DVDs At Their Peak in the 2000s

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm just gonna do a quick little post on DVDs and how they were at the height of their popularity in the 2000s, before the introduction of Blu-rays. I'll be looking at three studios that did so much with the format, as well as the franchises that got the most out of DVDs during the 2000s. So let's get into it.

The 2000s. I was in high school from 2001 until 2006, the internet was starting to become even more prominent than it had been in the '90s, and studios had started putting their movies out on DVD rather than on VHS. While DVDs had been around since 1996 in Japan and 1997 in North America, it wasn't until the early 2000s that movie studios began doing something with the format beyond just slapping the movie onto it and it's trailer as a bonus feature. And even though VHS was still around in the 2000s, the format was basically dead by the time studios discontinued using them in 2006. Most studios anyway. Disney kept putting movies out on VHS through 2007 though they were exclusives to the Disney Movie Club and not released to retail stores. I'll be looking at Batman and Superman for Warner Bros., Star Wars for Fox, Star Trek, the movies and TV shows, for Paramount, and the Walt Disney Platinum Editions, as well as the two-disc special editions Disney put out for certain movies in the mid-2000s.

We started renting and buying DVDs in 2003 at the earliest, because I remember renting Star Trek Nemesis on DVD before I ever got it on VHS. We also had a bunch of Disney movies on DVD, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Lilo & Stitch, the Herbie the Love Bug movies, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. I personally wouldn't get a DVD player until about 2005 or 2006, when I got a portable DVD player. Since we're already on the topic of Disney, let's talk about Disney first.

While Disney had been releasing movies on DVD since 1998, when they released Mary Poppins on the format, and had only been releasing the animated movies on DVD since late 1999, it wasn't until 2001 when they began releasing two-disc editions with the Walt Disney Platinum Editions, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Even outside of that movies like Alice in Wonderland and Mulan got 2-disc special editions in 2004, as did some of their then most recent films such as The Emperor's New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. On the TV side of things things weren't great. Disney was wildly inconsistent with releasing TV shows on DVD. Some shows never got complete seasons only three or four volumes, while others got a season and a half and then didn't get finished until the 2010s. There were some shows that didn't get DVD releases at all. Regardless, TV shows produced by Disney didn't get anywhere near the amount of bonus features that the 2-disc DVD releases of the movies had. I have most of the Walt Disney Platinum Edition line, and am only missing four releases. I don't have the 2-disc DVD releases that Disney put out of some of the animated movies.

Warner Bros. on the other hand, did so much with their catalogue on DVD. They released complete season boxsets for even their older TV shows like Adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Dukes of Hazzard, as well as newer shows like Smallville, The O.C., and One Tree Hill. Their animated series library on DVD was extensive too with the entire DC Animated Universe getting released throughout the 2000s. Including the movies like Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. In terms of the movies, they would release giant boxsets of their more popular titles such as Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology: 1989-1997  which contains Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin, and Superman: The Ultimate Collection which contained all four movies in the Christopher Reeve Superman series, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, and Superman Returns, with each movie having multiple discs, and both sets having a continuing documentary that chronicles the production of each movie from development to release. The four Batman movies were released individually, while the each of the movies in the Superman set were released individually but without the documentary. I don't have the Superman set but I do have the Blu-ray version of the Batman set and all of the bonus features are the same on both. In fact, even to this day Warner Bros. still releases 2-disc DVD editions of their movies even though Blu-ray and 4K have essentially replaced DVD as the primary home media format.

While Paramount didn't do this with all of it's TV shows and movies, Star Trek was an example of the movies getting the 2-disc special edition treatment and the TV shows getting individual season boxsets as well as a complete series set. TOS and the movies were the only ones to have DVD releases prior to 2002, and TOS had a forty volume DVD set similar to the old Star Trek: The Collector's Edition VHS line from Columbia Home Video Library. All ten movies got the 2-disc treatment starting with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which never had a single disc release in the '90s the way the other movies did. All the sets had tons of bonus features. I've had all ten of the 2-disc edition releases of the movies, and I have all but two of the seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD, only missing seasons 6 and 7. I also have the first season of Deep Space Nine and the first two seasons of Voyager and they're all pretty cool sets. I don't have the original season sets for TOS though, but I do have a more recent DVD boxset for season 1 which is the late 2000s Remastered version of the season, rather than the original.

Star Wars was weird because while the TV shows (all two of them) and the TV movies (all two of them) had DVD releases, they were never complete season runs and didn't have any bonus features. Also George Lucas hadn't intended on releasing any of the movies on DVD until the Prequel Trilogy was completed in 2005. Which is why when Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace on home video in 2000, it had only a VHS release. And even when the movie had a DVD release in 2001 and then Episode II had a VHS and DVD release in late 2002, George insisted that the Original Trilogy would not be released on DVD until 2006 at the latest since Episode III was coming out in 2005, wrapping up the Prequel Trilogy. But then in 2004 the Original Trilogy was released on DVD in a giant boxset which included all three movies (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) as well as a bonus disc full of special features including the 2 hour documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy. I love the DVD boxset for the Original Trilogy because the bonus features are amazing as are those on the DVDs for the Prequel Trilogy.

There are so many other examples of amazing DVD releases but these are the ones I wanted to focus on because all of these came out between 2001 and 2006, during the height of DVD's lifespan as, once Blu-ray was introduced in 2006, DVDs started getting less and less bonus features to the point where by 2014 Disney had next to none bonus features on their DVD releases, saving the majority of them, including recycled DVD bonus features, for their Blu-ray releases.

Anyways folks that's gonna be it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more reviews and posts. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you later. Take care.