Ockeghem's All Things DARK SHADOWS (w/Spoilers) (2 Viewers)

[Ockeghem]

I too purchased the blu ray because I wanted the deleted scenes. It's one of only three blu ray titles that I own.

 

[Radioman970]

3 blu rays...! that's some willpower. I can't do it. I fight not to rebuy every movie I have on DVD. I'm almost happy when they announce there's something wrong with the blu ray and not to buy it. lol

 

[Ockeghem]

3 blu rays...! that's some willpower. I can't do it. I fight not to rebuy every movie I have on DVD. I'm almost happy when they announce there's something wrong with the blu ray and not to buy it. lol

Radioman,Yeah, I've only purchased the blu ray discs I own because of the special features. I don't have any other reason to purchase them. The standard DVDs are fine for my own personal viewing.

 

[Radioman970]

The current Witchhunter goings on are yet another peak. Really great moments! I watched 3 in a row this morning.

I had a thought about it. I've been looking at this Witchhunter like I do Price's character from that movie. And even though they share many of the negatives of this concept, it's quite a bit different in the DS world. For one thing, witches DO exists there while in Price's movie we know they don't and I firmly believe that Price's character (as well as his companions) also didn't believe a bit of it. So my thoughts on the Rev. Trask character altered after thinking about that. He's still a despicable person but for different reasons...perhaps... but you never can tell with DS! Btw, that actor is fantasic. I mean, he's a good detective, but as the Witchhunter he's scary great. I still say he looks like a vamp and even more so with the dark makeup and Eddie Munster widow's peak he's sporting. I have a feeling things are just starting to heat up.

 

[Radioman970]

Radioman,Yeah, I've only purchased the blu ray discs I own because of the special features. I don't have any other reason to purchase them. The standard DVDs are fine for my own personal viewing.

I'm that way on a ton I have. Others, like Contact, I had specific reason. For it, I just wanted that opening scene upgraded to the best possible. I love that scene. I wasn't disappointed. It's a case by case basis for so many. Like Trek, I'd upgrade those to blu in a minute, but I need Director's cuts so I'll most likely stick with the old releases for a quite a while, from what I've heard. I've taken to waiting on the blu ray to come out and get discounted on a lot of stuff.

 

[Mark Collins]

Just wanted to state to fans that TCM will be airing Night of Dark Shadows for the very first time early Friday y morning which I guess is when I should say it will be airing and for the first time I believe. To bad it is not the long version that Darren took so much time to find. The lost footage is what I mean.Sorry I made a mistake about Night it airs 1AM CST Friday Morning.

 

[Harry-N]

While watching through the 770's, this image at the start of #772 is quite striking. I can't recall the series ever doing something like this in the opening narrations. The somewhat overblown image of Barnabas superimposed on the Old House was just amazing. Very classy!

Harry

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

I'm envious of everyone who has the complete series set. It came out after I started buying the DVD Collections, which I bought and watched out of order. I have collections 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26. Of those, 1, 2, 9, 10 and 13 are the slim cases, which I prefer. I stopped buying them when I realized it would be cheaper buying the complete series on sale than continuing to buy the remaining individual collections but then it feels like I wasted money on the ones I have.

My Mom got me into this show back in the 90s when Sci-Fi was airing them in the mornings. I would tape the daily episodes and then we would watch them at lunch. I missed all of the pre-Barnabas episodes when Sci-Fi dropped them. I loved Quentin's ghost/ 1897 story line the most. While it was long, it didn't feel like it, unlike the Adam story which just seemed to drag.

 

[Mark Collins]

Welcome Ron!!! DS is my number one show. I have bought the show twice over. First VHS tapes and then the DVDs. I think you are wise to wait for a good price but I would buy only from Amazon. There are knock off copies lurking about. In fact if memory serves it was reported on by the DS news link. I would never buy from Ebay because of these knock off copies if I were you.I and several others were taken in on a complete set of Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVDS. We got our money back and I had to repurchase the series through Amazon.Love to see new fans here. I and Scott watched the show when we were kids. I will let him tell you his story. I began to see the show from the first run in 1976 which covered I think 26 weeks of Barnabas. NJN network covered the middle 3 years. I collected VHS tapes from NJN back in 86-87 I believe. It was not until Sci-Fi that the whole show aired from start to finish. I was so envious of the people who could see it. Then MPI took a risk and began around Halloween in 1989 and released 8 or 9 edited tapes. I believe we have one fan here who really wanted the edited years on DVD or the first one I believe. I used to AUDIO tape the show like Harry when it first ran. Those reel to reel tapes sound just as good when first recorded. I played them to death over the years. I even would take them to school because a friend was huge fan. I believe Harry did some of this.We then received the entire show from MPI with the first year airing at the last of those first VHS releases. I was so in love with the Laura storyline as a kid. I actually asked MPI to send me my tapes early from the Laura storyline. The reason was I could not wait until I returned from my annual Christmas Vacation in Carlsbad CA to watch them. MPI was so great to me in those days. They sent the tapes direct to my house and early.I watch the Laura storyline every year and the Matt Morgan storyline is what kicks it off. I will begin watching MM next week and introduce Laura over Thanksgiving break. Laura always gives me a warm Winter LOL.Here is the DS news Link http://darkshadowsnews.blogspot.com/

 

[Ockeghem]

I'm envious of everyone who has the complete series set. It came out after I started buying the DVD Collections, which I bought and watched out of order. I have collections 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26. Of those, 1, 2, 9, 10 and 13 are the slim cases, which I prefer. I stopped buying them when I realized it would be cheaper buying the complete series on sale than continuing to buy the remaining individual collections but then it feels like I wasted money on the ones I have.

My Mom got me into this show back in the 90s when Sci-Fi was airing them in the mornings. I would tape the daily episodes and then we would watch them at lunch. I missed all of the pre-Barnabas episodes when Sci-Fi dropped them. I loved Quentin's ghost/ 1897 story line the most. While it was long, it didn't feel like it, unlike the Adam story which just seemed to drag.

Oliver,It's great to see another fan of Dark Shadows. I rented about half of the series on VHS tape (and dubbed it for my own library) when it first came out. Then I bought the entire series on pre-recorded VHS tape. When the DVDs came out, I was a member of the Dark Shadows Fan Club, but I found that I wanted the DVDs sooner than once every other month. I eventually purchased the entire set (Blue and Grey vols. 1-6 and Red and Black vols. 1-26). I also own several Special Edition DVDs, various Collector's Edition DVDs, the Complete Dark Shadows Soundtrack Collection, and the new film. Mark has inspired me to purchase many of the extras over the years.

 

[tracyedgar]

I had purchase all 32 volumes on DVD, but had to go in for the coffin complete set. I sold the 32 volumes on eBay and the money paid for the coffin set!

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

I don't like eBay. I bought all of my DS Collections from third party sellers on Amazon, I go for the cheapest prices I can. I would have bought more by now but the free shipping being raised to $35 cuts into my git card balance faster, I usually would buy DS when I had about $20 let on it and that's harder to do now. With the thicker cases, I kept getting loose scratched discs and broken hubs but had no problem getting replacements. Never had that problem with the newer, slimmer cases. If I do buy the cool looking coffin set, it will be from Amazon directly. I'm just hoping it will drop cheaper than it was recently for I'm on a tight budget for DVDs.

I have the Burton/Depp movie which I bought cheap from Big Lots. It gets better on repeat viewings. I saw the 2 original cast movies back in the 90s but only kind of liked one, I was bored by Night of Dark Shadows but i'm willing to revisit them one day, might like them more now. I just wish I had started watching the original series sooner, would like to have seen the earlier episodes.

 

[tracyedgar]

Yes--I got my coffin set directly from Amazon directly. I only SOLD my old set on eBay.

 

[Harry-N]

My story is up-thread, but briefly I watched the show in its original airing on ABC and caught some reruns on NJN and SciFi over the years. Though I got some LaserDiscs of "Music Videos", "Scary Moments", "Behind The Scenes" and the two feature films, I never could justify buying the whole series on either VHS or DVD as they were released in collections.

The cost seemed prohibitive to me, and I also had trouble with the idea of finding the time to watch any of them. A nighttime series has 20 to 30 episodes in a full season, which takes very little time to get through. DARK SHADOWS had over 1200 episodes, which seemed like a daunting task. So I remained content for years with just the occasional viewing of the movies and those odd compilation videos.

The coffin set got my interest when announced, but again, the idea of spending that much for a show I couldn't find time to watch made it just out of the cards.

Finally a sale on Amazon that brought the price down to a much more reasonable $269 and I decided to spring for it. The Barnabas-story episodes had just become available to me to watch on Netflix, so I got the feel of how quickly they flowed without commercials. I figured I could squeeze in a half hour a day to watch them on DVD, and then quickly learned that little viewing marathons were pretty easy too.

I got the full series set just a little over a year ago and am already through well more than half of the series. A bonus to this story is that my early watching of the series seemed to hook my wife as well, who'd never seen a frame of the show before, so it's all new to her, and I get to see it through her eyes as the story unfolds.

What's also nice is that the overall storylines go much quicker when viewed in mini-marathon style. In the one-per-day, five-per-week ABC days some stories just dragged on forever. You'd get a story of David being missing and it would drag on for an entire week or so, whereas now, you can get through that in one sitting. I also remember the 1897 storyline feeling like it was bogging down and would never finish as it ate up nearly a whole year.

I'm usually an early supporter of a series that I love, but in this case, I just had to wait for the full series before springing for any of it.

Oh - favorite character: Victoria Winters. I was sad to see her leave the series.

Harry

 

[Ockeghem]

Harry,

An excellent post above. Although I agree completely with you that some stories dragged on forever and others got bogged down, as a ten- or eleven-year old child, this aspect had me waiting in great anticipation for the next episode to air. (But how I disliked waiting over the weekends!) As an adult, I do like how I can view them in mini-marathons these days, but there was something magical for me back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, waiting each day and running home from school to watch the show twice between 3:30-4:30. The earlier half hour was a repeat episode of the prior day's latter episode.

My daughter and I watched episode 790 last night. We're at the point where Judith is being tricked by her 'beloved' husband Trask to see the ghost of Minerva Trask, rocking away in her chair. One of the funniest lines for me last night was when Magda came downstairs from having visiting Judith, and Trask asks her if she saw his wife. Magda says (in her very thick gypsy-like accent), "Which one?" LOL.

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

One thing that makes me leery about large sets is finding a defective disc past the returns cut-off date, this has happened to me before. I think I will put aside some cash each month until I can afford the coffin and keep the sets I have just in case, then sell them down the line.

Watching DS on Sci-Fi twice daily made the show's flow fairly fast, couldn't imagine having to watch the original broadcasts, but things would get frustrating tuning in on a monday only to have it preempted because of a holiday. That's why I like having the DVDs. I can watch as much or as little as I want. I watch all of my TV DVD sets in marathons and if I don't have anything new to watch, I will re-watch ones I all ready have.

I missed Victoria when she let and didn't like how she was eventually written out of the series. It's one of the reasons I didn't care for the Leviathans story. My favourite character is Barnabas and my favourite actors are Thayer David and Nancy Barrett for the the way they portrayed each of their many characters differently from the others. I especially loved Barrett's Pansy Faye possessed Charity Trask.

 

[LeoA]

A free program like DVD Flick can scan a disc and give it a clean bill of health if no bad sectors are present. It's a pain since it's tedious the more discs there are, but obviously something of that scale could easily take years before viewing every last disc where as even 131 discs could be scanned over the course of a few evenings.

 

[Radioman970]

I just had one that had some digital problem a few weeks ago, lasted a short time. Wasn't a show stopper. First one I've had in 43 discs. So that's pretty good.

I was using emsa diskcheck to check discs. But I had a few used DVDs I bought that checked out okay but still skipped when I finally watched the movie. They even skipped on the PC where I checked them and at least one stopped and wouldn't play at one point. I was wondering if maybe the only real way to be sure discs are okay are by actually watching them. For that reason, I was definitely hoping the company would replace any at a low cost.

Coincidentally, I tried watching Live and Let Die from BOND 50 over the weekend but it wouldn't load at all. I read others are having problems with various discs from that set. Trying to figure out what to do to get a replacement or whatever. My firmware is up to date in my Panny.

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

I'll check out DVD Flick. If I have a disc that won't play all the way or freezes a lot, I will try it in my computer to make sure it's the disc and not the player. My usual way of checking box sets is to just fast forward each disc but it's time consuming and if there is a problem, the disc will freeze up.

 

[Radioman970]

If you fast forward, does it still read the whole surface? I was thinking it skipped frames... uneducated guess...