theWitcher

FWIW, Carny and Urgh! A Music War are now available for pre-order.

JOE29

I'm also waiting for a price drop. Even $15 would be acceptable for me.
Although the $10 price you suggested would mean an instant purchase.

Steve Phillips

They've got DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK up for pre-order on the WB Shop site now.

JerryKILL

The Terminal Man and All the Marbles are up as well. It's getting more and more difficult to resist ordering, as there are now quite a few titles that I've been wanting for years, heck decades. I'm shocked they got the music rights for Urgh A Music War cleared for release.

obscurelabel

On music rights - there are different cases that might apply, but if the filmmakers secured the music rights for home viewing when the movie was made, they wouldn't have to incur any additional cost or effort to include the original music for a DVD release. With all the news we hear about problems with music rights, there are many, many movies with tons of original music that get released unchanged on DVD because the rights were paid for when the movie was made.

Paul1957

Up for pre-order

She (Hammer)
Razorback
From Hell It Came

http://www.wbshop.com/Pre-Orders/ARC...efault,sc.html

Steve Phillips

I really wish Warner would do something about their horrible website. It's just the worst I've ever seen; like something from 15 years ago.

mdnitoil

Yeah, I can see why Warner shoved a Hammer film in the Archives. It's a bitch trying to find people who'll buy those.

It's astounding just how quickly a studio can turn to crap like that.

obscurelabel

Amen. The site is an embarrassment. That it is an official presentation of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate is mind-boggling. There are thousands of 12 year olds who could design and implement a better site.

Paul1957

Buy any 5 of these dvds for $50.00:

All the Marbles
The Bermuda Depths
Boulevard Nights
Carny
Dealing or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty
From Hell it Came
Mike's Murder
Razorback
Reckless
She
The Terminal Man
Urgh! A Music War

http://www.wbshop.com/Buy-Any-5-of-t...efault,sc.html

i86time

Aarrrghh! I hate when promos like this are offered when I want 5 films, but not from that list. In any event, when I add The Bermuda Depths as 1 of the 5, it doesn't deduct the proper amount - the cart totals $57.02. Way to go WBshop.
Enough people must be purchasing these discs to warrant WB keeping them @ $20 a pop, hopefully that will soon change.

Silverscreenvid

Enough people are NOT purchasing those discs at $20 a pop, or they wouldn't be offering specials like this and the box sets.

There's a difference between Warner putting these on "sale" and a retailer putting DVDs on sale. If Amazon or DD puts a title on sale, it is doing so to compete with other retailers offering the same title. However, Warner is the only one selling these titles so they have no competition. If you want Carny or All the Marbles (both of which I'd love to have), you have to go through Warner.

My guess is that a handful of their titles are selling, and Warner would like to release some or all of those particular titles to the general public as regular titles. Unfortunately, if people have been buying Doc Savage at $20 a disc and Warner releases essentially the same title in a standard (non-DVD-R) format with a street price of $10, people who bought the "archive" version will feel badly burned.

I think that Warner will eventually go to a model where people will be able to get most or all of the archive titles, one way or another, for $10 a pop, either as part of "box sets" or some type of choose-your-own 5 for $50 promotions. From there they can release those titles that warrant it at the same general price point and not totally destroy customer goodwill. It will take a year or so for this business model to work itself out (I fully expect them to run a 5 for $50 or something similar Christmas sale this year).

Remember that Warner has essentially zero overhead on these titles other than the cost of preparing them for release. The discs aren't burned until they are sold so they are never caught with excess inventory. They could sell them for $1 apiece and make money if they had to.

JerryKILL

$10 each is still too much for what is essentially a barebones DVDr. I'm holding out for a $5 price point.

JOE29

I don't think so. I'd go for a $10 bare bones disc as long as the video quality is good. I am one of the ones that is holding out for a price drop though, I'm not buying these for $20 + shipping.

i86time

I'd be interested to find out the numbers on these things, but I doubt it will happen. It's a rather good idea and I'm surprised that, other than the stuff on Amazon, more studios haven't adopted a direct to consumer on demand system. I do think they people are making too much of the 'DVD-R' issue, other than that fact that the media itself is cheaper and cheaper to produce. Perhaps the company feels that people equate the actual quality of the transfer and the discs longevity with the belief that anything on -R will be bootleg quality with a dubious lifespan.

Problem is, about the quality, they may be right. Based on the disclaimer they have for each title, it appears most of these offerings come from D1 video masters created for pay/cable in the early to mid ninties. This was (is?) the same tactic used by Universal for their TV series cataog titles. So, essentially, the public gets transfers that were state of the art 15 years ago. Maybe some titles are better than others, and maybe some are even from more recent transfers, but with their horrid 360x240 FLV samples, I can't tell much. Not only that, but I doubt they'll use DL media, so titles like URGH! (which demands a PCM soundtrack and is nearly 2 hours in length) are going to suffer to some degree. I'd still be interested in trying some out, just not for $20. I can see customers being PO'd if they purchased a title and then it's later released as a pressed disc at a lower cost. But that's kind of like electronic components - a certain group of consumers will buy the expensive bleeding edge stuff, which allows the manufacturer to release newer models with the same or better features at a cheaper price a few years later.

And as for sales, besides the obvious but limited, 'box sets' by actor/character/genre, I think they've only had 1 or 2 'choose your own' offers which lowered the price to $10 each, but I think you had to buy 10 titles. The current one is limited to only the newest releases, which will likely expire once the new titles are released in a couple weeks. I've only seen 20-25% off coupons. That indicates to me WB must feel they're doing OK, otherwise we'd see more unlimited 'choose your own' offers and higher % off coupons. In any event, I'm waiting for them to fix the current bug so I can give them my $50. If they don't, oh well.

Disc-Flipper

Is there any place to buy these Warner Archive Collection movies for a decent price in Canada? Warner shop won't ship outside the US and Amazon.com and eBay prices are over $30.

tylergfoster

If it says WIDESCREEN at the top of the page, it'll be Widescreen, right? In many of the summaries, the conflicting information "16x9 FULL FRAME" is printed despite the top-of-the-page statement, and I don't want to spend $20 on a couple of these only to discover they're in FS.

Mountain Biker

Holy shit they have Airborne available now!!

I have no problem whatsoever paying $19.99 for this gem!!

http://www.wbshop.com/Airborne-+EST-...gid=ARCHIVENEW

rw2516

All the widescreen ones I have are 16x9 widescreen. Does it say 16x9 Full Frame on a movie you know is widescreen? I take "16x9 Full Frame" to mean that side bars are part of the picture. Picture cannot be stretched on 16x9 tv.

tylergfoster

Non-anamorphic? It seems like "16x9" is a pretty common term to indicate anamorphic enhancement. And no, I don't have any of these.

i86time

URGH! A Music War and Doc Savage are listed on the site as 16x9 Full Frame and are widescreen anamorphic (black bars not encoded into the video content). Razorback is listed as 16X9 Letterbox, and does have some black bar area encoded into the pictures as its AR is 2.4:1. However, The Bermuda Depths is listed as 16x9 Full Frame on the site where it is actually 4x3 Full Frame, as originally intended. So I guess it could be a gamble as to what the actual aspect ratio will be on the disc. If it was intended to be widescreen, it's likely the Archive will release it as anamorphic widescreen.

As to the nomenclature on the website, 16x9 Full Frame seems to indicate a 16x9 image display where the entire image area (Full Frame) is used (i.e. a 1.78/1.85:1 AR) whereas 16x9 Letterbox indicates a 16x9 image display with letterbox bars (i.e. a 2.35/2.4:1 AR). 4x3 Full Frame is fairly self explanatory. 4x3 Letterbox would be a horrid non-anamorphic transfer of widescreen material, but thankfully I haven't yet seen a title listed as such.

rw2516

It's anamorphic. 1:78. 1:33 is the film in the center while the remaining :45 are the side bars. The side bars are part of the picture and cannot be eliminated by stretching the picture to fill the sides because the sides are already filled.

Matthew Chmiel

"16 x 9 Full Frame" is just a way of saying "1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen."

The preview clip of Airborne on the website shows the film in it's OAR.

Do they still use DVD-Rs? I remember hearing rumors that might change, but I don't know how I feel paying $20 for DVD-Rs of Airborne and Angus.

Alan Smithee

Airborne is an "Archive" title??? I ran that film at a theater when it was brand-new! (Whatever happened to Shane McDermott anyways?) I thought this was just going to be for the obscure 40s-60s stuff.

Has anyone actually seen the DVD of Urgh: A Music War? It runs a bit over 2 hours so it should use a dual-layer disc- I have it on the long-gone CED format and that uses 2 discs, there'd be too much compression on a single layer. (I have a bootleg DVD that uses a 2-sided Disc, that was before dual-layer recordable discs were possible.) That clip on the website looks like a squashed 4x3 picture too. I read that their other movies use the lazy chapters-every-5-minutes, did they at least properly chapter the songs on this?

Lastdaysofrain

I own Urgh: A Music War, the picture looks and sounds excellent, best I've ever seen the movie look. I noticed no compression issues or artifacting.

It's 16x9 widescreen (it's about 1:78:1), my only issue is that the chapter stops are the "every five minutes" so you can't chapter to each song. It's a great release and there are some rumors floating around about some of the legalities/authorizations for music rights to it not being in order, so it may be pulled. I'd recommend picking it up.