MUMMY LEGACY COLLECTION (1 Viewer)

i tried playing THE MUMMY'S TOMB, that used to play correctly, and it now freezes 20 minutes into the program. Has anyone try to contact Universal to get replacements for discs that once played correctly. These sets have a terrible reputation. Just wondering if they back their product more than 30 days, The set was purchased a number of years ago from AMAZON...and i am sure they would not exchange. If you were successful...do you have a contact point? Thanks for your help.

Is this using the same DVD player? I ask because some players coped better with these problems than others, so it;s possible your set always had this issue but your current player can't cope with it whereas the older one could Of course, if it's the same player you always used then it speaks of a deeper problem The random nature of these problems - some sets had them, others didn't, some players would play problem discs and some wouldn't - is why there was so much confusion over these DVD-18's and why there were denials it even existed Example: I have the Hammer Horror two disc set. My old Pioneer player won;t play the second film on either side of the discs (they just break up into a mush of noise on the screen and the player grinds away trying to re-read constantly before crashing). A scan with a checker in my PC drive revealsd a cluster of bad sectors right at the start of those films on all of the discs. I guess it;s right at the layerchange point. My second oldest player, a Panasonic, plays them all absolutely flawlessly. My brand new Toshiba BluRay player copes better than the Pioneer but still shows faults. If I only owned the Panasonic and never scanned the discs I would have presumed they were fault-free - then when I bought the BluRay I would have thought the problem had developed since purchase. I never bought the Legacy sets for this reason, except the Invisible Man and Creature ones which has films on it never released on their own. For the Hammer films, I am gradually replacing the films on that with editions on single discs - most of the German releases. It's a shame because the Legacy collections were very nice - attractive and compact packaging. But for the Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy movies I kept to the single discs. I had to double-dip and buy the UK edition to get House of Dracula, which was bundled with Dracula.

Huummmmmmmm almost makes it sound like it is a player problem, rather than a disc problem. i think, but i am not sure, that it is a different player. But of the hundreds of dics that i have, this is the first not to play on this player...in fact on two different players... where it used to play all the way through... The newer players, then are not of the same quaility as the older ones?.....are they made to different standards? Should i approach the manufactures and ask them why their machines will not play the discs correctly?....something is wrong some where.

Bob: I am sorry to hear of the issue you are having. I think one of the greatest fears for DVD collectors is that discs in their collection that had previously played just fine begin to have playback issues years after being purchased (and therefore well beyond the return window). I purchased all of the legacy sets and for some of them (i.e. Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.) I had to request 1 or 2 replacement copies from the retailer before all of the films would play through without problems. One of the main reasons I have not started collecting the Alfred Hitchcock Presents season sets, even though I would love to add them to my collection, are the playback problems with the Season One set that was issued on DVD-18s. Nebiroth brings up a good point about it possibly being the player. Another possibility is that the spindle keeps the disc so securely locked that in trying to pry it free so you can play it may have caused the disc to delaminate (I swear it's like wrestling the jaws of Hell to get them out of their packaging). Just a thought. I hope you get the issue resolved to your satisfaction soon. Darby

Thanks for you insights. But it will not play in three other players. So i think that the fault would lie with the disc itself.

I never suggested otherwise. Only that if you've changed players since buying the discs, it's possible that the discs were always faulty but your older player would cope with them anyway, but your newer player won't. The devilish thing with these awful DVD-18 discs (that's double sided and dual-layer on each side) was that not all of them were bad to start with, and even if you had a bad one, sometimes your player would cope with it and you wouldn;t be aware of the fault until you bought a new player which couldn't cope. The random nature of the faults - some discs had them, some didn't, they were often in different places (although the faults tended to cluster at the layerchange points, that wasn;t always the case) and some players would play faulty discs anyway - this is what lead to denials of the faults even existing, then claims it was player related, etc Newness of player is irrelevent; I have three. A very old Pioneer that wouldn't play the Hammer Horror Collection discs at all; a seven year old Panasonic that players them flawlessly and a brand new Toshiba BluRay that copes better than the Pioneer but still has problems. The only way to be sure is to put these discs through a checker on a computer. The checker will read every single sector on the disc and checksum it. That's what I did and the checker shows the Hammer discs all have bad sectors, on both sides, at the layerchange point. If I only ever owned my Panasonic player and no checker, I would have assumed they were flawless, when they obviously aren't. These discs were all fabricated in a factory in Mexico. There is nothing inherently bad about DVD-18 discs, however, they are the most demanding to make and have the highest rates of failure because they are double sided and dual-layer on each side. The manufacturing tolerances are therefore much higher and "the more there is, the more there is to go wrong". Not many factories are set up to make them as there's not much demand anyway - the vast bulk of DVD's are films and a single-sided disc is usually more than adequate for that.

Thanks for the information....tis a bit frustrating....i went to the Blu forum...and posted a thought there....i wish Universal would release all the duel layer box sets on a one sided Blu disc. i would purchase them all again....just knowing that they should play into the future.....for a while at least.

Personally, I've taken to generating ISO images of these Legacy Collection discs, as well as any other DV-18s in my collection. I just keep those ISOs tucked away on a hard drive with a backup copy as well. Then I generate a new disc if I need one. Turns out that both sides of my Invisible Man disc started to puke around the layer change so the ISOs bailed me out.

Indeed, although of course if your discs had the fault at purchase it will probably not be possible to take a backup of it, as it will have unreadable bad sectors.

Absolutely. I created these years ago when the complaints first started rolling in and promptly forgot about them. Recently, I had a desire to revisit Invisible Man and discovered my once working disc had become a glorified coaster. Luckily, the backups were intact and I was good to go. Needless to say, I spent the next day scrambling and checking the rest of my discs for faults.

Wonderful. I just discovered my Invisible Man discs are screwed. It's crazy. I checked them last night and they were OK! Even crazier thing: my old Panasonic DVD player plays them flawlessly! My new BluRay player just makes grinding sounds and then spits them out.

Happy to report my Mummy Legacy Collection is still working. I had a Mummy evening last night, I was surprised how good the transfers were (it must be 3-4 years since I last viewed them), as for the films. I didn't bother with The Mummy as I find it a bit boring. The Mummy's Hand is a lot of fun, & Tom Tyler is the best mummy. The first of the three cheapies, The Mummy's Tomb is awful, a real borefest, but the last two, The Mummy's Ghost & The Mummy's Curse I think are quite good, there's a real strangeness about them, & there're not scared to go with a downbeat ending. I was wondering just how many shots of the mummy had Lon Chaney Jr. under the make up, I'm thinking not many. Looking at the face, a lot of the time it looked like Spencer Tracy...naa.

Funny, I just got done watching them all except the Mummy yesterday too! Watching them on the big screen in my HT really shows how good the prints were. Also, I was thinking the same thing about Chaney...that didn't look like him at all. Could they have used a stunt actor but gave Chaney the screen credit? Anyway, a fun time rewatching some Universals one hour classics!

Has anyone tried contacting Universal. It has to be the discs. They were terrible from the beginning. I know I went through 4 sets of exchanges before resigning myself that I wouldn't be able to own a playable copy of house of Dracula. These were the limited edition sets which means I had to return the busts, that's 4 sets of butst that probably ended up in a dumpster. What I ended up doing is rip the discs to xvid. the quality is mostly there, but more importantly they actually play all the way through on the rips. I did the same thing with the Abbott and Costello flippers from Universal.

This is a very old story. Any of those older DVD-18 discs are at risk of acting up on you. Any time. In whatever machine. That's why Universal has stopped using them, and they were well aware of all the complaints several years ago and they don't make new releases with that format any longer. My advice if you really want these movies is to seek out the older double feature versions.

Although the Legacy sets did contain films that have not been released anywhere else. The Invisible Man sequel films, for example, or House of Dracula.

Unfortunately true. Which is why I am really hoping they re-release the INVISIBLE sequels and others. For HOUSE OF DRACULA, I opted for the R2 disc.