I saw an article the other day that Netflix is planning to end its DVD by mail service. We haven’t used it ourselves for a few years; indeed, I don’t even have a DVD player anymore, and my laptop doesn’t even have a CD/DVD reader. Still, the news provoked almost an emotional reaction in me. In the words of Digory Kirke from “The Last Battle”, I saw it begin. I did not think I would live to see it die.
I don’t remember the exact year I first became aware of DVDs; growing up in the 90s of course we got videos and went to the Blockbuster and the library, but eventually in the early 2000s I began to notice that was changing. I’m pretty sure it was the early 2000s because I was at a friend’s house, and he had the movie Dinosaur on DVD. I remember thinking how very cool it was that you could skip right past the stuff about the egg and Aladar hanging out with the lemurs and go straight to the scene with the meteor. (What? I’m a disaster-movie kind of guy.)
Here’s the interesting part: what you may not remember is that Blockbuster actually had a DVD rental service too. I don’t remember the exact terms now, but I think it provided that if you rented a DVD by mail from them, and returned it to the store, you could get a free video rental in exchange. It was all right for a while, and I went with it, and then came the Fateful Choice.
I wanted to watch The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie, a classic collection of the greatest Looney Tunes hits, including What’s Opera, Doc? and the one with Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers. The Blockbuster DVD by mail service didn’t have it. Netflix, on the other hand, did. I made the switch and never looked back.
At one time you could get five DVDs at once through Netflix; oh, those were the glory days. You could burn through whole seasons of shows if you wanted to, and only use streaming as a backup, if that! Ah, memories.
Alas, time marches on. The five-at-a-time DVD rental soon became three, and then I no longer had a DVD player, and now I hear it’s ending. So it goes.
Closing Time
I looked it up; the last movie I rented on DVD through Netflix was Thor: The Dark World. One of my favorite parts was the “Into Eternity” melody where *spoiler* Frigga dies. I include it below. Seems appropriate.