Warner Archive Discussion Thread (The Announcements/The Films) - Page 32

And John Ford enters the archive collection with his hard to find 1932 film, Flesh, a wrestling picture with Wallace Beery.

Yeah. Discounts have disappeared!!! And so have this week's new releases which were just there an hour ago.

I swear that if someone was trying to screw things up at WBshop, they couldn't do a better job than this bunch the last year and a half!!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by gunthertoody 

Yeah. Discounts have disappeared!!! And so have this week's new releases which were just there an hour ago.

 

I swear that if someone was trying to screw things up at WBshop, they couldn't do a better job than this bunch the last year and a half!!!

Weird, I just ordered three titles from the new list and received my confirmation.
 

I have also found that I no longer get the Insider Rewards discount on any Warner Archives title.

I have about thirty Archives titles on my wish list - guess they will stay there awhile.  Maybe there will be a Labor Day sale.  Cross my fingers.

Warner Archive now has a 30%-off, w/free shipping, sale for its 200+ comedy titles.  Effective for August 27 - September 6.

I wonder what movies will be offered next month by Warner.

As if we have not figured it out, but Lou Lumenick at the New York Post indicates that the Warner Archive is releasing films & TV shows weekly now, instead of twice a month.  Tomorrow we get Joe E. Brown in Eleven Men and A Girl along with a 1973 TV movie Deliver Us From Evil.  Cartoon Series Pirates of Dark Water and the 2ND season of Falcon Crest are also slated.

Does the Archive have plans to do a set of the 'Thelma Todd' shorts aired yesterday on TCM?

Also want to report the latest good customer service by WBShop.com, replacement of Cass Timberlane, pixels and lockups, apparently from a faulty burn. Fingers crossed that forthcoming replacement will be OK.

I second Warners' commitment to customer satisfaction. My disc of Above Suspicion was faulty: lock-ups, macroblocking, etc. I sent them an e-mail (months after purchase incidentally) and a replacement was dispatched within a few days without my having to return the defective disc. The replacement played perfectly.

Unfortunately, WB doesn't own the rights to those. They are, like the the Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chase and the best of the Our Gang shorts, owned by Hallmark. And that company doesn't seem to want to do much of anything with them. Grrr!
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by RUrahrah 

Does the Archive have plans to do a set of the 'Thelma Todd' shorts aired yesterday on TCM?

 

Also want to report the latest good customer service by WBShop.com, replacement of Cass Timberlane, pixels and lockups, apparently from a faulty burn. Fingers crossed that forthcoming replacement will be OK.

Sheesh, $50 for FALCON CREST Season 2? $30 for PIRATES OF DARK WATER?

No Insider discounts = no more sales for me

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike_Richardson 

Sheesh, $50 for FALCON CREST Season 2? $30 for PIRATES OF DARK WATER?

 

No Insider discounts = no more sales for me

As a TV/DVD collector first, I also will have to wait for a price reduction on F.C. .  That's too much for me right now for a 1-season set.
 

Releasing every week now??? THIS IS GREAT NEWS!!! Maybe, just maybe, they can release some of the Best Picture Nominees that are missing from DVD a lot quicker... I hope...

Quote:

Originally Posted by ajabrams 

Unfortunately, WB doesn't own the rights to those. They are, like the the Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chase and the best of the Our Gang shorts, owned by Hallmark. And that company doesn't seem to want to do much of anything with them. Grrr!
 

 

Well, at least a collection of Thelma Todd shorts with Patsy Kelly and Zasu Pitts is coming out in Germany in October...

http://www.edition-filmmuseum.com/product_info.php/info/p112_Female-Comedy-Teams.html
 

I wish we could get something like that in the US. Maybe Warner or TCM could do a licensing deal with Hallmark like they do with Universal? The Garvin/Byron shorts are a special treat. That sounds like a great set, though I think they could have fit more films into a two disc set.

Over in the Laurel and Hardy thread there is a lot more about the Hal Roach properties (Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals, etc).  Today they are owned by what is known as RHI (Robert Halmi Incorporated).  They released a Little Rascals box set through Genius, but little has been heard since.

Their wikipedia page has an item that in June of 2010 they were contemplating bankruptcy, but that is Wikipedia.  I don't know if it is true.

I would love to see WB acquire those titles as well.  But who knows what will happen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by greylocke5 

I have also found that I no longer get the Insider Rewards discount on any Warner Archives title.

 

I have about thirty Archives titles on my wish list - guess they will stay there awhile.  Maybe there will be a Labor Day sale.  Cross my fingers.

Well, my Insiders Rewards discount is back - but is now only 10%, at least on the Archive Titles.  I guess I'll be waiting for "mega-sales" from now on.

I think the ARCHIVES is a racket for WB to jack up the price.

Look at "FALCON CREST" S1 for example, got it for $25.00 and now it jumps to double for S2, plus the cover art SUCKS !!!

It was released in Spain on the pressed disc.  WB gives us the DVR which, scratches easily and doesn't last as long !!!

The pressed disc market for catalog titles on DVD in the US is d-e-a-d. It's not a racket, it's a means to stay profitable. It's either MOD DVD-Rs, or nothing (see: Fox).

From Facebook in response to my query:

"We're just completing a new 16x9 master of SUNDAY IN NEW YORK for WAC release...Look for a release before the Holiday season!"

Racket or not, the pricepoint for a TV series season is set over my budget.  I'd love to get Falcon Crest S2 but not at that price.

I think that's fair. A more long term budget conscious choice may be to pick up a $50 DVD All-Region player and import the release from another territory.

If the Archives are a "racket", I wish Fox and Paramount would get into the "racketeering" business. The price of a title is basically irrelevant. It comes down to how much you really want a title. There are some movies I wouldn't give you 50 cents for. Some titles I want so badly I'd pay $100 for. One of the badly wanted titles showed up in the Archives and thank heavens I only had to pay $14.00 instead of $100!!!

The pricing of the Archive products are too high for what is being offered (DVD-Rs with no subtitles or other features).   There simply isn't a "value added proposition" for most of these titles given that they're essentially the same thing as a TCM broadcast without the station id bug  In some cases, it's a lesser value since many TCM broadcasts at least provide captions.

Hasn't anybody noticed that slowly but surely Warner's catalog DVD releases have been going out of print? I would imagine eventually they will find their way back via the Archive program. The same way that book publishers can't afford to do large print runs anymore and opt for print-on-demand services, the movie studios are going to settle into burn-on-demand. Hopefully they will find a way to reduce the high cost of burn-on-demand vs. pressed discs and be able to pass those savings onto the end customer.

The high price of the MOD discs has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of making them. Indeed, it is arguable that they impose less costs on the studio than does a run of standard pressed discs - an argument that has been forwarded by the creators of the MOD system as being one of the factors that lead to it's creation.

They're expensive because they can be - and a lot of that is because of the monopolisation of supply, since the discs are not available elsewhere although admittedly they have found their way through to two online stores.

If an outfit like Alpha can churn out incredibly cheap pressed discs - albeit of low quality - then so can anyone else.

They're still expensive because people are still buying them at that pricepoint.  If sales were not going well then they would adjust their pricepoint down to enhance sales.  In the past year or so, I haven't bought any title from them that wasn't on sale at either 25 or 30%.  My unwatched list of dvds/brds is so long, I can afford to be patient and just wait for Warner's prices to drop until they meet the value I place on these discs.  Those that live here in the United States have the opportunity to utilize the same purchase strategy.  Unfortunately, HTF members living in Canada and interntionally have only a couple of choices, either buy them by any means possible since they can't get them directly from Warner or not at all with these high pricepoints and lack of availability.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve...O 

The pricing of the Archive products are too high for what is being offered (DVD-Rs with no subtitles or other features).   There simply isn't a "value added proposition" for most of these titles given that they're essentially the same thing as a TCM broadcast without the station id bug  In some cases, it's a lesser value since many TCM broadcasts at least provide captions.

 

 

 

Therefore, you made the choice not to buy them which is fine.

My problem with Warner about their pricing is that they should offer some additional discounts for those that buy multiple titles at the same time.  I'm not talking about value packs, but any mix of these dvds like 5/55. 

I agree that the program has been successful for WHV.  Clearly there is a segment of the buying population that will buy these at almost any cost and thus they've been able to keep the pricing high and eliminate "value packs".  This may not be a large segment, but it doesn't need to be due to the low expenses borne by WHV.

I would imagine that they also feel they can sell more units with their current pricing structure and occasional sales rather than implementing an across the board price cut to,say, $10 per disc with no sales.  I chose $10 because that would seem to be a price point that could encourage others to get their feet wet in the program as well as encouraging impulse buys or blind buys of individual titles.  It frankly is all I think these are worth under the current DVD-R w/ no extras and no new transfer format.  If WHV is indeed changing over to pressed discs (and perhaps making other improvements) as reported in the "Star is Born" thread then we can revisit pricing issues.

It would be interesting to see the data behind  the decline in sales of retail catalog titles.  For years WHV trumpeted their amazing sales of their classic product.  Did these really fall off a cliff when the economy tanked or did they just become a victim of corporate downsizing because while the margins may have been good, the overall dollars relative to WHV as a whole could not justify their continued existence?  A recent example is the Looney Tunes shorts.  Warner's own promotion dept says they shipped nearly a billion units of Looney Tunes....now we're hearing future releases are Archive bound.  I have a hard time believing collectors just stopped buying the Golden Collections en masse.  Maybe they did, but the "billion units" seem to say otherwise.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert Crawford 

 

 

My problem with Warner about their pricing is that they should offer some additional discounts for those that buy multiple titles at the same time.  I'm not talking about value packs, but any mix of these dvds like 5/55. 

Totally agree. Right now, the discs are priced as if one person will only buy one movie at one time. The prices tell you that anything less than $20 is not worth their time to get the Archive machinery up and running to meet this one, small order. However, they should consider people willing to buy many discs at one time. To encourage such people, they should introduce a new pricing scale that allows discounts, either 5 for $50 or $55, 10 for $100, 15 for $150, etc; a bulk discount that averages the price of each disc to around $10 each. Make the price range of the program accessible to the average classic movie fan. Wasn't that what this program was all about, getting movies to the classic movie fans that weren't going to be released any other way? If so, at least make it somewhat affordable for them to add the films to their collections.