Mid-July 2023
Into every household, some out-of-date film DVDs must fall. In my household, many of those DVDs are quite old, going all the way back to 2017! The classic Hollywood movies purchased on DVD during that year were replacements for the home-recorded ones featured on TV (back in the stone-age days of satellite reception). The cable-station was TCM, Turner Classic Movies. Dear Husband recorded dozens of flicks that were presented by the late and wonderful Robert Osborne. His insider-info and artistic assessments of the Golden Age of Hollywood were so intriguing and accurate that I wanted to somehow transfer his verbal bits onto data-bits — and leave behind the flick!
It was an innovative idea that lacked any technology for its realization. That unfulfilled concept reminds me of the “invention” that I drew up in the fifth or sixth grade: a ketchup bottle with a dial-top that would measure out the desired amount, instead of the splat-glop-overage, onto your food. This past week, on 4 July, to be specific, we watched Winchester ’73 as part of having a nice, quiet Fourth of July, just the way that Sheriff Wyatt Earp suggests to the vigilante-brother portrayed by James Stewart. The movie’s a classic, but our disk is less than optimal. Dear Husband went online to purchase the Blu-ray version, hopefully one manufactured after 2017.
Not a prayer, or an earthly, of finding one at the amazonian selling platform for American customers. We’ve experienced this dearth of buying-choices with other classic Hollywood films. An earlier copy of Notorious hailed from South Korea! The latest Blu-ray version of Winchester ’73 is available from a seller in Denmark. It’s a newer version of what we bought six years ago; but it’s not been transferred to Blu-ray for consumers in the U.S.— where the movie was made! Undoubtedly, the byzantine copyright laws have helped to foster this freakingly frustrating search by Americans to procure movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood. A cheaper payout (to whomever currently possesses the copyright) in other countries is vastly preferred by the Globalist Pig to cutting a bigger check for the cost of American consumption of a piece of American film art. Furthermore, Universal Pictures couldn’t pay Mr. Stewart his requested fee in 1950, and so Jimmy, ever the Scots, suggested they pay him a cut of the gross. This financial arrangement was the first of its kind for any studio since the advent of talkies. It worked out quite well for this actor, who might have been savvy enough to see that the profitable days of the studio were numbered. Indeed, this type of deal hastened the demise of the studio system. The Europeans currently appear to have a lock on many of the Blu-rays from Tinsel-town productions of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. I’m quite pleased to think that the Europeans are finally getting a chance to see how The West was won, albeit through an often highly idealized screenplay. I am nonetheless mildly miffed that Americans are not able to update, or even stock, their own domestic vintage cinema vaults.
There’s a nefarious underlying reason for this disparity in celluloid art of the productive Yankee past. The electronic viewing market of Americans, as it transpired during the past few years, threw a wretched wrench into the control-freak plans by corporate elites to control what we watch, where we watch, when we watch, how we watch, and if we watch. Blu-rays, especially of good, old-fashioned, patriotic, time-honored, decent and dignified motion pictures were going to be Archaic Things of the Past. The Shiny New Universe of Streaming Original Content (aka politically-correct and pornographic propaganda) would overtake any and all previously digitized content. So why laser-disk any more of the tired, old DVDs? That vicious universe of wildly acclaimed, weird and creepy content did not materialize during the past few years. In reality, it vaporized. The media-masters of that universe fumed:
Why, you naughty salt-of-the-earth consumers of the USA! Just try to find your beloved stick-in-the-mud American Movies on Blu-ray! Enter the enterprising free-market mischief makers, the hackers in their hiding places. For all I know, these deviant creatures came up with this workaround while they were locked in their houses during the beta-version pandemic. A piece of software hasn’t been written that hasn’t been hacked. The Robin Hoods of Hackers have sprung forth to do good for humanity! There exists, online, an assortment of vendors who offer modified players for Blu-rays Without Borders. The Regional DVD player has been limiting, if not eliminating, domestic distribution of American-made silver-screen gems. The After-Market Region-Free, Code-Free Blu-Ray player has emerged from the darkness of globalist-ghoul-control. One customer review crows that the size of this re-programmed black box is great: He can put it atop his fireplace!
I’m impressed and intrigued by the imaginative impulse of crafty, creative and enterprising individuals in America, and elsewhere, who consider the illegitimate imposition of fiats and mandates upon their lives as ripe opportunities to technologically soar around — and above — the petty, pompous philistine potentates who believe they rule over us with swipes of their dingbat decrees. I ought not use the term “dingbat” since it’s a technical reference in typography, a printer’s ornament or character. The dingbat was, once upon a bookbinder’s time, used to construct a box frame on a page or to order sections on the printed paper. Those tinpot despot decrees regarding how We the People live our lives, and watch entertaining stories on disk, and travel, and garden, and buy goods and services, even eat — they cannot keep up with the relentless march of humans toward liberty. Their jaw-dropping incompetence and arrogance expand three-fold before our very eyes. No wonder we seek solace in the mythic movie past!
There’s no need to organize revolt the way Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood did, aeons ago. The revolt has happened quite naturally, quite wonderfully, and, according to the emperors without clothes, quite unexpectedly! It’s a small world, after all, when one considers the plights we’re all in, globally speaking. It’s become very dizzying for these corrupt ciphers to figure out their next rake-off scheme and the latest gambit at holding onto their ill-gotten power. Too-big-to-fall has become too-corrupt-to-stand-up. There are countless other examples of the phenomenal individuals who are devising and designing means and methods, entire cottage industries, that propel the heart, mind, and soul into the freedom of being. My personal favorite involves the typefaces that were the dreamer-prime mover behind a young Steve Jobs as he envisioned aspects of his Apple genius machine.
His love of letterpress metal type, and of fonts (a subset of typeface), drove that machine toward success, more than forty years ago. The current crop of dullard schemers, and tiresome tekkies, at Apple Inc., has decided to do away with a large percentage of the typefaces for Apple Pages. There have, consequently, arisen digital domains that offer oodles of online printing fonts. Dafont, in Sweden, is one of them. They’re hitting the bulls-eye, capitalistically speaking, even in Sweden! While the free-loving citizens of the nations of the world work feverishly to erect some semblance of physical borders to protect their beloved homeland. the innovators of today are working fiendishly to arrive at a tomorrow where the individual can claim the sorts of outlooks upon the world that a free man of medieval times possessed. That archaic spirit might not have known of his priceless possession.
We living spirits know quite well about our priceless possession called liberty. And we know equally well who our enemies are: those who would rob, cheat, filch, purloin, and sneak-thief that liberty from us. One trick is to divert those treasures of the film past into the forgotten past. We’ve survived the obscene overlord obsession with using a Chinese virus to institute a vile statism wherein the citizen is a pawn, and the immigrant the 21st-century slave. The real pawns and slaves are the bureaucrats and boobs-in-charge of governments that do not govern. Blu-rays without borders are the first wave of a future that the socialist planners and government shills of the globalist pigs did not predict. To predict anything, a person has to first be in touch with reality. Our out-of-touch tyrants can’t pay pollsters enough to figure out that mise-en-scène. There’s hope for a bright and shining future, filled with blue rays!