There’s still a future in ‘real’ movies reckons Mal
Our growing consumption of online music and movies has claimed iconic Australian music and movie retailer, Sanity. The decades-old retail chain, Sanity, has long been a fixture in malls and high streets around Australia, but last week they last week that the continuing shift to digital music and movie consumption has finally forced them to close all their remaining bricks-and-mortar stores.
But the DVD is still far from dead, believes Reel Memories’ Mal MacDonald, who’s been in the home entertainment and movie memorabilia business for 49 years.
He said it’s just the latest technological change in the ever-changing way we’ve watched movies at home.
“Back in ‘74, it was all home projection, people would buy a film,” Mal said, referring to actual photographic film on a reel, before going through the list of formats he has dealt with in his time
“So it's gone from Cinefilm, reel-to-reel, 16 Millimetre, Super8 Sound, then Beta came along, VHS — if you blinked, you missed laserdisc, remember the 12-inch discs, which had little microdots the laser would scan just like the frames on a film? It was the forerunner of the DVDs we have?
“And how many types of DVDs have we got,” he continued. “There’s the standard DVD, which I sell heaps of here, there's Blu-Ray and there's about two others.”
The move to online streaming can be convenient, admits Mal, but some may be left behind.
“This is where it comes down to the crunch, because a lot of elderly people haven't got computers. What are they to do?” he said.
But more importantly, relying on an online provider for access to your favourite film or television series comes with the risk that it could be removed and then be simply unavailable.
This has long been the case with each move to new home entertainment technology, and a large part of Mal’s business is sourcing films that have fallen through the cracks and failed to transition to DVD or a streaming service.
“That's happened and that's happening with a lot of the stuff. When you look back at the old catalogues, which I've kept, and you see what came out on VHS which now you can't find on DVD, a lot of it still hasn't been released, Mal said, but it is something that he is working on..
“I deal with a big company back in Sydney and they ask my suggestion for titles, so I've given them pages of all these titles. I'm having a field day because they're releasing stuff, some of the titles you can't find anywhere —you won't find them on streamers,” Mal said.
“There’s still probably hundreds of titles I've given him, which I'd love to see on DVD. But what he has released, I'm having a field day with here, because a lot of that stuff is not up on streaming.
“A lot of it, people will only find it Reel Memories, where the memories remain real!”