Monday, February 28, 2011

Blu-ray Series Kickoff: Blu-Balled

As an in-training tech nerd, I loves me some shiny gadgets. Granted, I don’t always buy the things (that costs money!), but I generally try to keep up with the Next Big Thing in the consumer electronics world. A few years ago, when the media was calling Blu-ray the Next Big Thing, I took notice, but was ultimately uninterested. Why, I thought, would I want to pay for an expensive piece of technology I could only appreciate with an even more expensive TV? Sure, I can always get a PlayStation 3, but at $599 US dollars, it’s still way out of my price range.

Time passed, and several things happened. Many months of savings (and a hard-fought refund with Westinghouse) rewarded me with 40” of Samsung LCD. I moved in with a roommate who actually had a PS3. And most importantly, Blu-rays started becoming super cheap. Not pawn shop cheap, but cheap enough. My inner techie yearned to jump on the HD bandwagon; it was now practical to do so! I still held back, though—I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but I knew that if it was meant to be, a good, definitive reason would jump out at me.

And jump it did. Slowly, surely, and decisively, Disney DVDs started to receive fewer and fewer bonus features in favor of their Blu-ray counterparts. Movies like The Princess and the Frog shipped their Making Of featurettes only in hi-def, and the supplemental extras that had long been DVD’s siren song started drifting to a new format. Well bugger, I though, I guess I’m making the switch.

That was seven months ago, and my initially-modest Blu-ray collection has swelled to a still-modest-but-not-bad size. It’s not what you’d call a large collection, but my DVD catalog ain’t exactly that big either, so it doesn’t suffer much from comparison. Mercifully, major retailers like Target and Wal-Mart offer Blu-ray movie specials on a regular basis, making it even easier for me to build a library of HD goodness.

What does this have to do with you, my beloved audience? Well, I need to write about something while I wait for Oliver & Company to arrive in the mail; why not make a new series based on the home theater impulse purchases of a rural twentysomething? Okay, there’re plenty of reasons not to, but this way I can keep myself sharp, writing, and active, while you folks can formulate your own disparaging opinions based on my taste in movies. Everybody wins!

Bottom line: new blog series, filled with movies old, new, and (hopefully) cheap. This series will be in addition to our regular cast that includes Our Feature Presentation, video games, and Terrible Movies. As with that one article that kicked off that one Disney series, I’m still trying to decide a name for the thing, so feel free to offer one up in the comments. Stay tuned—yet more internet movie kerfuffle awaits!

PS – My pool of movies is fairly shallow at this point, and I’m open to suggestions of what to fill it with. As always, leave ‘em in the comments where I can find them, unless, of course, you want to send them to me on Twitter.

No comments:

Post a Comment