As I type this, I’m in the process of ripping thirty-plus Hopalong Cassidy movies from their DVD source to digital files. The DVDs were the only way I could ever have gotten to see all these pictures, and the price was more than reasonable, but the discs are poorly compiled: the movies were just shoveled onto discs all anyhow, all out of release order, with no attempt made to organize them. With the movies ripped to digital format, I can stream them from my server in their original release order, with no loss of quality (like we used to get when we copied VHS off the air), and because the Cassidy movies all have runtimes of just over an hour I can fill out an evening’s programming with other content that I have, without having to pause to switch out discs or jump from one player to another. Behold the supremacy of physical media combined with the the power of digital playlists!
If I’d been paying for a streaming service . . . First of all, I don’t know of a streaming service that offers the complete catalog of Hopalong Cassidy westerns; second I’d be at their mercy for having to view the pictures (probably riddled with commercials) within their time frame, before their rights ran out and the movies got removed; and third I’d have had to pay out a LOT more money, paying the service every single month for a mess of content that I don’t care about in order to access what I want. This way I have Hopalong’s whole ouvre at my fingertips, in my collection, whenever I want to view them — and the suited corporate bastards CAN’T take them away from me!
It should be clear by now that if you don’t have at least a little bit of the Librarian / Collector in your blood, or if you’re one of those people who’s so very very contemporary in your mindset that you can’t stomach anything that was made longer ago than last year, this series of posts is Not For You.
However if you agree with Peter Bogdanovich that “There are no old movies; just movies that you haven’t seen,” then it’s my hope that something I type here might possibly help you along your journey.
And if you think of yourself as a film enthusiast but you don’t know who Peter Bogdanovich is, what the hell is the matter with you? Were you raised in a barn? Go out and LOOK HIM UP! Cheezits, what do you think the internet is FOR?
That last point maybe needs to be clarified. Because of course if you’re a young person who didn’t live through it, you can’t be expected to know history by osmosis. But you should have enough curiosity in you to find out. Don’t just say “OH, I don’t know about PAPER MOON or THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, they happened before I was born!” Of course they did, moron. But the stuff is out there. Go out, track them down, research them and WATCH THEM. Nobody blames you for the accident of your birth, but if you have no curiosity about things — that I do blame you for. KING KONG, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, THE WIZARD OF OZ and the Universal monster movies were made a long time before I was born, but that didn’t stop me from filling my head with their goodness at the earliest opportunity!
Also, I had the advantage of growing up in a world that was not yet glutted with content. Just three networks, and maybe three or four local affiliates who filled out their broadcast day with syndicated reruns and packages of old movies. I also had a father who shared with me his love of ’30s comedians, and access to publications like THE MONSTER TIMES and Forry Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, both of which which helped feed my taste for horror movies made in a time before they became really horrible.
So add my voice to the growing chorus: Physical Media, Physical Media, Physical Media. It is the Great Savior of the film buff. Much more economical than any streaming service, plus it puts the power of choice into your hands. If you don’t like the space that it takes up, or don’t have space for it to take up, you can always rip it to digital files, as I described above. Of course this is just one of the reasons why the suited corporate bastards don’t like physical media and don’t want you to have it, and why we must keep buying it. MakeMKV is a really useful little app for converting discs to digital files without loss in quality. You can find it here: https://www.makemkv.com, and if you need instructional videos on how to use it, there are several on YouTube. Connect a disc player to your computer, slide in a disc and you’re off to the races. If you need the files in some other file format than MKV (iTunes won’t play anything other than mp4 Or m4v), then another great little app called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr) is here to make the conversions.
You already know where to find physical media. Hell fire, your local library probably has a lot of it on loan! If you’re buying, as an alternative to Amazon, you might try www.deepdiscount.com. Critic’s Choice and VCI are two other good sources, and both are publishers as well as retailers, so buying from them encourages future releases.
But somewhere along the way you are going to discover the value of having digital files in-house that you store on your own media; either discs, a hard drive or a NAS. When that happens, you will want to start exploring the regions of the utterly VAST vaults of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). I visit them frequently, and never fail to make a Happy Discovery or three — like for instance, a restored-from-35mm-print of Richard Williams’s vastly under-appreciated animated classic RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY, in the original widescreen (never issued to home video), available to watch online or download to your system, here: https://archive.org/details/raggedy-ann-andy-a-musical-adventure-1977-35mm-ultra-hd_202307/
And — if your appetite for film, TV and music is as voracious as mine, somewhere along the way you’ll run into something called torrenting. I’m not here to tell you that you should do it, I’m not here to tell you how to do it, but I will say this much: get a VPN. You will need it. I use NordVPN, but it’s in no way a paid promotion, so you’ll have to search on it.
Anyway — searching is a good habit to get into. Don’t know the answer? Not a problem and not a kick against you. You know where to find the answer, and that’s literally All That Matters. Search, search. Search. How else do you learn? How else do you make Wonderful Discoveries? And no matter when you were born, or where your interests lie, Wonderful Discoveries are what it’s all about.
—Thorn.
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