The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- O is for Out of Print

O

is for Out of Print

There was a time where being a serious movie buff required true dedication and hard work. There were no such things as VCRs or Laserdiscs or DVDs or Blu-rays or Netflix streaming or iTunes or YouTube or Bittorrent. If there was a movie you always wanted to see, you had to hope that someday a local revival house or TV station decided to show it. Problem was that the first option tended to focus more on well-respected critically acclaimed junk and the second guaranteed you’d see an edited version with all of the good stuff cut out of it.

Thankfully, those days are long past, but not all is golden in movie buff land. For all of our options, we’ve grown accustomed to certain levels of presentational quality and access. We want to watch what we want to watch now and we want it to look better than it did when it was actually released.

And the world simply doesn’t work like that.

Out of Print means being denied. It means wanting. It means desire.

It also means having a reason to go on. In a land of plenty where all is available purely by whim, there is no joy of anticipation or satisfaction of achievement. Searching for the Out of Print keeps your love of movies alive. It forces you to appreciate films that you might have once dismissed out of hand as terrible. It make you think of the ways the world has changed so that what was once considered a marketable product, is now an unviable property, unworthy of release.

Out of Print makes the IMDb the most fascinating website in the world, allowing you to discover previously unheard of projects whose worth you can only estimate until you finally get the chance to see them for yourself.

Perhaps someday soon Out of Print will cease to be and we will all have access to every single thing ever recorded by a camera. It’ll be cool at first, but soon the novelty will fade, taking our passion along with it. It’s just so much easier to love that which you cannot have.

O

is for Out of Print

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Out of Print

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Our Blessing and Burden