just another (or if you like the dramatic another) look at the baffling devaluation we let happen on things that we once held dear, look you see. and this devaluation is not just financial, to be sure. no, in our stripped of filters, everything available all the time to sate the sense of entitlement and the want of instant gratification, i get the sense we are losing all variations of how we understand "value".
so i was browsing the "entertainment section" of Poundland, as i am so prone to do. this was to inspect the CDs they had there, see if anything took my fancy to have a listen to on my travels around or across the lands. whereas no tunes took my fancy, i could not but help notice a surprising DVD on the shelf.
yes, that is Star Wars The Force Awakens being sold for all of £1. despite having no practical or fanciful reason for owning it in this format, i did indeed go ahead and purchase it.
needless to say i was rather surprised to see the film being sold for that price. if for some reason you have not heard of the motion picture, in this era of Disney owned Star Wars, it is very safe to say that The Force Awakens is comfortably in the top 50% of them made. this and Rogue One were excellent. interestingly, The Last Jedi was an expensive experiment to show what happens when you let someone that clearly does not like Star Wars make a Star Wars film, and Solo was just plain terrible. but, this one had a great more quality and charm than it did have faults.
why the surprise? because i would have thought Disney would have valued the film far more than to let it be sold at this price. sure, true, it is currently being broadcast on one of the channels here in the UK, i think ITV, "frequently". further, i have no doubt that it will all of a sudden be, for streaming fans, only exclusively available on this "Disney+" Netflix rival being launched later this year. but there is more than this to value.
once it was so that Disney really placed value, in every sense, on their films. true, yes, a lot of this was financial value, starting with them being one of several studios in the 70s to launch legal efforts to block home VCRs. but the value went further.
it seems fanciful now, and i am not necessarily saying it was better, but there was a time when we didn't (reasonably) instantly have access to films. the usual was for a film to turn up on home video, or TV broadcast, three years after the cinema release. quite a wait. ostensibly this was done to "protect the box office income" of the film (in some countries it was not unusual to re-release blockbusters the year after release), but also to preserve a sense of value for it. allowing something of a widespread free for all in terms of availability of a product is convenient, but also tends to let them all become disposable. think of just how dire and disposable music has become in this filter free world of "streaming" being of more value than owning an actual record.
Disney used to take this valuation more seriously than others. they used to place a "moratorium" on films, locking them away for 5 to 10 years and re-releasing for the benefit of other generations. a good, long term marketing gimmick, perhaps, but also an effective and important way of making sure some movies remained memorable. this would seem to have gone out the window.
that is indeed the playing surface of this disc picture above. for a "replay" or "pre-owned" disc, that sure looks like it has never ever seen the insides of a player.
no, i am not saying we should go back to having to wait for 3 years after a cinema release to get films on video or TV. that said, yes, i suspect i am not alone in missing the aesthetic, tactile and social elements of going to a video rental store, but we between us have destroyed it. i suppose what i am saying is that i am quite surprised Disney has allowed this devaluation. realistically i would have expected them to withdraw from sale all unsold copies (for this "replay" disc has clearly never been used) so as to protect the value of the film in every sense.
it does seem rather unlikely that the Disney version of Star Wars shall ever come to be as treasured as the original films, or the prequels for that matter. yes, in respect of the latter, they were really very good films. what Disney started off well with The Force Awakens and Rogue One went downhill very, very fast indeed with Last Jedi and Solo, but enough has been said on how dire they are already.
or maybe that's that. just like how music has given up and accepted anything made these days shall be disposable and forgotten, so too for cinema. i find it hard to believe, but perhaps the industry as a whole just feels no films made in the last couple of decades has any chance of being as memorable as those made in the second half of the last century, and so are happy to see them devalued. we, the audience, with our appetite and demands for everything instantly, are also at fault.
what exactly shall i do with my rather cheap DVD copy of The Force Awakens? no idea. every now and then we end up going away somewhere that the accommodation has a DVD player. if i remember to do so maybe i shall take it with us on such a trip. otherwise, it shall probably just sit on a shelf. but, as i said, there was no way i was leaving something of that quality to pass me by so cheap. as wrong as that low value strikes me.
live long and prosper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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