I am the monarch of the sea…

Don’t ask me why I started thinking about this at 6:45 a.m. today but I meant to blog about it weeks ago and kept forgetting. If you haven’t picked up the new Indiana Jones boxed set on DVD let me put in a plug for doing so right now.

I got my first DVD player in 1997 as payment for reviewing movies for the then fledgling Attack of the 50Foot DVD spin-off site at Stomp Tokyo. We all rented or bought DVDs and then wrote short reviews, focusing on the quality of the transfer, the extras and the sound and special effects stuff, basically to offer guidance for folks who might want to buy them. I quit writing for them a few years back but the site continues to grow with the medium and if you’re a fan of movies at all it’s a really useful tool to visit before you buy and is always a fun read.

Anyway, when I was first discovering DVD everything was awesome. I loved the extras and commentary tracks, especially when you nabbed one with a major actor or director talking. And since DVDs are so much cheaper to mass produce than videos people were re-releasing all kinds of great old movies and the whole thing was just a film lover’s wet dream.

And then it got kinda old hat. I can’t remember the last time I bothered to watch all the extras on a rented disc or really noticed a difference in quality because all I’ve watched recently have been big studio releases of the last five years or so. And frankly, distributors seem to have gotten really boring and predictable in terms of packaging and extras so that every new movie that comes out seems to have been deliberately edited to leave enough on the cutting room floor to sell an “extended edition” DVD.

It took them long enough to get around to it but the release of the Indian Jones films to DVD is the first such thing to get me excited about the medium again in nearly three years. I ran out and bought it the day it became available and have not been disappointed.

The restored Raiders is absolutely gorgeous. Even in my newbie days with DVDs I don’t ever remember sucking in my breath the way I did at the visual panoramic at the beginning of this first installment in what is probably the film series with the most impact on my childhood other than Star Wars. The film is beautiful and the sound just rolls across your living room–it was like being transported to the jungle.

My Grandfather took me to see Raiders in the theater in 1981 and it’s one of the few truly vivid memories I have from my childhood, probably because going to a movie with Granddad was not a normal thing and going to an adventure movie with him was so cool because I knew, even at age 9 that he was going for me. He had no interest in and most likely wouldn’t really enjoy the film itself but I wanted to see it, so that was good enough reason for him to suffer through it. I don’t remember having many moments like that with Granddad, who was known for most of my childhood to utter, “don’t pester me!” at regular intervals. Going to see this movie with him left a big impression both because the movie was so cool and because I was seeing it with him. His only comment afterwards? “It was really LOUD!”

Along with Aliens, Terminator 2, Star Wars and now LOTRFOR, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite adventure movies of all times and this disc gives it exactly the loving treatment it deserves. And I haven’t even watched the extras yet. So, go buy it. Or tell me you want it and I’ll put it on your birthday list. Seriously.

Edited three times to fix my atrocious typos and spelling errors. Note to self: Don’t blog that early in the morning.