And There Was Much Rejoicing

[bloodyrosemccoy]

AHA! Barnes and Noble finally came through!

That’s right, dudes, I now own a “Diamond Edition” Blu-ray copy of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, one of the best movies ever made. This is significant, because before this day my only copy of this movie was on Betamax. BETAMAX, DO YOU HEAR ME. You don’t even know what that is. And ever since then I’ve been foiled in my attempts to buy a copy that will play on something that is not a VCR bought in 1982, what with the time I tried to get a DVD from Amazon and it sent me a PIRATED COPY that wouldn’t play what the hell Amazon and the cursed Disney Vault bullshit. BUT NOW I OWN IT IN BLU-RAY, and you can bet your indoor plumbing that when they release the DVD version of the Diamond Edition next month I will own that too, because I am not spending another 20 years sitting around waiting for another anniversary.

Speaking of outdated media, this version contains something I remember renting in Laser Disc format:* the fascinating work-in-progress version, which from what I recall has the audio track intact, but which shifts back and forth from various animatics and storyboards. It’s really interesting to check out the process of making an animated movie.

WHICH I FINALLY HAVE. Now off to see if they have a copy on iTunes, because god dammit I will not get caught with outdated media for this movie again.


*We still have the Laser Disc player. We call it the Star Wars player, because we own exactly one movie trilogy in Laser Disc form. And now that George Lucas has “lost” the original copies of Star Wars, the Laser versions are actually the closest thing there is to the Star Wars theatrical releases.

Comments

[beccastareyes]

The Cornell anime club has a lasrdisc player in storage, because we actually own some anime on laserdisc -- notably Here is Greenwood, and I think some other things. The club actually gets a bit gleeful when we have an excuse to break that (or the VHS player) out.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hee hee! Every once in a while we bust out one o' the old school players, ust to see what we got on them.

[pandoras-closet.livejournal.com]

I still have the original Star Wars on VHS. Because I'm awesome like that

[anagramofbrat.livejournal.com]

well also because the last unfucked with edition of star wars was the THX box set. :P

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Same, got the 1983 box set sitting on my movie shelf :}. It's the only version I have.

[anagramofbrat.livejournal.com]

You don’t even know what that is.

Hell yeah I do! It was Gen-X's HD-DVD!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Old-school high-five!

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Betamax was the best thing ever.
My family had two players.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Lots of people know what Betamax was. Well, some of them probably think it was made up for that episode of Cowboy Bebop, but they've heard of it, at least ;)

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Y'know, whenever I hear anything about Beauty and the Beast, it reminds me of an editorial that ran in Dragon Magazine while it was in theatres. It seems this editor was driving along in his car, scanning through the radio stations, when he came across a religious show with some preacher exhorting his listeners to boycott the movie because it (and I quote) "promoted lycanthropy".

I'm not even sure what the hell that means. Did he think watching Beauty and the Beast was going to turn people into Werewolves? Or was it just that it would make people more supportive of any Werewolves they happened to know?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

AHAHA. I have NO IDEA what that means. Dude, there aren't even any werewolves IN B&tB, unless you have a seriously skewed idea of what a wolf looks like.

Maybe the preacherdude was confused and was arguing against bestiality? Which is also stupid, but at least there's some connection?

Or he was just crazy. Probably that one.

[van.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons we still keep the Laserdisc. Also because there are some cool movies that we have that are only on LD right now, and may likely never make the transition. Also because some movies just shouldn't have to be bought twice, dammit.

[xaandria.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what Betamax is. I ALSO know what a LaserDisc player is, and that happens to be the medium that WE had Beauty and the Beast on, as well as The Little Mermaid. We've also got a DivX (to keep the Betamax and laserdisc and minidisc players company).

Basically, I have been able to tell definitively which battling technology will fail, because it is always the one that my dad chooses. So when he went in for HD DVD, you bet your ass I got a BluRay player.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's sorta how it was around here, too. And not just Dad! We also had an amazing psychic video store that enabled us: it invested first in Beta videos, and then moved on to Laser Disc. Good times.

[mooncat75.livejournal.com]

I remember Betamax! My parents even had the video camera...lens as big as your fist, camera body so large and heavy you had to rest it on your shoulder, big ass wire connecting the camera to actual VCR portion you had to CARRY WITH YOU!

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

My entire childhood is on Betamax tapes from about 1988. We have all the classic Christmas specials--Charlie Brown, Rudolph, the Grinch--with commercials intact! Who remembers what came in a Happy Meal for Christmas, 1988? I do!

...Now if we could just get a freaking Betamax player that worked, so that we could copy everything to DVD. *sigh*

(And I seriously want to watch Beauty and the Beast now. Bookish heroines for the win!)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

GOOD GOD. I think I have that exact same holiday lineup, although Mom tried to stop recording during commercials. However, she didn't always get to it--my brother and I had a What The Hell Is On These Tapes? party, and I remembered EVERY SINGLE COMMERCIAL for things like Doritos and Fruit-On-The-Bottom Yogurt.

[daiq.livejournal.com]

I used to teach puppetry to my year 7 students, and had all these episodes of Fraggle Rock we taped on betamax from 1982, so in about 2003 i had them converted to VCR and showed the kiddies at school - they LOVED the old TV commercials, used to go spare over them!!!

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Wait, how do you have B&tB on Betamax? That format was already dead by the time that movie came out in theaters! It died in the '80s!

I remember watching the ollllllllld Incredible Hulk cartoon on Betamax. At somebody else's house, because we only had VHS.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It held on by its fingernails for a few years after its official death sentence. I believe Disney finally gave up on it with The Lion King--I have Aladdin on Beta, too, but after that I have memories of worrying about how we'd acquire Lion King without a VHS.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Dear lord.

Rarities! You can probably get actual money for those things. From stupid people.

On that note, I will now expose you to "Beauty @ the Beast" a Thai 3DCG shameless ripoff version of the Disney classic:

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Totally different! Belle is wearing pink! And that's obviously Simba. With ... silly horns.

I wound up having to explain to a couple of patrons at work that any animated movie we had with "Little" in the title, except The Little Mermaid, is a knockoff. Witness: The Little Cars, Little Bee, and The Little Robots. They piss me off.