Month: March 2025

DVD Rot Is One More Worry

By Bob Small

Until a few days ago, we had never worried about “DVD rot”.

Now we are hearing about it .

Though DVDs ”should last 30 to 100 years” Warner Brother DVD’s made between 2006-8 which requires DVD owners to “check inner ring codes for the suspect plant”.

Another point is that whyile Warner Bros says it will replace certain DVDs damaged some of the affected titles are no longer in print.

Thus your Humphrey Bogart DVD might be replaced by Scooby Doo.

Lastly, and we’ll just quote it here, there’s a tendency where DVD’s and other optical discs to oxidise underneath the reflective layer, causing the adhesive to de-bond and often resulting in a “milky” spot on the readable surface. “

Wait. There’s more! Over 600 Blu-ray Titles No Longer Work! Even Criterion, the “gold standard of DVD media, has had problems with some of it’s classics, including Citizen Kane. If you can’t trust Criterion for Citizen Kane,or Paris, Texas, well then you probably can’t trust anyone.

The next question to emerge is, “should we still buy DVD’s?”.

Why DVD Series Are Still Worth Buying in 2025 attempts to answer that question. Their reasons inclue

• No dependency on internet connections.
• Better picture and sound quality.
• Special features”
• Support for the physical media market”.

It seems that streaming is overtaking DVD’s, but there is a sizable, albeit older, minority still buying.

Unmentioned is a tendency among many of us to avoid monthly costs and sharing information online.

See also 5 Reasons Why DVDs & Blu-Ray Are Still Essential In The …

VCR’s also exist, even though they’re no longer making new players, many used players are on sale.

Places such as Good Will and Salvation Army, that sells DVDs also have VCR tapes, and for a fairly cheap price.

Snow Wrong

By Bob Small

One explanation for why the Disney Studio made the live action remake the way they did is that they believed Biden/Harris would win a second term. However that result turned out to also be a fairy tale.

(Rachel Zegler) is a pro-Palestinian spokeswoman whereas the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) served in the IDF, and is vocally Pro-Israel. One imagines discussions on the set might have been very lively.

By trying to “empower” Snow White it unempowers the Prince. If you’re waiting for “Someday My Prince will come, spoiler alert it doesn’t)

And there’s more. Or rather less.

Not only are the Dwarfs removed from the title “– Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the title in 1937 — it has been “de-dwarfed”, taking away work from dwarf actors such as Peter Dinkage, among others.

One of the best comparisons of this “artistic malfeasance” is this review which calls it “about as sensible as remaking “Singing in the Rain” as a cartoon.

Trigger warnings have been issued in the UK, saying that “a woman is deliberately poisoned” and “a girl is surrounded by ominous trees”.

Oh, the horror!

In an essay on the 2019 live-action version of Alladin, Aisha Harris wrote in The New York Times that “shoe-horned progressive messages only brings more attention to the inherent crassness of Disney’s current exercise in money-grabbing nostalgia”

Discussing this film, the concept of “endless splitting hairs over the authenticity (italics mine) of a fairy tale”.

See also:

Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot

Snow White (IMDB reviews)