I don’t believe I’ve ever posted about this before, so now seems like a good time. This is our DVD and Blu-ray collection:
It’s on a bookshelf built into our downstairs room, and the shelves are big enough that the discs are stacked two-deep. There’s a lot of them. I tried to count and gave up on the second shelf from the top when I passed 500. It’s very easily over 1000 items, maybe closer to 1500.
KLS and I got into anime in a big way during its VHS boom in the early to mid 90s, and – after a brief stint with Laserdisc – got our first DVD player when the first anime discs came out in 1997. Anime in those days was released with 3 or 4 episodes per disc and we bought loads of them. It remains a large chunk of our collection today, filling most of the top two shelves.
The above photo is representative of the range of anime in our collection. Cobra is the film version from 1982 (which is fantastic). Evangelion and Bebop are single discs with a few episodes on each (we bought the entire series of discs for each). Tower of Druaga is one of many low-priced multi-disc collections I bought about a decade ago. The middle one in the bottom is a series never released in English that I bought at a Korean bootleg shop in Sydney. And the last Blu-ray – Plus-Sized Elf – was bought a couple of weeks ago!
In preparing this entry I had fun looking through many of these. As you can see we have four of the five different Cutey Honey series released since 1973 (only Cutey Honey Flash eludes me, and the discs are hellishly expensive these days). We’ve also got all the live action versions as well!
The same is true for many other series: both anime and other. If I like something I’ll usually hunt down other versions or series to get more. The biggest example in the collection is surely Doctor Who:
I don’t know how many different Doctor Who DVDs I own, but it’s probably over 200. In fact as far as I know I own all of them, and for many years my happy place was getting the latest disc of classic Who and watching it multiple times with each audio track. I have convinced myself the discs will be watched again one day. And I’ll start with all of Jon Pertwee’s episodes in order.
In front of the Who discs (which are double stacked) you can see box sets of other series from the 80s or 90s. The above is only a portion of these; We have enough we could probably broadcast our own retro TV station!
Incidentally many of the discs have been repacked into thinner cases. I began this years ago to save space and last year when we had the bathroom done I finished the job. I’d say about half our collection is packed this way, which wasn’t cheap since although the cases individually are inexpensive, buying hundreds of them wasn’t! I’ll spare you my criteria for what got repacked and what didn’t, but suffice to say anything I consider ‘special’ remained in its original case.
Second to Doctor Who is my Ultraman collection, which now contains box sets for 35 different series and about 20 other discs of movies, specials and animated series. I’ve watched them all.
In fact I’ve watched all these discs! KLS has watched most of them, but a thousand hours of Ultraman, endless classic Doctor Who and hundreds of hours of Inspector Morse series weren’t exactly her thing 🙂
I like watching quirky Japanese films, and they’re so infrequently localized I usually buy them whenever they are. There’s dozens in the collection, most of which are horror and/or tokusatsu (or sometimes both). I’ll admit many of these are objectively bad films, but something about low budget Japanese trash appeals to me, so I enjoy them!
The collection includes lots of recent movies as well. Specifically titles you may ask “Why did you buy that?” The answer is the Walmart cheap movie bin! During Covid Walmart used to have big bins full of $3 DVDs and I plundered them every time I shopped there. Will we ever watch these again? Doubtful. But they were absolutely worth the $3 I paid for them!
Speaking of Covid, during that time we watched loads of movies since our workdays ended early. It was the first time we browsed our collection and rewatched movies we’d had for years.
If you look closely at the first pic you may wonder about other titles you glimpse. I haven’t shown all the Star Wars stuff, the Hammer horror films, the TV horror anthology series, non-Ultraman tokusatsu series, the vast collection of 1980s films we loved as kids, or the bottom shelf which is entirely music video collections or concert films! If there’s ever been a show or film I have fond memories of, chances are it’s in the collection.
The above is a treasure. This was the only set of this Japanese TV show ever localized and I bought the disc from a dubious website set up by the company. It’s incredibly funny and watchable, and I always looked forward to the second set which never came. The English set is now rare and expensive but it’s never leaving my collection.
Many years ago I used to have an account on a DVD collectors website. I did this simply because it had a feature where it would track which anime series you had and inform you when the next disc would be released. Even then – and this was over 20 years ago – some of our discs were getting a bit pricey, and I’m sure these days we’ve got a fair amount of ‘collectible’ ones in the collection. I don’t care; I have no interest in ever selling any of this.
And yes, the collection continues to grow. You may have read recent reports about various companies cutting back on physical disc production, with Blu-rays in particular nearing the end of their life. As a response – and because I recently wanted to get into Jess Franco and 70s horror films – I bought nearly 50 new discs on Amazon in one frenzied binge. The ranged from under $5 (Sucker the Vanpire) to $80 (a Kamen Rider set). You can see them all in the above ‘watch’ pile, in front of 65+ unplayed Switch games!
With streaming services becoming increasingly expensive and discs becoming less available some have been talking recently about a ‘return to physical’. You won’t hear that from me, since I never left physical! And I hope I never do.