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Showing posts from May, 2023

Alice in DVHS-Land

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"...that's how it always begins. Very small."  -Egg Shen-  Did you know that the first truly high-definition consumer video format was neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray, but instead a version of VHS that predates both of them by at least four years? The Entrance to the Rabbit Hole For the last twenty-three years I have watched The Transformers: The Movie on (or very close to) my birthday. It started as a silly ritual and even grew tiresome once or twice until the addition of a wrinkle: each year right before my birthday I would find some novel way to watch it. One year I watched it on an airplane using a Royole Moon personal cinema, one year I watched it on a Sega Genesis using a Mega Everdrive Pro, one year it was on Laserdisc on a CRT etc...  At a certain point in that journey I decided I wanted to revisit my original experience.  The first time I had ever seen the film was when my parents rented a VCR and I got to pick out a movie from the rental store - it was an original