Is there a way to find out if a release had 10,000 or less movies produced of it? So I know A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Elite and Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Elite Entertainment had a short production run. Is there anyway to find out how many of these were produced? Also, we can take an educated guess and assume a couple hundred of these were either thrown out or damaged.

Production runs? 500 or more is what I heard. An entry in the database of how many copies were made would be nice.

This one got only 500...

Hawkwind: Live (1990) [ID8663CA]

When it comes to most releases, nobody knows. When you see people quote numbers, ask for proof.

There is only 1 disc I know of the production run, disclord posted on a single title that I know of and there are no other production numbers.

Disclord is the only one I would trust, I would also trust someone who actually worked in LD production that had some type of proof but other than
that there is no true way to find out how many of a disc is actually pressed.

It's nearly impossible to reliably get such information.

The ratio of guess vs. estimate would play against us, and give partial/wrong information.

Not worth it.

Julien

Elite Entertainment should know how many Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 3 laserdiscs they produced. I don't know if they'll tell anyone. If I had to guess it was probably not many. It was only for about 3-4 months I think. I know with the video game Illbleed for the Sega Dreamcast that it's said that game only had 50,000 NTSC copies made of it which is considered very low for a video game. Most of the NTSC copies of illbleed are either badly scratched up aka unplayable or thrown out in the trash. People especially kids do not take care of game discs very well. I'm guilty of that when I was a kid. I also don't know where I heard that there was only 50,000 illbleed NTSC copies produced. That could be inaccurate information.

Most LDs in the US went though the usual record store process of being over shipped and then returned and sold as cutouts or destroyed so even if you knew the original number pressed it wouldn’t be very useful in determining how many still exist or how many ever actually sold to customers versus just getting trashed.

I don’t know how it worked in Japan but I assume the same way but with more diligent trashing.

We only get the Samples/Not For Sale copies floating around, but they are 99.9% identical to the regular releases.

I don't know if returns were destroyed or later re-offered priced-down in a different cover/obi.

Would be fun to find a sample copy of a cancelled title though (like the USA VHD prototypes).

Julien

I wish more people understood this basic concept in all aspects of life.

Now I seriously need to learn how cutouts work in Japan. I realize I’ve never seen any indication that they even do it that way but I’m pretty sure they must have. How do I even search that if I don’t know the correct lingo in 日本語!?

Japan is also the biggest country on Earth for magazines and books so they are probably very good at remaindering stuff. Maybe ninja do it at night…

So should Criterion but then never cared about my requests by Email for interviews or back stories or trivia about their LaserDisc period.

They flatly don't care as it doesn't bring them any extra business whatsoever.

Julien

I don't know how many releases Wild Wild West got but i think it had a decent amount at one time before people probably tossed it or damaged it. With that said Wild Wild West is probably the winner of the best looking laserdisc in my collection of 100s of movies. It even beats out most if not all 4:3 laserdiscs. A widescreen release that actually looks gorgeous.

I'm going to start capturing it in 10 minutes or so and maybe later today if I feel like it I'll post screenshots up of it. This laserdisc on my LX-900 looks ridiculously close to dvd. Warner Brother went out with a bang since this was one of the last two laserdiscs they produced. It came out I believe on December 28th of 1999. I thought Small Soldiers and Blade were pretty good wide screen releases but I think this one beats those two releases.

No harm in reaching out either way. I blindly contacted someone who was involved with the four US squeeze LDs and to my surprise I got a response.

In regards to overall numbers, I have some for some of the highest selling titles (with sources) here: Laser Star Certified Discs??

Outside of that, you can speculate via mint marks. B6021031 on Nightmare on Elm Street 2, A: Freddy's Revenge (1985) [EE3562] makes me believe at least 1031 were pressed on June 2nd, 1996.

Thx, forgot about this topic, this is the closest we can get to numbers of discs.
One could guess that from those sales you could have a 20-60% more ratio due to sales and losses but its such a big percentage that its just a guess.

I can't see that they would do runs of only 1000-3000 discs but then again it could make sense as to why its so hard to find older titles where some went to the dump
etc.

Or its just that those films are sort of junk and nobody cares and tossed them when they were worth nothing before ebay came around.

Ive been dealing japanese records for 20 years now and LDs Ive been collection for atleast 10. I feel pretty confident in saying that they never had a cutout system like the one they had in the US.

I would say the US was alone with such large numbers of cutouts. Since the 70s those cutouts where exporterted to Europe in huse numbers too. In sweden we did have a low price series, where the company sometimes would withdrawl cds, just to sell them back for half the price. So it was NICE PRICE-series.


But I know for sure, they never did this with vinyls, and never seen it on CD either, in Japan. I do think it got to do with that the quanitity was well calculated. As soon as an album got a NICE PRICE-price it would change the catalogue number. So I guess it was the same way with LDs.

And its a bit different to have an overstock of 200lds or 2 000 000 cds if one album. Then getting their money back, which they pay in advance is high priority.

Yeah US loves doing the cutout thing, I've seen it on all media other than books.
I've been collecting all types of things my whole life and have never seen the cutout or punch out or anything in any other country.

I know it has to do with the closeout, selling at lower prices or just returns etc, but its only been in this country that I've ever seen it.

Have seen some amazing ones, center of the records to punch through the label on the actual record, side cuts, corner cuts, holes in the corners,
CDs with melt marks over the UPC and more.
Some would punch to the paperwork and some would go through the entire case and all.

I've even seen VHS with punchout, not that many due to the dirt that would end up inside the cassette case, I think they were more melt than drill.

Not using the cutout system is one thing but not even Japan can correctly guess how many copies of everything will be needed. That’s…hilariously magically impossible. There must have been some other way of dumping the crap nobody wanted. Maybe the stores did it individually or they just marked stuff down to nothing and blew them out.

Cutouts were records that sat in stores for a while and then distributors would offer to buy them back. If you don’t do this stores will get very conservative. The cutout system allows stores to carry a better range of product with less risk.

If the stores took them up on this they had to do it by a certain date or lose their chance. Once back at the distributor they would “cut them out” with a drill or a saw and send them back to stores as what I call “crap bin” records. Not necessarily the same stores, any store that would have them. I was poor in the 80s and much of the 90s so I LOVED crap bins. I got some great stuff from crap bins like A-Ha’s second album, which bombed horribly in the US, which is still my favorite of theirs. It was $1.44 at KMart . I even have EU and UK cutouts! I assume they were all imported to the US and then became cutouts after that.

I had some cutout cassettes back in the day. There would be plastic debris rattling around in there…very hard to remove since most prerecorded cassettes were welded and not screwed together.

The system with books is (was?) that the store would rip the covers off and mail them back to the distributor for credit making them impossible to sell at all. Magazines just get binned. The toy market also does this, which is a big part of why toys in US stores are such high margin crapola. They throw away a LOT. If a movie bombs the resulting pile of crap is enormous. Nintendo found out about this with Game and Watch in the early 80s and really ate s**t. It isn’t done in Japan, or wasn’t back then. It’s a huge reason the NES was done the way it was. They had to avoid the buyback system that the US toy industry uses by selling it as home electronics.

Ofcourse. But compared to US.. that i believe actually over used this system to avoid fees and licenses and be able to sell their records much cheaper. I mean, pretty much all albums exist with cut outs, no matter how good selling the albums was. Springsteen, jackson, metallica, kiss and so on. (Cds). I think they saw the cut out system as a good way to sell albums to customers that wouldnt buy that artist for full price.

In japan, where the retail price was fixed, they cant sell it with the same obi if they lower the price. I can look up a very few situations where they repriced the same catalogue number later.

I dont know how it works in japan. But in sweden, and most of EU... In order to get most of your money that you paid in advance for the copyright owners, you have to destroy your overstock. So here.. the companies would never be able to withdraw albums to later sell them for 1usd. They would make a loss on at least 3usd for each album.

I think they simply used a regulat sale at the stores to get rid of the overstock. Just like we had to here in sweden.

Good points.

Another thing I didn’t mention up there is that usually in the crap bin there weren't individual SKUs anymore. They were usually just “cutout $1.99” regardless if it were Portishead or Pet Shop Boys.

Also, one of my favorite LDs is a cutout. Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella. This easily beats the actual studio version on CD. I got it as a cutout on sale from Lumivision’s website, IIRC. It was “cheap” but I don’t remember how much. It wasn’t $1.44 for sure, more like $16 maybe.