Geek Girl Navigating the World – The Frustrations of Collecting DVDs

It can be difficult being a geek, especially when it comes to the things that you like to spend your disposable income purchasing. This becomes especially frustrating if you’re one of those geeks that really likes buying DVDs of favorite TV shows or cartoons.

I’m a big fan of animation.  One of my favorite shows is Rocky & Bullwinkle (later to become The Bullwinkle Show).  I, of course, am not old enough to have watched the original run of the show, but I’ve seen quite a bit of it in syndication and on the few video tapes of it that were released several years ago.  I was ecstatic to discover that the show was being released in full season sets on DVD while browsing the shelves in the electronics section of a local department store. The sets were released once a year for three years and then, all of the sudden, nothing. There was a five-year gap between the release of  season three and season four.  The fifth and final season was released seven months later, but before then, the complete series was released in a large and reasonably priced boxed set.  This is one of the success stories.

There are far more stories that don’t have such happy endings.  I’m sitting with a collection that has two volumes of Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers, two volumes of Darkwing Duck, three Volumes of Ducktales, and two volumes of Talespin.  Each of these series would take only one more volume to make them complete.  Four years later, I’m still waiting.  The shows don’t appear to be syndicated any more on any channels, or at least not on the ones included in cable packages in my area. Even if they were, that doesn’t make my collection any more complete.

The fantasy/science fiction/horror anthology series Amazing Stories saw the release of the first season in 2006.  There were only two seasons, and the second season has several more of the episodes that I remember watching.  After a couple of years, an e-mail to the company that released the DVD revealed that they were having some issues getting the rights to release the second season, and that was the last that I’ve heard about it.

WKRP in Cincinnati is one that I can at least understand why they’re having problems releasing.  The first season was released, but there were a lot of substitutions made because paying royalties for the songs that they used was proving to be too expensive.  Those substitutions led to a lot of backlash from fans, and, as a result, many of them never bothered to pick up that first season. Disappointing sales are probably going to kill any DVD releases, if they just don’t prove to be decent money makers.

It seems, though, that royalty issues and copyright issues seem to be one of the major hold-ups for some of the shows that geeks would really want to see released.  Take, for instance, The Tick.  Season one and season two sets were both released, but they were not complete, because each episode contained an episode that was in dispute.  The third (and final) season has never been released.  Again, another major disappointment for any geeks like me who thrill to hear the battle cry of “Spoon!”

Still other shows have just mysteriously not been released.  Dharma & Greg had the complete 1^st season released, but not another season has surfaced.  Granted, Chuck Lorre might have better things to do than hash out DVD release deals with people right now (after all, he’s got Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men to run these days), but I’m pretty sure that he isn’t actually the stumbling block to anything.  I’m not sure if sales were disappointing or if there were problems with rights there, as well.  All I know is that when the station that runs the show in syndication stops, I’m really going to be wishing that I had a few more seasons of it to watch.

I suppose that I’d be happier with my DVD library if I weren’t such a completist.  However, I am a geek, and that kind of seems to go with the territory.  One cannot build an encyclopedic (and probably useless) knowledge of one’s favorite things if one doesn’t have access to all the necessary materials to establish canon.  It’s like missing a chapter in a book.  Sure, you can still muddle through, especially if the story doesn’t have any far-reaching arcs, but you’re missing important nuances of the story.  There are inside jokes to be had and subtle character developments that could become crucial later on.  No self-respecting geek wants to be the one who’s getting told, “oh, yeah, that one episode, the one that you don’t have, that’s where all of this happened, and it connects into the rest of the story like this. Wow, I can’t believe you missed that.”

Complete series sets are a double-edged sword.  Season sets can be expensive enough, but when you’re getting into a complete series, the prices can be astronomical, especially if it’s a show that managed to last more than one season.  Some of those sets will contain twenty discs or more, and the price tags certainly show it.  The trade-off is that you do have all of the episodes all in one place, and once that release date has hit there’s also that instant gratification payoff.  Still, spacing out sets and building both a sense of anticipation and a little bit of a sense of accomplishment can be very rewarding for geeks.  A season set often comes with some very cool extra features, there can be (and often is) special packaging, and there can be a real sense of the production values of a show present in the whole design of the set.  This is not to say that complete series sets can’t have some of the same perks, but if the set is just slapped together in a rush to get it released,  it can leave fans feeling very disappointed.

Some shows are just released very slowly.  The Simpsons is probably one of the shows that I find the most frustrating on that front.  At first, seasons were released, on average, once a quarter. Then it dropped back to twice a year.  The largest number of releases was occurring while Futurama was being released on DVD simultaneously.  I had hoped that maybe season sets would be produced a bit faster once Futurama was done.  I was wrong.  Now fans are lucky to see one release of a season set a year, which gets a little painful if you start running numbers.  So far, fourteen seasons have been released.  One of those seasons was the 20^th season, which was released out of chronological order so that fans with Hi-def home theater systems could see The Simpsons in all their pudgy, yellow glory. The former librarian that I was absolutely cringes when I think about this–because to me it looks like I didn’t care enough about the show or my collection to bother buying seven seasons of DVDs.  Such is not the case.  There have been 22 seasons of the show, making it not only the longest running animated series on TV, but the longest running series on TV, period.  I realize this means that there is a lot of material to go through and try to compile into DVD sets.  I am missing eight seasons.  The thing that seems the most frustrating of all is how quickly after season 20 aired the complete season set was released.

There are all kinds of resources to research favorite shows, especially on the internet.  The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com if you don’t already know) is an almost invaluable resource to those of us heavily entrenched in geekery.  Geeks, however, can also find some other resources in an attempt to try to get their favorite shows released on DVD.  TV Shows on DVD is run by a couple of guys who probably qualify for some kind of award as ultimate TV fans, making them some king geeks in my book, and they’re very cool about running a very democratic website.  They report the latest news about TV releases regardless of genre, from cartoons and kids’ shows to cop shows to sci-fi shows to primetime soaps, both old and new.  They also maintain a voting system on their site so you can vote for your favorite shows to be released and the format you’d like to see (individual episodes, season sets, best of sets, etc.).   The best part of all is that they maintain those numbers, and the DVD industry does pay attention to them.  The website is: http://www.tvshowsondvd.com.

Amazon.com also offers a sign-up and tallying system, as well.  Unfortunately, if the show has been released in another country, they don’t seem to allow it to be voted on for an American release.  It’s also nearly impossible to find any information about how to get shows or DVDs listed that aren’t included.  Their release calendar is more searchable than the one found on Tvshowsondvd.com, but it isn’t nearly as well organized.  As a geek, the popularity of a given release is probably not all that
important to me, and it doesn’t really help me find anything at all.

You can also make attempts to e-mail the studios that released the shows.  Sometimes, you’ll get a reply, often times a very nicely worded and polite form e-mail.  Sometimes, you’ll actually get a response from an actual human being who may or may not be able to not only answer your questions but also give you a little bit of hope and some resources to try and nudge things along (and sometimes, even a nanometer of progress still feels pretty darn good in almost any situation).  And, of course, sometimes, you won’t ever get any kind of an answer at all.

Still, I do hold out hope that I will be able to complete my collection with the season sets that I’m missing.  I’d prefer to be able to do that in season sets or volumes if that’s the way that they started releasing a series, but I’ll take complete series sets if that’s what I can get.  If you, fellow geek, also find yourself wishing for the rest of a series, don’t give up hope; after all, there’s still the story of Rocky & Bullwinkle to bolster your spirits, and I wish you the best of luck in your quest.  There is a bright side, at least part of the series has been made available, unlike, say Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, but I think the completely unreleased series that I’m dying to get will have to wait for another article….