>> RANTS > FROM THE PEN OF THE MASTER GEEK

DVD is Killing My Kung-Fu

Your friendly neighborhood Geek is a tad bit miffed. It is beginning to feel as if my vast knowledge of popular culture is slowly becoming less impressive. Sure, it wasn't as if I was making people green with Geeky envy to begin with, but you gotta’ milk what strengths you have, you know? The problem is that the DVD market is killing my social relevance, much in the same way file sharing is killing the box office, (or short theater to home times, or crap movies, or 17 year-old theater employees, or Mitchell Bickford, or whatever else they can think of at the time). This slow death of my mad knowledge has been made ever more evident with the release of The Muppet Show, Season 1. (The set is fantastic by the way, and only makes me miss Jim Henson and Vincent Price all the more).

It wasn't always like this.

In the beginning a Geek had to work long and hard for their information. While you normal people were out there seeking hot love or studying for the test on Monday, we Geeks were wading through the strange masses at Sci-Fi conventions looking for some lost nugget of information. These weren't the nice and shiny convention halls either, oh no. These were sticky-floored meeting halls in rundown hotels on the outskirts of shady Nevada towns. Sometimes it took hours, even days to learn that the first draft of Ghostbusters actually opens with the team fighting the big monster (or that there were multiple paranormal eliminators in the world and that the flick took place in the future). Useless or not, we Geeks loved learning about our favorite films and televisions shows. And, much like an ex-smoker trying to convince their friends to quit we would drop little useless nuggets of knowledge and facts every chance we got.

Then came the Internet.

Both a boon and a curse to Geeks, the Internet allowed us to spread our knowledge to any and all who wished it. You would think that the Internet would have meant the downfall of useless knowledge being in the hands of a few. That didn't really happen. See, by then many of the media companies had gotten pretty wise as to what went on at Sci-Fi conventions. As such, it was growing harder and harder to find bootleg anything. With Paramount hiring spies and Lucasfilm sending in representatives, it simply wasn't worth the risk to traders and business people to make available less than legal copies of scripts, props, or videos. While you could still find copies of the Star Wars Holiday special or the David Hasselhoff version of Nick Fury it just wasn't the same. That was all right though; the Internet took the place of seedy conventions. No longer did we need to wade under the folding tables of poorly manicured booth merchants. (Which sounds far more disgusting and horrible then it really was). No, we could now wade through the bulletin boards and user groups that populated cyberspace. This was not without its dangers however; as was evidenced by the slew of completely wrong information that outnumbered the real facts by about 10 to 1. Like the much hyped, but very wrong belief that after smoking the Death Star Luke yells "Carrie" as he exists his X-Wing class Incom Snub fighter. (Um, that was a bit much, wasn't it)? Still, most fans weren't willing to put in the Boolean effort to find out the real facts about their favorite show or movie. We Geeks still had the power.

Until DVDs came along.

I understand that DVDs aren't the newest of technology but it hasn't been until recent years that most films are getting Directors Cut or Collectors Editions treatments. Shoot, even the worst of National Lampoon movies (of which there are many) get the Special Edition version. I'm all for nice and pristine copies of my favorite flick but did they have to cram all kinds of lesser information onto them? Now anyone with a remote control and an urge to sit on their butts in front of the television a tad bit longer can learn that the blood rush in Evil Dead 2 was caused by building the room at a 90-degree angle. I suppose the biggest loss is an emotional one. Strange as this may sound, it always filled me with a true sense of accomplishment whenever I discovered something about a film that not many other fans knew about. It felt even better to pass that information onto my fellow Geeks. Not because I enjoyed knowing more than others did, but because it felt like I was passing on knowledge to a new generation of fans. Like some Geek elder wanting to make sure that the knowledge of Jean Claude Van Damme as the first choice to play the monster in Predator would never be lost. There was a visceral pleasure in watching a painfully grainy bootleg VHS copy of a lost show pilot or outtake. Sure, the image was terrible, the sound was crap, and the tape was always in danger of being destroyed by your VCR, but there was something special about watching the scene or flick with your Geeky buddies. Some of that feeling is lost now and with it, my Geek Kung Fu.

That’s okay though.

I guess it means I will just have to dig even deeper for my phat Geek knowledge. Hopefully that will make the discovery all the more sweet. I will make a promise to you fine readers however. When the day comes that your friendly neighborhood Geek is some famous writer or producer and I get to make my own uber Collectors Edition of my flick...

I'll keep bits of information out of it. I'll save it for the conventions and rumor boards.

Promise.