There aren't too many of us that collect physical media anymore. I mean, even the most recent of the formats, the CD, in terms of audio that is, has gone the way of the dustbin. Cast aside by the streaming monsters, be it Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon's Alexa connection. However, there has been a bit of a resurgence in that CD department according to several articles I've read.
Even so, vinyl outsells compact discs by a large margin. The long thought dead format has shown a decade long unforeseen comeback that has put it in the billion dollar annual range in terms of sales.
But I'm not talking about audio here.
Right now film collectors, myself included, have many options to choose from among companies that remaster films for blu ray, and bundle them with bonus features and packaging bells and whistles. These compete with the streaming services, and the reason they do well is the streamers don't offer a choice of picture quality, framing, commentaries, permanency of location, or sundry other options the physical products bring. Actually, I've clicked on more that one film in recent months where the image was blurred, sized down to about 2/3 of the screen it occupied the center of, and sounded awful. Truly a disappointment, but lucky me, I had both films on a physical format anyway.
And really that's largely the reason for the argument made by most in the collector community why they do it.
There wasn't always a ton of options. Now, however, you have Scream Factory (an imprint of the long successful Shout!), Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, and up and comers like Synapse, Severin, and Scorpion, and some European folks like 88 and Second Sight. The overseas folks are starting to make their products available in Region 1 (to those not in the know, that means they can be viewed here in the States and Canada) and Australia's Umbrella Entertainment has brought limited amounts of re-releases into the American market.
Let's not forget Kino Lorber. They don't always pack the bells and whistles, but they include not just genre selections, but classic films that go way back to old school cinema, even digging up a few previously thought to be lost titles. The variety KL provides is quite broad, but the most recently dated stuff mostly falls into the cult category. Oddly, they released the nuclear nightmare fuel The Day After from 1983, but it must have been pressed only once. I know this for a couple of reasons, one being because it's not available on their website any longer. The other reason is I tried to buy it once, and most folks on eBay want more than 130.00 for the damn thing. I guess I'll have to stick with the MGM DVD copy I bought 12 years ago at an exchange for $3.99.
Yes. I'm a collector. But not like the ones with Instagram and YouTube accounts, or webpages. Those folks, surrounded by thousands of titles, are either loaded, or are shipped freebies for talking about the product. I'm frugal for two reasons.
A. I don't have money falling out of my asshole.
B. The hunt is most of the fun. Many times I have put a title back down on the shelf, or ignored its internet posting, due to the asking price. But eventually, months or years later, I'm able to track it down for a much, much more affordable rate. For some reason, that feels like a victory.
I'm digressing.
I'm going to go back to pre-boutique here, because really that's my point. Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, a company called Anchor Bay was digging up slashers from the 70's and early 80's and re-releasing them. They weren't 2K scans or anything, but the picture quality was generally greatly improved from previous offerings, and they often contained bonus features (frequently new to that disc's release) and a card with the original poster art that you could slip over their generally below Photoshop quality reworking of the cover.
One of the flagship titles of Anchor Bay was the Evil Dead trilogy. As a matter of fact, Bruce Campbell mentions in an interview during a Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs screening of Maniac Cop (now available on Synapse!) how much he wanted to thank Anchor Bay for their involvement in keeping the Deadites alive and kicking in the public eye. The other being John Carpenter's masterwork Halloween, along with its sequels, the less than overwhelming Halloween 4 and the abysmal Halloween 5. The repeated repackaging, remastering, and re-releasing of these titles kept Anchor Bay's cashflow most likely humming along in the horror department. Many of their other titles were numbered and those that weren't were really cool one-offs (Fade to Black, The Norliss Tapes, Charles Martin Smith's Trick or Treat) that weren't seen again, or at least, not for many years.
And it must be noted, that before Second Sight came along, Anchor Bay was the home of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead on DVD. My Dawn of the Dead Ultimate Edition, bought about 3 years before it's price went out the ridiculosity window due to the fact that it must have only been pressed that one time, is one of my prized Anchor Bay items.
Mind you, the horror genre weren't the only oars that kept the Anchor Bay boat afloat, as they distributed kiddie powerhouse Thomas the Tank Engine from 1995 to 2008. That was a major cash cow, I'm sure.
Actually, pre-DVD, I had a slick-ass clamshell Anchor Bay VHS of the 20th anniversary of John Carpenter's Halloween that I wish I still had, but that's neither here nor there. The point is Anchor Bay was keeping collectible horror afloat for quite a long time.
Back in the early days of my collecting, my kiddo and myself were always excited when the fall Anchor Bay displays came out in department stores to coincide with Halloween, brandishing many horror titles to pick and choose from. This is where I got C.H.U.D., Phantasm, Lightning Bug, Hellraiser, among others.
I guess my question is were they the predecessor or even the impetus for the modern-day genre boutique titles? After all, (with the exception of arthouse monsters Criterion) they were probably the only ones repackaging mostly genre films, cleaning them up, and putting them out on disc with bonus features. Other outfits may have been releasing old flicks, but often the image and sound were terrible and you were lucky to even sniff closed captioning, let alone a director's commentary on those things.
Regardless, among other physical media geeks, the name Anchor Bay usually draws a nod and a wink, and I'm often stunned at how many of those titles I still have, including numbered tin-cased Evil Dead II and Hellraiser pieces.
The last I heard Anchor Bay's library belongs to Lionsgate, the house that Saw built. Someone else bought the Anchor Bay name with the intention of once again doing what they did back in the day. Without access to their original library, and the competition from Scream, Arrow and the like, all I can say is I wish them well. It will be difficult ground to hoe.
But back in the day, whether at K-Mart, Shopko, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy, my eyes were always on the lookout for the white rectangle with the blue sailboat.
Maybe they did, or maybe they didn't launch the concept of the boutique. Either way, they were something completely different in their era, and really the only one consistently holding that line.
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