MISSING DISNEY ON BLU-RAY (1 Viewer)

[Brian Kidd]

I'm only missing one and one of these days I'll pay an arm, leg and kidney for the one I'm missing...

Yeah, I wasn't able to snag any of the final wave because the print run was so small and I didn't have the money at the time. I'm still kicking myself over not finding a way to at least get Chronological Donald, Vol. 4 and Dr. Syn. Now, there's no way I'm paying what people are asking, even for used copies.

 

[Jason_V]

I was hella lucky I worked right across the street from a Best Buy for four years. Each year new tins came out, I was there at opening (I had a very understanding boss) to pick up the tins. And I got some for review as well. I just need Donald Volume Three.

 

[Matt Hough]

I remember the excitement that each new wave of those tins brought. I do remember that Dr. Syn went very quickly. I had a friend who waited a week before buying it, and all of his usual places to shop didn't have any copies left. He had to buy it off Ebay for a premium.

 

[Gary16]

I remember the excitement that each new wave of those tins brought. I do remember that Dr. Syn went very quickly. I had a friend who waited a week before buying it, and all of his usual places to shop didn't have any copies left. He had to buy it off Ebay for a premium.

I bought most of mine at the Disney Store.

 

[Worth]

Yes, and this always raises a question for me: why did we get such wonderful LD's, from all studios, for a format believed to be forever a niche, yet we cannot get similar things for a more mainstream Blu-ray format? I have a great collection of LD's, especially fancy boxed sets, and we don't see that kind of effort very often anymore.

Laserdiscs were really expensive, for one thing. I remember paying around $75 for a bare-bones disc of Empire Strikes Back in the early-90s, and some of the boxed sets could go for well over $100. No one is willing to pay those kind of prices anymore - just look at all the complaints about Twilight Time discs being priced at $30.

It was also the only game in town for film enthusiasts for a long while. If you wanted a title in widescreen in a decent presentation, laserdisc was the only way to see it. Now. besides DVD and blu-ray, there's iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and all of the other streaming options, TCM and various movie channels to choose from. Too many options have split the market.

 

[Dick]

My holy grail Disney Blu-ray item which I'm afraid they may never do is Pocahontas, including the extended 10th Anniversary Edition cut, which is clearly preferred by the directors (just listen to their commentary) but was inexplicably dropped from the existing Blu-ray and hasn't been released since its DVD in 2005. I think that the extended cut improves the film to the point where it is the only '90s Disney musical I do not own on Blu-ray, because as much as I'd love to have it in HD, I'd rather watch the extended cut. The Blu-ray includes the If I Never Knew You sequence as a bonus feature, but does not include its reprise at all, and removes the ability from the previous DVD to watch these inside the film.

The Legacy Collection soundtrack released in 2015 correctly presented all of the music from the extended cut, including If I Never Knew You and its brief reprise at the end of the film, in the body of the soundtrack. And yet the Blu-ray division can't be bothered to do the movie correctly. I rally don't get why this one is so difficult, since they already have the film in HD, and have released it on Blu-ray already, and the main extra sequence is also in HD on the disc..so why can't this just be put into the film? Oy.

Disney's Home Entertainment division is and for decades has been totally non-responsive when it comes to requests for video releases, or even just information. I've grown to despise corporations in general, but Disney holds a special place in my ire for growing so large since Eisner that absolutely none of the executives cares one wit about pricing poor people out of its theme parks (as Disney himself would not have allowed to happen) or providing what the studio's fans would like to see made available. Magic Kingdom, indeed! Greedy Oligarchic Kingdom is what it has gradually become.

 

[Jason_V]

Disney's Home Entertainment division is and for decades has been totally non-responsive when it comes to requests for video releases, or even just information. I've grown to despise corporations in general, but Disney holds a special place in my ire for growing so large since Eisner that absolutely none of the executives cares one wit about pricing poor people out of its theme parks (as Disney himself would not have allowed to happen) or providing what the studio's fans would like to see made available. Magic Kingdom, indeed! Greedy Oligarchic Kingdom is what it has gradually become.

Wild tangent, but here goes. A one day, non Park Hopper Adult ticket is $117. Is that a lot of money? Sure. But think about this. Once you are in the park, you pay for nothing unless you want food or a souvenir. So that $117 gets you onto all the rides you want as many times as you want (depending on lines). It gets you all the street shows, the parades, the fireworks. Universal California tickets are roughly the same price. There are more attractions and shows and things to do/see now than there were back when the parks opened.

Original DL price to get in was $1 and rides cost between $0.10 and $0.30. So, you'd pay to get in and then per ride.

All this crap about what Walt would have done or did is moot. We simply don't know what he would have done.

EDIT TO ADD: Please tell me which other corporation does what it's customers want. Fox made Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, a movie no one actually wanted. Universal hasn't seen fit to release Jaws on UHD yet. Comcast is continually rated one of the worst customer service corporations around. If people stop buying Disney, Marvel and Lucasfilm product, THAT would be the clue something is wrong. But they're not. If people don't like it, they can vote with their dollars. And if you are, kudos. I don't shop at Wal Mart or Sam's or Chik-fil-A for different reasons; I vote with my dollars. Do the same.

 

[Dick]

WAll this crap about what Walt would have done or did is moot. We simply don't know what he would have done.

EDIT TO ADD: Please tell me which other corporation does what it's customers want. Fox made Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, a movie no one actually wanted. Universal hasn't seen fit to release Jaws on UHD yet. Comcast is continually rated one of the worst customer service corporations around. If people stop buying Disney, Marvel and Lucasfilm product, THAT would be the clue something is wrong. But they're not. If people don't like it, they can vote with their dollars. And if you are, kudos. I don't shop at Wal Mart or Sam's or Chik-fil-A for different reasons; I vote with my dollars. Do the same.

Well, Disney had an ethic, which was to bring an affordable park to kids and their parents. I really do not think it is a huge stretch to assume he would not have allowed his theme parks to become out of reach for lower-income patrons. For a family of three or four or five these days, including lodging and meals (to say nothing of probable airfare), taking a week-long Disney vacation would just about have to invest enough to be able to send a kid to really good college for a month.

As for your comments on corporate in general, I do not dispute they pretty much all have zero interest in what their customers want. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't. There used to be such a thing as brand loyalty, which meant that customers who had regularly purchased a particular company's products would continue to do so. This loyalty did not come from nowhere. It came from a company's willingness to work with its customers to provide a symbiotic relationship and a reliable product. Now, it's a one-way street. Corporations rule, customers take it or leave it. No feedback between. I think that sucks, but I also think it is the way our government is running things these days.

And, Jason, I do the same.

 

[KMR]

Wild tangent, but here goes. A one day, non Park Hopper Adult ticket is $117. Is that a lot of money? Sure. But think about this. Once you are in the park, you pay for nothing unless you want food or a souvenir. So that $117 gets you onto all the rides you want as many times as you want (depending on lines). It gets you all the street shows, the parades, the fireworks. Universal California tickets are roughly the same price. There are more attractions and shows and things to do/see now than there were back when the parks opened.

Original DL price to get in was $1 and rides cost between $0.10 and $0.30. So, you'd pay to get in and then per ride.

Let's look at $117. If you max out your day, you get about 14 hours. So you're spending about $8.36 per hour in the park. How many attractions can you take in during that time? With walking, eating, waiting in line, using the restroom, etc., let's be really optimistic and say you might average 45 minutes per attraction. In a 14-hour day you'd get to see about 18 attractions, which works out to $6.50 per attraction. In 1955, that would have been about $0.70 per attraction. I don't think many people at all could imagine having to pay $12.60 to enter the park in 1955.

And I think I was being really generous with the idea of seeing 18 attractions in a day. I'm guessing (emphasis on guessing) that 12 might be closer to real life. So we'd be looking at spending a whopping $9.75 per attraction.

 

[Jason_V]

^ Nope, bad numbers. If you do it right with rope drop, Magic Hours and Fast Pass, you can do everything in one day. Trust me. Done it at DL, DCA, WDW, Epocot, AK and HS. Including fireworks and shows. I'll be doing it again in May.

 

[MatthewA]

The numbers need to take into account two factors:

—1970s stagflation (you can even see what changed in the original Love Bug, which is now 50 years old, where a gallon of gas cost 40 cents)
—They got rid of ticket books in 1982.

Even so, it is true that the home video department doesn't seem to be as responsive as they used to be. IIRC, they folded it into the consumer products division when it used to be a separate division unto itself.

EDIT: And things are changing again somewhat.

 

[Dave Lawrence]

Well, in light of the events of this week, any chance of a Blu-ray release of The Devil and Max Devlin went from "highly unlikely" to "never going to happen".

Actually, audiences might have an easier time accepting Cosby as Satan's top henchman now than when the film came out in the 80s. But this is Disney, so I'm sure this one will be staying in the vault forever, right beside Song of the South. (And even if Cosby hadn't destroyed his image, current Disney may not even realize they own this film.)

 

[MatthewA]

They know about the movie*, which predates The Cosby Show by three years; they just want the path of least resistance. But he was not miscast. I do feel genuinely bad for Julie Budd; her two songs were probably the best thing about the film. They partly inspired me to learn how to sing, and it's bitterly ironic one of them has these lyrics**:

"When someone promises you sunshine,
You'd better know there'll soon be rain.
If someone says he'll bring you roses and rainbows***,
You'd better take a look again.

You'd better find out who you are, girl
Before you run to someone else.
Instead of waiting for those roses and rainbows,
You'd better give them to yourself."

But since you pulled the Song of the South card, it actually beat Max Devlin's box office take in its last two reissues. If they changed their mind, I think the former would actually sell more copies. Even so, they've got unrelated scandals of their own to clean up after like Lotso Huggin' Bear John Lasseter. They're not in a position to point fingers at themselves retroactively or at others today.

Cosby also returned to Disney for Francis Ford Coppola's 1996 movie Jack with Robin Williams. That was from Hollywood Pictures so it will probably get fobbed off on a licensee. If they even want it now. That I never even bothered to see because I couldn't accept the idea that someone who aged 10 times faster than normal (a real-life condition called progeria) would look like Robin Williams.

*Thanks to the presence of Sonny Shroyer, it's also linked to The Dukes of Hazzard, which is also taboo now. I guess playing a football coach in Forrest Gump will now be his least controversial claim to fame.
**Carole Bayer Sager wrote the same year she shared an Oscar for writing "Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do)". Marvin Hamlisch set them to music the same year he wrote "Hearts, Not Diamonds" for Lauren Bacall to sing in The Fan.
***The film's Canadian-born director Steven Hilliard Stern (no relation to Howard) also went on to direct Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story.

 

[Dick]

To answer the OP....about 80% of the studio's entire live-action catalog and a few animated titles.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'm only missing one and one of these days I'll pay an arm, leg and kidney for the one I'm missing...

Same here! I need Zorro Vol 2 - have everything else. The Treasures line is my "if the building is burning down and you only have a chance to save one material thing" choice.

 

[Brian Kidd]

All I want are the two remaining "package features," Make Mine Music and Melody Time. Yes, they're uneven. However, there are parts of them that are wonderful. Casey at the Bat, Peter and the Wolf, Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet, Johnny Appleseed, and Pecos Bill come to mind. I have the unedited PAL DVD's that were released a few years back, but they sure would be pretty in HD. At least they should be. Some of their HD animation looks fabulous and some of it has been DNR'ed so much that parts of the drawings have been erased (Sword in the Stone, the animated shorts currently on Netflix).

On a side note, thanks to this thread I finally got around to watching The Reluctant Dragon on Blu-ray. Boy howdy, does it look stunning. The Technicolor live-action sequences are really beautifully shot and it's wonderful to see the actual Disney Studio from that time period.