Been on lddb.com for a little over four years, was active on USENET including alt.video.laserdisc in years past, and have been into LD for a little over 20 years now, but only started coming into this forum.
My LD history: Couldn't afford much as a teenager and young adult (had a used $50 player from a thrift store, and for several years only owned 5 LDs: the Tron box set, Sonic Youth: Screaming Fields of Sonic Love, A Christmas Story, Rumble in the Bronx, and On Dry Land: The Desert Biome), but started buying heavily the last few years of LD's life in the marketplace. Had a local LD store -- Laser's Edge in Carmel, Indiana -- and also bought from places like Blockbuster Music, Media Play, Camelot Records, and online from Ken Crane. I was one of the last supporter of LD, doing pre-orders on the final year's worth of releases through Ken Crane, or whatever they had changed their name to by that point... which means that I got fun stuff like Trekkies, Bringing Out the Dead, Sleepy Hollow, The Matrix, etc. My (now ex-) wife and friends thought my hobby was weird, but they enjoyed the benefits of extras, commentary tracks, and so on... and I had a lot of stuff that never made it to sell through VHS.
Then the LD marketplace crashed due to DVD, and I began getting dozens of discs from eBay, used book stores, and Big Emma's. My collection quickly veered from "high quality cinema" to "whatever I could get for under a $1." Then I started school in 2002, and LD and other hobbies were put on hold (I did raid video stores for used DVDs, now standing at around 1200 titles, most under $2 a pop). Graduated in 2010, and until I find a grad school program, a couple of hobbies are back in the fray. I never got back into gaming, academia has totally warped my reading habits so much of my library is now in storage... but I picked up a 55" 3D television and 3D Blu-Ray player as a graduation gift to myself (specifically for Tron: Legacy), started buying Blu-Rays (about 100 at the moment, with 40 in 3D), and finally had a big widescreen TV that could do my LD players (if not the bulk of my early LD collection) justice. I've picked up the hobby again.
My collection stands around 500 LDs currently; one of my newer twists is picking up promo/dealer/non-retail discs, the majority of which are not listed at lddb.com. I entered a few into the database as a trial run, but most have been "pending validation" now for a couple of years, which leads me to believe that until I submit covers to verify that the things actually exist, they'll stay pending. So, my next step will be figuring out how to photograph them properly... a handheld iPhone doesn't work too well, even if it's an iPhone 5.
My primary LD interests at the moment lie outside of movies now, as now my interest is in the lesser genres that tend to be more ignored by collectors, and/or stuff that will never make it onto any newer formats:
Non-retail discs, as noted above. Recently picked up 27 discs of hunting simulations for the Dart Target System, an LD-based gun and bowhunting simulator once popular in sporting goods stores and the like. I also own around 30 discs from car dealers; mostly GM brands, a couple from Ford. Another 30 or so from schools, museums, and libraries: educational documentaries, LD and software combo packages, and rudimentary interactive works. A random smattering of promotional discs from information kiosks, retail displays, and so on.
Adult titles. Yeah, I know. But when I was an avid buyer new, I had never seen anything outside of the softcore Playboy and Penthouse titles. I saw the $100 listings in the LD catalogues of the time, but never saw them for sale anywhere, nor available from online retailers. No clue where the sellers on eBay got theirs, but I've been picking up multi-disc lots on the cheap. A ton of softcore (especially Playboy, which for a while were common in huge lots for low prices), a smattering of the early 1980s hardcore titles, Category III, and I recently scored a nearly complete set of the hentai series "Lolita" and "Cream Lemon" for free. (As an aside, what's the house rule on submitting cover photos of LDs that are NSFW?)
Games. I have a small selection of LaserActive titles, both Mega LD and LD ROM, as well as early interactive titles like the History DisQuiz and Mystery titles, discs from arcade games, a couple of MSX game discs, etc. I also have a couple of game footage discs, showing walkthroughs.
Music. This one will bankrupt me, eventually, since Japan had such a wealth of stuff. Never should have clicked on the forum thread about RecoBANCHOU
.I'm only getting music discs that interest me, since at least this genre seems to be well-collected and documented: punk and "alternative" bands, pop singers, and so on.
Thanks list
