Choosing Between DVD and VHS in the Early 2000s

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So today I'm going to do something a little bit different. Rather than talk about a particular piece of entertainment that I grew up with, I'd like to talk about being able to go to the store and choosing between buying a movie on VHS or buying it on DVD in the early 2000s. Specifically I'll be talking about five of my favourite movies that came out on DVD between 1998 and 2002. So they aren't necessarily the most popular movies of whatever decade they were originally released theatrically in. This is also going to be from a Canadian perspective, though if you're in the U.S. you can apply it to your circumstances as well. Also, this is a completely fictional scenario, though the movies are ones I ended up having on physical media at some point in my life, either on VHS or DVD or both. So, let's get into it.

It's late January 2003, and you're a teenager in high school and you're hanging out with your friends at a strip mall that has a Walmart, a Futureshop and a Chapters, a movie theater (very likely Cineplex Odeon) and a restaurant or two such as Denny's and Montana's, with a McDonald's across the road, and maybe a Tim Hortons as well. You just saw The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the movie theater and you decided to do some shopping before your parents are due to pick you up because you live in the middle of nowhere, are too young to drive yet, and there's no public transit service out in your area. Knowing the movie and music selections at Futureshop are better than at Walmart or Chapters, you go into Futureshop and while your friends go to the CD section to pick up the CDs they're looking for, you make a beeline to the movie section and start browsing, hoping to pick up some new movies with the money you got from relatives for your birthday and Christmas. Here are the movies you see.

 

The first movie you see on the shelf is Batman: The Movie. Both the VHS and the DVD from 2001. You never owned the official VHS release of the movie as it's a movie you saw on TV and have it taped off of PBS. And, even though you don't own it on VHS outside of that taped off TV version, you pick it up on DVD because you just got a DVD player (it's a DVD/VHS combo player) for Christmas and got Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Austin Powers in Goldmember, and Scooby-Doo on DVD to go with it.

Next, you see Batman Forever on DVD only. Since you already own it on VHS, you're not super disappointed that the VHS isn't there. You decide to pick it up on DVD since you already own Batman, Batman Returns, and Batman & Robin on DVD.

Then you see Beauty and the Beast: Special Edition on both VHS and DVD. Your sister got it on VHS for Christmas, so you pick up the DVD for your collection. It's a bit more expensive than the two Batman DVDs because it is a 2-disc release rather than the single disc releases that the other two are.

Then you see Spaceballs on both VHS and DVD and you pick it up on both since you don't already own it on VHS (You rented it over the summer of 2002). 

The last movie you see that you're interested in is Star Trek Generations on DVD. It's also the movie you were hoping to get on the format since it's your favourite Star Trek movie, contrary to popular consensus within the Star Trek fan community on the online message boards. They also had the director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on DVD, but these five movies, including the VHS and DVD versions of Spaceballs take up your budget for this trip, so you join your friends as they make their way to the cash with the various CDs they planned to buy. You can't wait to get home so you can watch the movies you've just bought.

I chose to go this route with this blog post, because I remember what it was like to find Batman: The Movie and Spaceballs on DVD, as they're both movies I didn't own on VHS when I was a kid. I borrowed Spaceballs on VHS from a friend of the family's in 2000, and I had Batman: The Movie on VHS because my dad taped it off PBS for me in 1992 or 1993, sometime after I started watching some episodes of the 1966 TV show on YTV. In all honesty, I didn't see the VHS releases that coincided with the DVD release of either movie at Futureshop when I got the DVDs in 2004 or 2005, whenever I got the portable DVD player that was the first DVD player that I personally owned (my parents had a DVD player as early as 2002). And you also don't need to have been a teenager in 2003 to know what it was like to find these movies on DVD either. You could be any age as long as you were old enough to have seen the movies on VHS or on TV. Or any movie really. As long as it was coming out on DVD in 2003 or had come out on DVD between 1998 and 2002. Whether it was the latest movie like The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which had come out on VHS and DVD in August, 2002, or the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which had been out on VHS since 1982, and out on DVD since 1997, with the then most recent DVD release having come out in 2000

I also did it this way so you could imagine going to the store in 2003 and seeing these movies on the shelf on either VHS or DVD or both, whether you already had them or not. Also, it was only an eight year period, between 1997 and 2005 where you could get movies and TV shows on VHS and DVD simultaneously. Where you could choose to pick up a new movie on either VHS or DVD, or both if you had enough money for that.

I think that's going to be it for me for today. I hope you all enjoyed this blog post. I might do something similar with going to the movie theater in the late '90s and early 2000s because it was a unique experience and very different from how going to movie theaters is in 2025. Not that I'd really know what it's like to go to the movies in 2025 since I haven't been to a movie theater since December 2019, but even in 2019, we were starting to get things like assigned seats, they'd removed the old box office booths from the entranceways of the theaters sometime in the early to mid 2000s, and they'd replaced the old theater seats with more comfortable chairs in the early to mid 2010s. So until then have a great rest of the evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.