We need to break a habit, people. Our favorite TV show is being released on DVD in complete seasons and we, like jerks, go out and buy Season One and then later on, we buy Season Two and Season Three and so on. We have to stop doing this.
Why? Because most of these are later going to come out in complete sets with more bonus material. This article lists some of the forthcoming such releases and I'll quote one here…
Not to be outdone, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is wrapping up its series of "complete season" sets of M*A*S*H with a 36-disc boxed set that contains all 11 seasons, the M*A*S*H film, and two bonus discs of never-before-seen extras, including a trivia game, a featurette on the show's fan base, and a 30th anniversary reunion of cast and crew. The Martinis and Medicine Collection is due November 7 at a suggested retail price of $199.98; season 11 comes out individually the same day.
Okay: Let's say you've always loved M*A*S*H and when they started releasing them on DVD, you raced to your local video shop and bought each of the first ten volumes. Assuming any sort of decent discounting, that's around $240 you've invested in those ten sets. On November 7, you can pay another $24 and get Volume 11 (for a total expenditure of $264) and you'll have all the episodes but you won't have the two bonus discs of never-before-seen extras, the trivia game, the featurette on the show's fan base, or the 30th anniversary reunion of cast and crew.
Won't you wish you'd waited and just bought the two hundred dollar version that includes all that, plus a copy of the original movie?
This is not just unfortunate timing on your part. Even as you read this, top execs at home video companies are huddling in meetings, discussing ways to package and repackage their wares so that you'll buy them more than once. There will be fans of M*A*S*H who will leave their old DVD volumes on the shelves and buy the new collection just to have everything in one nice package, thereby purchasing much of this material twice. That's the idea. (Appealing to the same mindset, there are companies that deliberately plan to release feature motion pictures at least twice. First, they bring out the standard video release and later — a year or two down the pike — they come out with the Platinum or Silver or Deluxe or Whatever They Call It Edition that includes the film letterboxed and with commentary tracks and documentary material and outtakes and such. Some people who didn't get the first release will buy this one but the big expectation is that many who did buy the previous release will buy it again.)
Well, you can fall for it but I won't. We're now about to see season-by-season releases of a number of great TV shows including The Addams Family, The Odd Couple, Get Smart and Whose Line Is It Anyway? I ain't buyin' any of 'em season-by-season. True, there's a risk that they won't eventually be collected into deluxe sets but I don't think any of them will be that difficult to pick up later as individual releases. The first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was released on DVD four years ago and you can still snag it and the others that have been released from Amazon, some of them for half-price. Season One of All in the Family on DVD even before that and all the collections to date are all still in print, some of them at discounted prices. If there's never a complete-in-one set of The Odd Couple, I can pick up the single volumes at some point in the future.
This kind of thing — repackaging reissues in a way designed to coerce loyal fans into buying the same thing again — hurt the comic book business greatly. A lot of readers eventually learned that when a story is released as a four-issue mini-series, it's better to wait and buy it when it's collected in a one-volume trade paperback. DVD buyers will eventually catch on the same way and the practice will cease…but until it does, we have to be smarter than they think we are. I've already bought a lot of movies several times — once on Beta, again on VHS, then in the deluxe, remastered VHS release, then on Laserdisc, then on DVD, etc. It's time to stop.