Hi all, I was wondering if anyone has a complete or comprehensive list of Laserdisc exclusives. I'm not looking for a list with exclusive extras (ie: commentaries, interviews, etc.), nor am I looking for movies with versions that are unique to Laserdisc (ie: director's cuts). I'm only looking for movies that have only ever been released on Laserdisc, things that have never gotten a VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray/digital release and can only be viewed today on a Laserdisc.

I'm mainly curious because I'm really interested in preserving these rare titles. I also would imagine that I'm not the first person to ask this question, and I'm hoping maybe someone has a spreadsheet or word doc sitting around that could throw me a bone.

If anyone has a list like this that wouldn't mind sharing, that'd be really awesome and I'd totally appreciate it! And if this is a re-post, sorry 'bout that, I tried searching for threads like this and only found a few related topics but nothing addressing my exact question. (ie: I saw some noteworthy titles are mentioned here, but I would be shocked if this was the entire list of LD exclusive titles: Ultimate list of Laserdisc titles that are significant )

Thanks!

I could think of only two but then I remembered one was released on VHS and the other on VHD, so...

Good luck with this, I think that topic is the best you are going to do unless you buy all the LD titles and then DVD/Bluray or newer
formats and then start the mission.

OR you figure out which films you want or have interest in and then look those up.

Good luck.

The thread you linked is the best thing there is. It’s pretty massive and it’s a living document so read the whole thing.

As Rein-O has said, it helps if you have some kind of interest in video recordings. Music, for example, there are many many exclusive music titles on LD but most people don’t care about Clan of Xymox videos or late period Chet Baker. There are also quite a few documentaries about racing and race cars that are LD only forever. Anime is another specialty area with loads of LD only stuff.

It’s very hard to think of some basic super low hanging fruit like a full length live action Hollywood movie that is LD only because that wouldn’t have been a good business decision. Anything with a main market outside of Japan would also have seen a VHS release. During the DVD boom we saw the release of almost anything that wasn’t in rights Hell, including many things that skipped the analog era.

It would be easier if you said you wanted to find a title where the LD version was still the best version, that is to say movies where the only releases are Beta, VHS, VHD, CED, and LD in which case a well captured LD version would be more valuable to the world than the other formats. I think there’s a David Lynch movie like that...another thing would be to get better versions of something because of the content, like THX1138 since that got all f-ed up on DVD.

So true, I almost S%!T myself when I saw Heavy Metal (1981) [74656] for the first time on LD.
I remember going to comic conventions and the only way to get this was on bootleg VHS tapes.
It was one of those rights hell films due to all the stories and the music since the musicians were on Columbia at the time but then over the
years they were on different labels and it was also such a cult film that it really didn't have much value for them to release it.

But now its on every format you can imagine.....

I mentioned this in another thread recently but there is still quite a bit of anime where the LD is far superior to the DVD. I'm expecting it to be the case again with an OAV I just won on eBay.

I regret not getting the 4 US Ako LDs when I had a chance to for a reasonable price.

Thanks to everyone for the replies, this is all great feedback!

I will definitely go back and check this out more.


This is a great point. I'm not sure if you're suggesting there's a handy-dandy list of these somewhere or if these are easier to think of for people, but I'm definitely curious about examples you may have of these.

To clarify, I guess my primary interest is in cataloguing things that couldn't be replaced with a DVD/Blu-Ray/digital release, whether due to having landed in "rights hell" or for some other reason (ie: "Song of the South"). So anything that didn't get a home video release from the DVD era to the present. But this is, of course, a monstrous and never-ending catalog, so I wanted to try to focus in on how Laserdisc fits into that bigger picture, particularly since Laserdisc is such a high-quality product.

I'd love to hear any examples you have! And if you have a link to that thread handy, definitely post it here, I'd be interested to check it out.

There is a lot of music like zeta said. A jpop concert LD that I got awhile back I had to add the majority of the catalog into here for.

As far as anime I haven't compiled a list but Phantom Quest Corp stuck out to me. That is an early DVD with bad blocking. The LD is Pioneer and sublime. There is a reason some old anime doesn't get a BD release even when it sees a more modern re-issue. It's usually because the source material is not salvageable and the new release is based off the LD anyway.

A lot of early dvds are bad in general so if there is no BD of those the LD is the way to go.

To be honest I sort of lost interest in contemporary anime around the time of region locked DVD. I still mainly watch anime on LD and I don't know much about DVDs and BRs. The only import digital anime I have I think are the Gundam OVAs and I rarely buy domestic stuff. Because of this I tend to think of things as long out of print but then I find out there was a DVD box six years ago or something.

We know that To-y is stuck on LD but there is a fan resurrection of that already which is supposed to be beyond wonderful.

Daicon Film, of course, but I'd assume that may be so rough there's nowhere to go much beyond the best Youtube version.

Whatever I can think of I must have already wrote it in that thread somewhere.

The LD version is always the best version.

So, OP, you pretty much have to collect 500,000 titles, or every LD ever produced, to have the ultimate video archive of humanity's filmed output.

I'd bring up points as to why this isn't true but as I've seen there is no getting anywhere in that discussion.