Saluting the 15th Annual Video Store Day + “The Great Tape Swap”
Back in December of 2024, a short nostalgia piece I wrote titled “The Great Tape Swap or How I Learned Even More About Films and People Thanks to VHS” was published in the 2nd revised issue of Film Fvckers, and I figured since it deals with physical media, home video circa the 1990s, as well as expanding one’s grasp of film and film history through tape trading, a spoken word version might fit the 15th Annual Video Store Day [VSD], which is happening today, on Saturday October 18th.
When VSD debuted in 2011, there were 10+ store within the city of Toronto, and I posted several tie-in blogs over the years, noting the various changes in the home video industry – encompassing the making, distribution, purchase and rental of movies and TV series on disc.
14 years later, we’ve gone from 10+ brick & mortar sales & rental shops to roughly 3.
Retiring owners, expired leases, downsizing to new yet fleeting locations, and the reality of insanely high commercial rents, taxes, and crafty condo developers have taken their toll on independent businesses; and then there was the pandemic, which forced already struggling businesses to find ways to stay alive, using deferred rents, government subsidies, and curbside and postal options.
Among big cities around the world, Toronto is still an anomaly for having physical media shops that specifically cater to film fans and collectors. What we have in this city is unique – a massive shared archive of film history that spans the first films ever made to the latest works. I’m completely spoiled by these riches in part because I’ve always been surrounded by media – physical as well as digital.
First VCR and colour TV: both RCA models, round 1983. First CD player: a JVC, bought Boxing Day, 1987. First Sony Betamax, Pioneer laserdisc player, and home theatre system: bought round Xmas time round 1990 from Bay Bloor Radio.
Image: Centre for Computing History
First DVD player: the Creative DXR2 in a Pentium 90 PC, round 1997. First proper DVD player: a pre-hacked Malata that lasted 8 months, and was superseded by a hackable Toshiba. First Blu-ray player: a LG on sale at Radio Shack for $159, which was soon followed by my first 1080p monitor (which died shy of its 10th birthday, dammit).
I still have players (that still work) for my VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, laserdisc, and CED media, and part of my affinity for physical media comes from owning it, and playing it whenever I want – things streaming denies all of us. Remember: streaming is giving a paid subscriber permission to watch what’s available from a site either for a limited time due to rights, or a work that’s exclusively available from the them.
Now, studios retaining control over their media libraries is nothing new.
In 1977, when studios realized sprouting brick and mortar shops like George Atkinson’s Video Station were renting rather than selling VHS tapes, studios soon introduced rental pricing, which made selling $130 for a new release movie prohibitive to consumers, but ensured a maximum return when purchased by shops, especially multiple copies to meet renter demands.
It was a paradigm shift that ultimately benefited the studios, as old films enjoyed new lives (and spawned new revenue streams) via ancillary markets: physical tape sales, network airings, film packages for broadcast, and Pay TV, which the major networks managed to keep small and peripheral during the 1950s thru the 1960s via heavy lobbying, and paranoid claims of utter destruction – a classic knee-jerk reaction to new technologies and consumer trends.
The studios always wanted total control of their film and TV libraries, and owning replication and distribution channels didn’t hurt, but we’re in a weird state right now where their control has yielded proprietary streaming channels with libraries exclusive to their own roster, and whole chunks of film and TV history usurped through massive mergers.
Media multinationals own too much, have too much control, and look only for the biggest and fastest return on branded franchises and reboots – which makes their interest in licensing catalogue titles especially erratic.
Speaking from a Canadian stance, Disney’s acquisition of Twentieth Century-Fox and the recent limited release of new and older catalogue titles on UHD and Blu-ray via mastering / replicating / distribution beast Sony hasn’t been great.
The flood of film and TV that should’ve emerged from the House of Mouse is still restricted to pitiful drips and drabs – note how Tombstone (Touchstone / Disney), Master and Commander (Sony), The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Sound of Music (both from the rebranded 20th Century Studios) are sometimes stunningly expensive U.S. imports.
There is no more Cinram nor Technicolor in Toronto to handle mastering and replication; neither Sony nor Disney believe our market is significant for domestic issues of the aforementioned titles. Just as costs were starting to stabilize after the pandemic, the Stable Genius was elected for a rude second term, and his chaotic, moronic application of tariffs have likely made studios think even less of domestic premiere releases north of the 49th parallel.
We don’t really matter; we’re pocket change when it comes to physical releases.
And yet, there’s a strange silver lining to some studios being exclusively obsessed with making only new releases and top-selling catalogue titles: non-exclusive back catalogue licensing. Let me step back several decades for some context. (Please note: specific dates, financial stats, and corporate intricacies were gathered from separate Wikipedia entries, and some content from research for upcoming blogs at my other site, BHA+)
In 1958, when Paramount felt their old movies were pretty worthless, they sold their entire pre-1950 film sound feature film catalogue outright to the world’s biggest talent agency, MCA, for $10 million. Four years earlier, Universal-International had licensed – not sold – 600 of their pre-1948 sound films to Columbia Picture’s TV subsidiary Screen Gems for $20 million. In 1962, MCA formally bought Universal-International, which had merged with Decca Records in 1951. It’s easy to see who blundered, and who was smart to see the value of a library as TV’s penetration into households was something that could get bigger.
Paramount had a specific view of which generation of films still had value – 1950 onwards – and interestingly, chose to focus on controlling the New via an early version of Pay TV: Telemeter. Paramount had purchased a 50% stake in the nascent company and using a coin-operated system, fed new and novel programs to households that were hardwired with coax cables in a closed-circuit set up. From 1953-1954, the system went through its trials before it was ended – but later re-estblished in Etobicoke, Ontario, from 1961-1965.
Image: Early Television Museum
The New included Broadway performances and sports games, and was a portent of the programming that initially appeared on U.S. and Canadian Pay TV channels, but in selling off their pre-1950 sound film library, Paramount lost a chunk of content which took years to rebuild.
Another company worth noting is RKO Radio Pictures, which was purchased by Howard Hughes in 1948, and after 7 years of tumultuous ownership, sold to the General Tire and Rubber Company for $25 million. RKO had bought several TV broadcasting networks, and in 1954, perhaps to get more cash to keep the studio running, as well as feed station needs for programming, RKO licensed titles from their deep catalogue. The success of watching older RKO films on TV ultimately led to 742 films being sold to C&C Television Corporation – a subsidiary of beverage company Cantrell & Cochrane.
As C&C’s later incarnation was running into financial trouble, the RKO catalogue was eventually sold to United Artists; when UA ran into trouble, UA and the RKO catalogue were purchased by MGM; when the newly minted MGM/UA ran into financial trouble, its pre-1986 MGM/UA and RKO catalogue were sold to Ted Turner, who eventually sold those valuable libraries held by Turner Entertainment to Time Warner (Warner Bros.).
Libraries = money; not just in their physical form as negatives and prints and video transfers, but as properties to remake, re-imagine, and re-exploit, but it is fair to say that based on the studios’ current fixation on remaking, re-imagining, and re-exploiting famous series, franchises, and characters, those massive libraries of film and TV history matter less – which is why they’re packed into streaming services owned by the studios. Streaming makes use of existing digital broadcasting infrastructure, and physical media has been reduced to niche consumers – fans, collectors, and buyers who will drop hard cash on 4K UHD steelbook editions which, coming full circle here, are heavily marketed and sold within the U.S. – not Canada.
The cost of physical mastering, replication, distribution, and sales of physical editions has largely become the responsibility of indie labels in Europe (Arrow Video, 88 Films, Radiance Films, Indicator / Powerhouse Films, Le chat qui fume), the U.S. (Vinegar Syndrome, Fun City Editions, Deaf Crocodile, Kino Lorber, Criterion, Synapse Films, Severin Films, Cult Epics, to name a few), and Australia (Via Vision Entertainment / Imprint, Umbrella Entertainment), rather than the studios / multinational media corporations themselves. Films that fall under the MGM/UA brand (now owned by Amazon), Paramount, and Universal exist as physical DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD releases, because these labels understand the value in smaller runs of limited and standard editions of films known, and deep catalogue titles that either became orphan films over the past decades, or were just forgotten by studio asset management teams amid thousands of titles.
Not to take away from the hard work involved with creating a 4K digital master of a catalogue that’s not only home video ready, but perfectly fine for theatrical screenings, but the UHD steelbook syndrome feels like a safe cash grab for the studios; a limited run based on pre-orders by physical and online merchants with a slight overrun for late-comers, and a near guarantee of sellout.
If the Disney model for creating a false sense of scarcity ensured their own library of classic films could be released after deliberate periods of moratorium / unavailability / “the vault”, then the UHD steelbook craze could be seen as milking consumers for a One Edition Only release – the highest price for the smallest run of titles possible, yet sufficiently high profile to prick the interested of fans, as well as 4K connoisseurs wanting the most visually and aurally dynamic software for their hardware.
And it is a craze. Taking Tombstone as an example, the UHD version is thoroughly OOP in the U.S., and was never released domestically in Canada, and like titles given a day pass from “The Vault”, Tombstone’s freedom to roam within the U.S. market was restricted. And yet its non-steelbook edition was and continues to be available in the UK. As is often the practice with UK releases, the older the title, the lower its SRP. On Amazon in the U.S., the steelbook sells for $69.95 USD, whereas in the UK, Amazon sells it for about $25 USD.
This is called bullshit.
If the U.S. market is bigger than the UK, why offer fans & collectors a severely limited run? It seems almost punishing, but just like the unnecessarily extremely limited runs typical of Disney’s “vault” shenanigans, these releases ensure success by sellers in secondary markets, like Ebay. At one point, the Disney tin of Doctor Syn (1962) was selling for over $200 USD.
Whereas studios seem content to release new and extremely selective back catalogue titles as one-time limited editions, indie labels like Synapse, Severin, Radiance, Vinegar Syndrome, Imprint, and Indicator more often than not put out standard, non-swag editions that come out a few months after the sexxxy edition – and at a cheaper price.
Indie labels recognize a film’s availability may disappear if the whims of a studio shift; their own special editions tend to be packed with a fair to sometimes insane degree of special features that contextualize a work with commentaries, documentaries, featurettes, and whatever ephemeral promo materials still exist (and in the case of Imprint’s The Keep and Dune big box sets, a metal cross and actual sand, respectively).
It is easy to pick on Disney – they bought Fox, and have done virtually nothing with its famous library released over the years on DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD, save for allowing whole chunks to go OOP (many of which I reviewed upon their original DVD release dates), and forced fans of classic films to search for used domestic and international editions floating around Ebay – and although Warner Bros. brings out both Blu-rays of classic films as well as UHD editions (The Searchers from 1956 seems to have earned a lot of love and praise for being one of the best 4K transfers around), there’s a deliberate selectivity, and some really mean ploys that harken back to the early 2000s: each of the six Thin Man films came out slowly as standalone Blu-rays before the whole series was repackaged in a far cheaper set.
More often than not, indie labels offer a choice, and perhaps the chief frustration for collectors is which version to buy, as there are British releases, U.S. releases, and Australian releases that sometimes occur within months of each other, and with differing extras. You could argue that sometimes there’s too much choice between domestic and import editions, but with costs much higher thanks to tariffs, shipping charges, and exchange rates, and fans having lighter wallets, it really behooves collectors to carefully scrutinize extras; read any early (and retentive) reviews and transfer assessments; and weigh the pros & cons of differing editions before dropping hard cash – or conversely, weigh the need to ‘update’ an otherwise perfectly fine edition bought a few years ago that fulfills the single, most important purpose of a physical release: to be able to watch, enjoy, and own a favourite movie.
The reason for sticking with physical is pretty straightforward: You own it outright. You can watch it whenever and wherever you want. And no one can take that precious joy away from you.
Thanks for reading,
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Category: EDITOR'S BLOG, podcast
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