly collecting: their youth.

Boy, are you ever gonna make those chumps pay.

Back to top