Sunday, January 02, 2011

Say bye to Star Wars


Dave and the pile o Korean food.

I met up today with my cousin Dave to grab food at the all you can eat Korean BBQ. It was good to get outside. Being sick over the Christmas holidays turned me into a recluse. Since I was being 'dragged' outside the house anyway I figured I'd drop off the Star Wars Definitive LaserDisc Collection over at William's. He had expressed interest in the Star Wars box set when I first started blabbing about the possibility of getting rid of my collection.

The few buyers that I had talked to were only interested in a few titles and out of that few they didn't offer much. Not that I was expecting a high resale value but at least a buck a disc. I didn't want to have just the crappy movies left with a few bucks so I ended up keeping the discs. Part of me didn't want to part with them at all. The time and effort that it took for me to find these specific LaserDisc titles was a large chunk of my life in the days of doing multimedia, visual effects and animation.

The weekly pilgrimages to Bay street video, Sam The Record Man, HMV, Tower Records, Monster Records, and the online LaserDisc mecca store Ken Crane's, to find that limited run of TRON or Seven Samurai, took some doing. I suppose like any collection a collector has put together there's the meticulous storage, the indexing, and in my case building a customized database for all the titles in my Psion 5. Like anything I suppose each title comes with a bit of history, sacrifices made to buy the "box set", and determination to collect titles before they went out of print. It's similar to listening to a song on the radio. Certain titles bring up certain memories.

I placed the S.W.D.C. on William's house stairs when he didn't answer the phone. It was like leaving a baby on the porch in the dark of the night. Sad to leave the item but happy that it would go to someone that would appreciate it.

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