Digital VD

While I don’t pretend to have mastered the diplomatic complexities of the Middle East, I do know that if we’d simply treat Palestinian encampments like giant American food courts, in which friendly Chick-fil-A attendants walked around with trays full of toothpicked samples, the bloodshed would end. Nothing says, “Put the explosives down, Mustafa,” like an inviting platter of all-white-meat chicken.

Because of my slavish adherence to our system, my house is unlike others. While many pad around their kitchens singing college fight songs or current pop offerings, I sing commercial jingles. For a while, I favored those of discount electronics outlets–“Nobody beats the Wiz / Nobody beats the Wiz.” Then, it was local car dealers: “Jerry’s Ford / Makes it clear / Let the competition beware!” But a staple of my repertoire has been the early ’90s jingle of the world’s leading home-video retailer: “Blockbuster Video / Wow! / What a difference!”

It pains me to say it, but the song is over. Not just because Blockbuster long ago changed slogans, but because the lyrics have become a lie. If you live in a semi-rural area, as I do, chances are you won’t notice much of a Blockbuster difference, because the bigger, badder franchise has driven all the mom-and-pop stores to ruin.

Gone are all the personalities and idiosyncrasies. I can no longer look forward to the “employee favorites” shelf, where video clerk Paco would steer me to the latest in Latino prison movies. Likewise, since Blockbuster doesn’t carry adult titles, I can no longer drop behind the beaded curtain, where I wouldn’t actually rent films–I’m not some sort of perv or weirdo–to look at the pretty pictures and then smell the girls on the boxes.

More important, however, is that Blockbuster doesn’t even qualify as much of a video store anymore. In fact, in 1998, they dropped “video” from their name. It’s no wonder. Just walk into a Blockbuster (there are 5,300 of them nationwide), and try to find the videos that they used to offer grown-ups.

When you enter my local Blockbuster, you must first wade past one Disney rack, three kids racks (containing–count them–nineteen Mary-Kate and Ashley videos, including “How the West Was Fun”), the Hello Kitty Carry-Along Mini Dollhouse, the Stuart Little 2 Friction Vehicle Roadster, the snack and magazine racks, the Good Humor cooler, and the Scooby-Doo Tiki Fun Set. After you get past the six racks of Nintendo Gamecube, Xbox, and Playstation 2 offerings, and the video sell-through and clearance racks, only half the store is left for rentals.

But what really makes Blockbuster a malevolent corporate entity–one that’s more insidious than Arthur Andersen, Enron, and WorldCom combined–can be boiled down to three letters: D-V-D. Perhaps I gave it away already, but I don’t much care for DVD. I’m not even completely sure what it stands for–Digital Venereal Disease? As with the clap, it is dangerous to have unprotected contact with anybody in the throes of DVD hysteria–a condition which already afflicts nearly one-fourth of the rental market just five years after the technology was introduced. (DVDs have actually eclipsed VHS tapes in sales, a feat that took CDs 13 years to accomplish over audio cassettes).

These enthusiasts will rhapsodize about DVD’s superior picture and sound, about users not having to be kind and rewind (like I ever did anyway). They will bore you with all the bells and whistles that DVD affords (“Rent Jackie Chan’s ‘Gorgeous’–in which, ‘action has never looked this good’–and you can listen to it in 5.1 Dolby Digital Cantonese!”). If you try to defend the merits of VHS–say, the recordability (just try finding an affordable DVD player that records) or the infinite title selection that’s available in the VHS format–they will look at you as if you just blew your nose on your tie. They will call you a Luddite, a troglodyte, and worse. When I told one colleague that I was sticking with VHS, he asked, “Dude, do you also like your women with no breasts and huge butts?”

Perhaps most cloyingly, they will launch into turgid discourses on their home theater set-ups, which center around their DVD player as if it is a sacrificial virgin or a golden calf. They will tell you about their plasma flat-screens, and their shaker boxes, their five-speaker surround-sound setups complete with deep-bass subwoofers. They will say all this is for people who “really love movies.” No it’s not. This is for people one step removed from the greasy mooks you knew in high school who used to install neon lights in the undercarriage of their Camaros. When I watch a home movie, I don’t want thundering bass rolling up my spine. It makes me feel like I’m back in ninth grade, sitting in my friend’s older brother’s Barracuda, listening to Zeppelin while waiting for him to drive to the liquor store to buy us beer.

People who really love movies want as many of them to be available as possible at any given moment. These days, if you go to Blockbuster to find such a buffet, you’ve come to the wrong place. High-brow cineastes, of course, have always regarded Blockbuster as a McVideo store, a place where you can find 75 copies of “Men in Black” and nothing more obscure than “The Buena Vista Social Club.”

But aside from stores like Video Vault in Alexandria, Va.–which stocks over 40,000 titles and rents through the mail via their website–the truth is that Blockbuster easily outmatched your average mom-and-pop through innovative revenue-sharing deals with film studios. These compacts ensured that Blockbuster would receive more copies of VHS hits in exchange for also having to acquire the studio’s less lucrative secondary titles. At the time, it was a sound business decision, and the customer won, too. Not only was there a broader selection of barely-known titles, but there were more copies of the popular hits being demanded by the masses.

Recently, however, astute film-lovers have noticed a turnabout. At my local Blockbuster, it first manifested last year. The new DVD offerings had initially comprised three squares of shelves on the new releases wall. Within a few months, those three squares became five, then seven. From my own unscientific observations, it appeared that four-fifths of the customers were still renting VHS, but before you knew it, nearly half the new releases wall (which accounts for 80 percent of Blockbuster’s revenue) contained DVDs.

I comforted myself with the fact that the “What’s Hot” kiosk, which bisected the DVD/VHS new releases wall, and which inexplicably always seemed to feature films starring Freddie Prinze Jr., remained the province of VHS. Until one day, recently, when it was overthrown by DVDs. Next, DVDs were given VHS’s precious floor space. Even though there weren’t nearly as many DVDs in stock, VHS racks became overcrowded as their shelves were cut back.

Always the quick study, I became suspicious. When I asked the minimum-wage, problem-skinned clerk if they were planning to discontinue VHS, he adopted the foggy-eyed, mouth-agog look he always gives when I ask any question more difficult than “Do you take American Express?”

“Uhhhh, no,” he said, unconvincingly. “Corporate just wants us to make room for some DVDs.” By last fall, however, unbeknownst to me since I’m not in the habit of reading “Video Business” magazine, Blockbuster announced they were purging 25 percent of their old VHS stock (ironically called “Blockbuster Favorites”)–or roughly 2,000 titles per store. These titles, they said, only accounted for a fraction of one percent of their total revenue.

This wouldn’t seem so sinister if the same movies were available on DVD, which they largely aren’t. Neither, one could reason, would Blockbuster seem inclined to buy them even if they were available, since those films were extremely slow to rent anyway. What that means is that as far as Blockbuster is concerned, many of those purged films are likely lost down the sinkhole forever. Keep in mind that when DVD launched in 1997, only four titles were available in the new format. Since then, DVD has spread like a bad rash, enjoying faster adoption than any new technology of the last 20 years. While only three percent of the public owned DVD players in 1999, roughly a quarter do now, and half are expected to by 2004.

Still, because of all sorts of complications–from licensing agreements to filmmakers needing time to go back and lard up their DVD releases with bonus features–selection, which now includes thousands of titles, is still abysmal. Video Vault manager Tad Peyton, whose store is incorporating DVDs without ditching VHS, estimates that of their 40,000 titles, well over half don’t even exist on DVD. While cult-like DVDians are anxious to sound VHS’s death knell, they’d do well to remember that last year at this time, you couldn’t even rent “The Godfather” on DVD.

Blockbuster shareholders, however, will be pleased to know that this is a perfectly sensible business strategy. First of all, with rare exceptions like the laser disc–an overrated technology that turned out to be the metric system of home entertainment–few people go broke recognizing American consumers for what they are: scared little men (or women), who at the slightest tail twitch from another member of the vulgar herd, will bleat confusedly, then stand at attention waiting to be led. While a Blockbuster spokesman admitted to me that “It’s difficult to say who’s leading who”–meaning, is Blockbuster meeting demand, or creating it?–it’s a rather elementary deduction that Blockbuster is well-situated to create a DVD hysteria.

While loyal VHS patrons cluck about Circuit City’s recent announcement that they are completely abandoning VHS sales, it is not nearly as alarming as Blockbuster’s incrementalism. Not only is Blockbuster the largest video-retail renter in the world (their next largest competitor is one-fourth their size), but they control 40 percent of the VHS market, and 60 percent of the DVD market. With the audio cassette/CD wars fresh in everyone’s memory, what better way to telegraph VHS’s extinction than by cutting your store in half even when people still rent VHS tapes over DVDs by a 3-to-1 margin?

Though Blockbuster claims it will continue to meet its VHS customers’ needs, even as they promise that their stores’ stock will be 50 percent DVD by 2004, it’s fairly obvious that the needs Blockbuster is meeting are Blockbuster’s. DVDs are cheaper to produce, they aren’t subject to burdensome revenue sharing agreements with the studios, and Blockbuster can rent older DVD releases for the same price as new releases–since in the new format, they’re all relatively new releases. Consequently, DVDs provide a 10 percent higher profit margin than does VHS. Just in case you didn’t get the hint that Blockbuster wants you to rent DVDs over VHS, they also sell DVD players (you’re out of luck if you want to buy a VCR).

All of this is disastrous for a movie-lover who doesn’t have an alternative video store in his vicinity. In order to make room for the new DVDs, VHS cassettes have been flying out of the clearance bins faster than you can say “fire sale.” Just as an experiment, I went to my Blockbuster a few days ago to gauge just how anemic their selection has become. I tried not to hold it against them that they had purged my all-time favorite Coen brothers film, “Miller’s Crossing” (with no DVD replacement). Nor did I affect snobbery, looking for film-school cast-offs from Luis Bunuel or Michaelangelo Antonioni.

Instead, I took a very simple measure. Armed with a list of films that had taken the Best Picture Oscar since 1968, I set out to see how many of them my new, improved Blockbuster still stocked. Assuming videos were filed in their proper genres and alphabetized correctly (a large assumption–Blockbuster clerks tend not to be the strongest spellers), I found that out of 34 VHS Best Picture titles, Blockbuster was missing 10, and had only replaced 2 of those 10 on DVD. No “Kramer vs. Kramer” or “Chariots of Fire,” no “The Sting” or “The French Connection,” etc., ad nauseam.

While Blockbuster’s DVD-worshippers like to say that it is a format for true film-lovers, it seems they care more about the content delivery systems than the content itself. If somebody buys beautiful leather-bound, gold-leaf paged editions of John Grisham and Jackie Collins novels, we do not consider them serious lovers of books. And with holes like this in their catalog, it is becoming apparent that Blockbuster is to a good video store what an Odessa bookmobile is to the Library of Congress.

So for those who of us who miss our VHS stock, what do we get in exchange? Well, I went over to the DVD racks to look at all those movie-lover’s bells and whistles I’ve heard so much about. Now, it seems, I can see Billy Ray Cyrus in “Radical Jack” in 5.1 Surround. “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves,” a film I could barely get through in English, now comes with Spanish captioning. It would seem a crime to miss David Arquette’s commentary track for “Scream 3”–though not as big a crime, as say, watching him act in it. And then there’s the evangelical Apocalypse movie “Left Behind,” starring the increasingly preachy Kirk Cameron. This DVD contains something called “Actor’s Messages”–which sounds less like a bonus, more like a threat.

In fairness, I found exactly two titles that contained extras I’d be interested in seeing: Frank Sinatra’s interview after “The Manchurian Candidate,” and Woody Allen’s original theatrical trailer for “Bananas.” Are either of these worth the 2,000 VHS titles Blockbuster had to clear out? Hardly. Other than that, I’m left with: the storyboard-to-scenes comparison in “Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo”; the Thompson Twins karaoke from Adam Sandler’s “The Wedding Singer”; Ben Affleck’s French language track in “Reindeer Games”; the actors’ “talent files” and Thai subtitles of “Cruel Intentions 2.”

It is quite possible, even likely, that all of these releases have beautiful pictures and pristine sound. So what? This isn’t entertainment, it’s punishment. Maybe I would be interested in the deleted scenes from “Whitney Houston’s Greatest Hits”–if they contained backstage footage of her smoking crack with Bobby Brown. But they don’t, and I’m not.

Am I fighting a losing battle sticking up for VHS? Almost certainly. The best that even the industry’s propagandists (the Video Software Dealers Association) can muster is that “The VHS format is alive and well . . . it is far too soon to write its obituary.” Not very encouraging. But I will endure the smug put-downs of my friends and colleagues. They will say I am a dinosaur, a young fogey. They will call me a whimpering damsel lashed to history’s tracks. I will stand firm, and laugh right back at them. For even as they take out loans to afford their alphabetic extras–their LCDTs, their HDTVs, their PDPs, all of which center around their DVDs–there are already whispers and intimations from those who are planning their obsolescence.

The beauty of our system is that the current generation of self-satisfied, oppressive techno-jerks will shortly get their teeth kicked in by the next generation of the same. This gives me great pleasure. Just as I have to contend with the DVD bores of today, they will have to contend with the FMVD bores of tomorrow. (FMVD standing for Florescent Multilayer Video Discs, which hold eight times the data on a DVD, and which are not to be confused with FMDV–also known as foot and mouth disease.)

These friends and colleagues of course, will buy the FMVD, or whatever VD comes after DVD. And they will buy the VD after that, and the one after that, until finally their home entertainment is beamed off a satellite straight to the VD chips implanted in their heads. With any luck, the radiation will kill them. The vulgar herd will be thinned, and maybe a few of the survivors will finally join our silent minority, as we cling stubbornly to Ogden Nash’s lament: “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.