What year my movies are from - Chart (1 Viewer)

[rbirk]

Just for fun I was curious to find out some statistics of my DVD collection. Especially the release year of the movies. I have almost 1100 movies, so I thought it was time.
I expected to have more recent release, but actually not as much as it turned out. I guess it is hard to resist the marketing campaigns.

Ron Birk

 

[Nathan V]

Wow, you sure like 2000-1 films!

my collection focuses heavily on 70s-90s, with some 40-50s and '00s thrown in. 70s was arguably the best decade for cinema.

 

[Todd Phillips]

I would have said the 50s. We can all agree on the worst decade: the 1890s.

 

[Daniel P]

Actually, I always preferred the 1890s to the 1870s...a terrible decade for films in my opinion...:p

 

[David Lambert]

Why not? I have these graphs handy:

Keep in mind when you see how many discs I have from 1998-2001, that many of those are supplement discs. Like, if I have the 2-disc set for ID4, disc 1 is 1996 (or whatever year the film came out), and disc 2 is whatever year the supplement disc was produced or released. Well, what other year should I mark them?

 

[rbirk]

I only counted movies as one, so Lord of the Rings and Pearl Harbor are still one and not four. I don't really see a reason to count supplemental discs or Disc A and B.

 

[rbirk]

Some people say the 70s were the best, but somehow it is very weak in my collection. I don't know if it is because I don't like them or there are still many movies to come.

One reason my count is so much higher recently is that I stopped going to the movies theaters. Instead of paying $10 in the theater as it costs nowadays in Boston, I rather buy the movie for slightly more (and if you are two or more it is actually cheaper to buy the movie).

Ron

 

[David Lambert]

Ron, without getting into the whole counting thing as a debate (which has happened here at HTF ad naseum), I choose to count my collection as "how many actual DVD discs do I have?" (example: ID4 (2-disc SE) = "2 items")
Other people choose to go by SKU (X-Files Season 3 = "1 item"). Other people choose to go by FEATURES (Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea/Fantastic Voyage = "2 items").
That's just too darn complicated for me, so I simply count how many of the round shiny things I own. To me, that's as simple as a "DVD count" gets.
Sure a DVD-18 throws a curveball into that mix (note that you can have bought T2: Judgement Day - Ultimate Edition on either 1 DVD-18 (which is what I have, so it counts as "1" for me) or on 2 DVD-9's). But if I stick to counting the DVD discs, I can never get confused.
Besides, I don't buy them as a contest to compare to anyone else. I buy them to watch!

 

[Brian McHale]

70s was arguably the best decade for cinema.

Actually, I find an awful lot of films from the 70s have not aged well. I went to high school and college in the 70s, so I remember them well (I was one of the few people who went to college in the 70s and didn't do drugs). If nothing else, the clothes and the hairstyles are almost painful to look at (kind of like my 1975 year book photo).

 

[Jack Briggs]

Yet that diminishes the likes of Chinatown, The Conversation, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver?

 

[Jack Briggs]

Oops, I spoke too soon. You said an "awful lot" of movies, and you're correct. It can make one squirm to look at some of the stuff that came out then, especially material said to be "futuristic." Rollerball and those cheesy 1970s 'dos. Well, for that matter, Star Wars has a very '70s look (note Harrison Ford's hairstyle).

 

[Adam_S]

okay, so how do I make that sort of chart?
I have dvd profiler, do I export that information into a general database or spreadsheet like from micrsoft office and then use an office tool to graph the elements I want? I know generally what to do, but I have no idea specifically what to do, since I rarely use spreadsheets and databases even less.

Adam

 

[Brian McHale]

Yet that diminishes the likes of Chinatown, The Conversation, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver?

I'm not saying there weren't any great movies that came out in the 70s. There are great movies in ANY decade. Im just saying that a lot of movies from the 70s don't play as well today as they did when they were released. After all, this was in response to a comment that the 70s was the best decade.

I would propose that maybe the 40s was the greatest decade for movies, with titles such as Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), Fantasia (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Great Dictator (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Notorious (1946) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

 

[Patrick McCart]

We can all agree on the worst decade: the 1890s.

HEY! Don't diss Muybridge!

 

[Ruth_F]

I'm not saying there weren't any great movies that came out in the 70s. There are great movies in ANY decade. Im just saying that a lot of movies from the 70s don't play as well today as they did when they were released. After all, this was in response to a comment that the 70s was the best decade.

Oh Brian, you are speaking to hersy to my friend Chris --- he is one of those who counts the 70s as one of the best decades for films. I have seen very very few films for that era and occassionaly I'll catch something based on his recomendation --- and so far so good.

 

[rbirk]

Adam, I store my list of movies in my own database format. This is then used to dynamically create a web page as seen here.
From this database I exported a column which have the years to Excel. There I created a formula to create two new columns with year and count. Using these two new columns I hit the Chart button wizard and got a nice chart.
I never done anything similar to this before and had to play around for an hour, but I liked the result.
Ron

 

[Jeff Kohn]

Adam, I store my list of movies in my own database format. This is then used to dynamically create a web page as seen here.
From this database I exported a column which have the years to Excel. There I created a formula to create two new columns with year and count. Using these two new columns I hit the Chart button wizard and got a nice chart.
I never done anything similar to this before and had to play around for an hour, but I liked the result.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. All it takes in DVD Profiler is a menu selection.

 

[David Lambert]

There I created a formula to create two new columns with year and count.

Let me tell you two words that will save you from creating formulas in the future:

PIVOT TABLES


Use the help feature in Excel to look up about Pivot Tables (and, if you have a recent enough version, Pivot Graphs as well). It's a drag-and-drop method of creating such things without needing to formulate anything.

 

[Mark_vdH]

My dvd-movies are divided like this:

1910-1920: 4
1920-1929: 8
1930-1939: 18
1940-1949: 16
1950-1959: 25
1960-1969: 29
1970-1979: 45
1980-1989: 47
1990-2002: 121

 

[Danny_N]

My collection by decade (excluding supplemental discs):

1910-1920: 2
1920-1930: 6
1930-1940: 46
1940-1950: 64
1950-1960: 118
1960-1970: 132
1970-1980: 104
1980-1990: 53
1990-2002: 102