Page 152 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

The DVD: Home V ew ng of Mov es Comes of Age | 1 1

Not only were the DVDs attractive to the consumer, but the manufacturers
liked them as well. Costing less than half as much to produce as a videotape, the
DVDs could sell for as much if not more (especially when packaged as “special
editions”). This made it financially attractive for the manufacturers to produce
as many movies on DVD as possible, leading to a renewed popularity of old
movies. Restored Hollywood musicals, films noir, romantic comedies, and even
silent films have found their way to DVD, creating an entirely new fan base for
films that had not been seen by the general public for years.

BaCkgrounD anD hisTory

Home viewing of commercial movies began on the heels of World War I with
the introduction of the Pathé Baby with its 9.5-millimeter center-sprocket film
in 1922 and the transfer of professional films to that gauge. The Kodascope, Ko-
dak’s first 16-millimeter home system, soon followed. Though these were more
curiosities than anything else, they gave people a taste for home viewing that
was only to grow over the next decades up to the point where, by the end of
the century, home viewing had become the driving financial force behind the
American film industry.
Just as cinema has gone through numerous revolutions since the 1920s, so
has home viewing. In keeping with the technology of the time, the Baby and the
Kodascope of the 1920s had no ability to produce sound. When sound finally
came to the movies in 1927, it did not also come to home viewing. For home
projectors, that came a few years later—in 1932, with the introduction of an
RCA Victor sound system.
The popularity of television, starting in the late 1940s, led to a new way of
watching movies at home. No longer did people need projectors and their own
film libraries; now, they could simply turn on the set, sit down, and watch. Un-
fortunately for home viewers anticipating first-rate movies on the small screen,
the movie studios of the day saw television as a threat, as competition. They
would not release their major pictures to the television stations or networks,
forcing television, when showing movies at all, to rely on B-westerns, science
fiction, and horror movies, leading to a nostalgia for such films that remains
to this day among the baby-boomers growing up at the time. It wasn’t until the
early 1960s that recent feature films were regularly shown on television, starting
with NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. Before that time, only a few major fea-
ture films were aired regularly on television, most notably The Wizard of Oz at
Thanksgiving and It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas. It was television that made
both films the cultural icons they now are, something that studio executives,
anxious and protective, were not able to appreciate until years later.
By the 1970s, having finally proved they could augment studio profits when
shown on television, movies were a staple of both network and local-station fare.
They had established themselves as an important part of home entertainment
for the average American, not just those who could afford film projection equip-
ment. Soon, movies would become one of the most important parts of home
entertainment with the introduction of inexpensive systems that could record
whole movies for playback later, such as the Video Home System (VHS) and