Warner Archive Discussion Thread (FEEDBACK) - Page 55

Re: Warner Archive Discussion Thread

By the way. My estimated delivery date is the 13th. But since they have no record of my purchase that's not going to happen.

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I did a double feature today, "The Big House" (1930) from the Warner Archive DVD and "The Divorcee" (1930) from the Forbidden Hollywood Set 2. If anyone wants to see what these Archive discs lack, they should do something like this. No matter what home video set-up you have, the differences are glaring. The new transfer on "The Divorcee" was a revelation; the detail seen, the clarity. And the subtitles on the disc were a godsend in trying to understand an often muddled soundtrack. I could only wish this had been done for "The Big House." In my estimation the better film, it was sad to see it in such a shoddy state; the print soft, muddy; the screen flickering now and again; the dialogue hard to follow; I had to play scenes back numerous times just to figure out what they were saying to each other. It's even more sad to think that apparently there's no hope for a better version of this important, genre setting film anytime in the near future.

Re: Warner Archive Discussion Thread

Yes, and with people scooping these up for $15 to $20 each, Warner must be thinking "Why didn't we do this before...we could have saved alot of money, and without any effort either". I myself scooped up a few of these a month ago...but now I am fearing what this program may truly be and I will not buy another archive until I start seeing Warner release some regular catalog DVDs again (that are not re-packagings).

With Amazon supposedly having these for sale after 6 months, and the archives selling better than they thought, what are the motivations for Warner to release anymore of their catalog on regular DVD? I am serious in asking this because if I was Warner, I wouldn't put another nickel into regular catalog DVD releases.

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There have been some interesting comments made regarding Warner's plans with catalog titles and some assumptions made that I'm not ready to make right now. All the years of hard work from George and his folks has disappeared so easily over the last couple of months in certain quarters around here. In short, WHV has gone from the "penthouse" to the "outhouse".




Crawdaddy

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The easiest way to the "penthouse" are new retail-announcements.

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I guess.....

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a double-disc release of a refurbished African Queen, complete with 1969 John Huston interview and Hepburn's 'book on tape' recollections of the project, plus a commentary from Theo Bikel, would put them above the penthouse, but its a tall order i admit.

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It would send them to prison.....They don't own THE AFRICAN QUEEN. Paramount does!

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But I'd post bail if they did it!~

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I came to that conclusion about 30 to 40 pages ago.

.....and.......the calendar keeps on turning forward........with no (new to DVD) Warner catalog announcements.............

Maybe they'll throw us a bone and release a catalog title or two in September or October. Something they already started work on before they saw the $$$$$$$$ from the Archive cash cow.

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I just recently placed my first (and possibly last) order with WB the other day, and am having problems with mine too.

Shortly after placing my order I found that I needed to change it, but since I couldn't find any record of my order on their site (just the confirmation email WB sent to me) I tried to cancel it with a note to customer service. After providing them with every detail of the order except my credit card number, here is my latest response from WB customer service:

Unfortunately, WB's inability to find a record of my order didn't prevent them from sending a charge to my credit card company:
Now I've got to make a phone call (after two written attempts) to try and get this order cancelled. So, until WB get their act together regarding their online store, I won't be trying this again.

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We might see a Horror set in time for Halloween. But that is all I can think of at the moment.

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I feel disappointed that they are partly damaging the reputation that they spent years building up by using public domain quality disc authoring.

Plus we were told in March that international sales would be available "shortly", but nearly two months have passed and it still hasn't happened.

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Probably because it appears a business decision was made to change the course of the business away from those previous efforts and achievements (which I completely agree were amazing) toward a higher-priced product with lower quality.

Plus I would not mind "fewer announcements", I fully expected that in this economy. It is no announcements that bothers me.

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Well said. I own more than 50 of Warner's sets and they have my highest respect for what they have done but not for what they are doing right now. Especially the fact that there are no announcements bothers me really.

By the way:

Roughly Speaking has been added to the Archive.

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BINGO!

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OK. I just got off the phone with WB's customer service department, and was told that, even though I received an email on May 10 from service@wbshop.com with the subject line "Order Confirmation for WB", and there is a "pending" charge on my credit card for this order, that it somehow was never actually placed with WB, as they have no record of it at all.

I won't be using this service again.

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Until they address your first point (and the price issue), frankly I couldn't give a hoot in hell about the second.

What is slightly gob-smacking about this whole Archive initative is - coming from a company that were so far in front of the rest when it came to innovative and high quality presentation of its value for money catalogue titles - that it is so half-arsed in well, practically everything. From its flaky website and ordering system, to its amateur hour authoring and its price-gouging (no other phrase for it I'm afraid) for what appear to be 'take it or leave it' shoddy goods.

The Archive is everything Warner hasn't been. Until now.

And, with no new 'normal' catalogue releases on the horizon from WHV, it's the only game in town.

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Is anyone concerned that the Warner Brothers Archive website has been down for two days thus far? (May 12 and 13)

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I called with the same problem. My CS rep said he was forwarding the problem to IT, and they would get back to me. Hopefully this gets resolved soon, although I'm not optimistic.

The lesson is: if you placed an order late on May 7, check the website to make sure the order is listed in your account. It sounds like more than a few orders were lost. What a pain!

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As far as price goes, perhaps one of the reasons why the discs were priced at $19.99 was that at the end of the day, Warners may have felt that a very small amount of people would actually be buying them. As such, the high price is a way for them to maximize the amount they can earn from this very limited market. Also, it might explain the lack of quality controls; since the Archive discs are priced as luxury items, not collectables, meaning that a rather limited amount of people would be enjoying them, then maintaining the strict quality standards they have in place for general market items would not be as necessary.

Seen this way, if the price for these Archive discs does go down, this might be a bad sign. Lowing the price brings the items in reach; it makes them purchasable for more people; it gets them out there. It's the first step that leads to the next one of putting them on Amazon, and eventually, the last step, of having them in stores, like Costco. In which case, these Archive discs will be the discs of record for these films; the one everyone who wants these films has; there would then be no need to really improve upon them with a restored transfer, bonus features, etc.

Maybe then people should hope that the Archive prices remain high, so as to keep these discs as luxury items, outside the grasp of most of the general buying public, with a limited amount of them in existence. Then there might be some hope of a general, restored version coming out some day in a box set or something. The more people buy the Archive discs, the more the Archive way of doing it becomes mainsteam, becomes the standard.

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Contact your credit card company ASAP and demand a charge back.

Your card gets charged, but they have no record of the order. Where I live that counts as credit card fraud.

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His card hasn't been charged; 'pending' is a notification that a charge may (or may not as appears here) be in the offing.

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Not most of the people replying to this thread.






Crawdaddy

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Do you guys have that WB archive phone # handy to post here? I haven't located it in the FAQ's or in the "Contact Us" section of the site.

I'm another one that ordered late on the 7th and my CC shows the "pending" satus of the order so I'd like to call them and get a status update.

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I ordered on the 7th and had a pending charge on my bank account.I was on the phone with customer service on both Monday and Tuesday with no results. They seemed clueless on what to do.I called my bank today and was told that the pending charge was never picked up so it was no longer valid. I called back WB and they told me that there was still no record of the purchase. So they re ordered for me and gave me the discount i had in my original order. The number for customer service is 866-373-4389.

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Warner's isn't forcing anybody to buy these disks. When have we seen so many classics offered for sale? The price might be high but that is the law of supply and demand, these products imho are specialty items. The other studios have stopped releasing classics or if they are released they are far and few. I remember when Warner used to use the cardboard cases when many movies were originally released on dvd. All of the movies had no extras and the prices were VERY high. Also if other studios do read this thread and are considering the same model that Warner's is now using we probably will NEVER see another classic.

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Seems to depend on the studio as Sony is currently taking up some of the slack. We can all point to some time in the home video past when prices were high and features were low. For better or worse though, that is no longer the case and it's a real bear to try to put the genie back in the bottle.

I think a lot of folks will become better disposed towards the Archives once they clean up their quality issues. I mean, my kid can do better encodes by simply using the default settings in Nero Vision. There's really no excuse for that. It's even more galling when you consider that it only has to be done once, and then the files can be burnt over and over again.

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Frank,

Thanks for the phone #. I'll try calling them to see if my story's the same as yours.

It sounds like WB is having a considerable amount of problems with the online archive site regarding their ordering system.

Is everyone else here having these kind of problems?