Do we have any serious MCA DiscoVision collectors here besides blam1 and ratkins?

After saving the collection of Charles Shishkevish from the trash back in August, I have a basement full of MCA DiscoVision LDs. I'm down to missing only the following seven titles:

1. Jacques Cousteau: The Singing Whale
2. Le Corbusier
3. Romagnolis' Table: Abruzzi Specialties (just the jacket)
4. Romagnolis' Table: Made in Milan
5. Silent Safari
6. The Solar System and The Universe: Beyond the Solar System
7. Women at Work

The past few months have been a trip!

Show us what you've got!

I have some discs but don't want to collect the entire library.
My focus is on the films and Disney programs I want that were released on DiscoVision.
There are 11 in my collection, and out of those I may one day pick up one or two others, but then again I may sell off a few that I own as
they are not tops in my list of favorite films.

I did have an early Pioneer branded PR-7820 but had to sell it due to space about 7 years ago.
Pictures are posted on the laserdisc archive.

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I have seen pictures of antu's disco library, its truly impressive.

Yessss, my time to shine! I don't have a *massive* collection, but DiscoVision makes up a bit more than half of my entire LaserDisc collection, and it's what really ignited my interest in LaserDiscs. I love old home video stuff and I find late 70s/early 80s stuff especially interesting, so DiscoVision is a perfect area for someone like me to study. I'm really fond of these things even if they're often defective or low-quality. To me that's part of the charm -- because it was brand new, spage-age tech at the time, almost every release was experimental in some way, and keeping tabs on all the oddities and bugs that turned up as MCA more or less worked things out as they went, is absolutely fascinating to me. I've described my DiscoVision collecting/research as "electronic archaeology" in the past, because that's exactly what it is. That, and it's just really cool to have these available, because while they're long outdated, they're still mostly the same to watch as they were 35+ years ago, and for that reason I find them truly impressive. I brought out my copies of "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" for a family movie night before Halloween, and everyone was impressed by how good they looked for their age. I also made myself a DVD backup of "Diary of a Mad Housewife" since it's become one of my favorite films.



Again, nothing too amazing, and few items that'd really be of much value, but I love what I have all the same. The only ones I'd really like to get my hands on at this point are "Looking For Mr. Goodbar," "To Kill A Mockingbird," and "The Lost Weekend." I'd be thrilled to find a second copy of "Diary of a Mad Housewife" as well. Any test pressings would be exciting to acquire too!

I really like the uniform color and style of discovisio jackets. It makes collecting worthwhile, they look amazing when stacked.

You people are weird.

anyone as obsessive over a long-outmoded home video format as us LD enthusiasts generally tend to be,
would, in all probability, be considered quite "Weird" indeed in the eyes of about 99.9999999999999999999999% of the world population...

If you've got nothing to contribute, why comment at all?

Don't mind him. He doesn't understand a crap.

I think Discovision is far more interesting than most late US releases. It was a special epoch in the home video market and there's something special about those that I still find fascinating. I don't have the time or money to invest some myself but this is after all where the format really started, although the work of Pioneer was certainly necessary to keep it alive.

I put this video together tonight, about the DiscoVision release of "Deliverance." (I have a couple of others about DiscoVision as well.) Just an example of what I mean by MCA figuring things out as they went. Can't exactly be easy when you're literally the first to do anything with the technology, so I think it's outstanding that DV discs ended up working as well as they did, and still do. The flaws are pretty amusing, though.

My love for DiscoVision is eternal.

The issue with Deliverance is pretty interesting to be sure. I have the CAV only LD-V1000 player (used in Video Games and industrial applications). It will reject any Extended Play disc you attempt to play - and yet it DOES play Deliverance Side 3 just fine. I like this player because it ignores the "End of Side" trigger and will play out to the end of the material. Finding "extras" at the end of some sides is fun and interesting.

The "Special Functions" displayed in the above referenced video are all 'broken' because the player expects to skip tracks in the vertical interleave. In Freeze Frame, the disc plays one complete frame (one revolution), but then steps backward one track in the vertical interleave to playback the same frame. Because the vertical interleave spaces do NOT align in CLV (even at frame 5000), the player tries to step backward but doesn't understand why the previous track is not in the proper alignment. Freeze frame will sortof work during the first several hundred frames, but that's about it.

I always avoided the Discovision releases.
Might be I made a mistake doing so...?

Are they reliable rot wise? Never been a huge fan on the covers but I can appreciate the collectible angle now I see them gathered in one picture. I dare say I have to re-think my opinion about them after all.

A great collection
It's nice to see someone takes care of them in the afterlife

Happy hunting chasing them all down

I think i would like to obtain some of them.
I collect 99.9% music so i like to have the Abba ld of course amongst a dozen others.
I already know they look soft, but the Abba Pal cdv is also soft.
It is also cute that some here found out that the opaque side of some discs contained Abba or Elton John videos after 'cleaning'.

Yea I know

What is your definition of "weird" in the context here?

Weirder than any other person who has an interest in a particular niche within a commercially dead audio visual format that could itself be considered niche by now.

Weird.

i'll tell you all what's "Weird"
collecting 30 year old VHS VCRs and making S-VHS recordings from DVD sources a full fifteen years into the 21st century.

try to remember; the ARTHUR C. CLARKE and STANLEY KUBRICK would've had humanity
long since discovering ominous giant alien HERSHEY bars on the moon and traveling clear out to JUPITER by now.

but what are many of us actually doing these days? feeding off the detritus of the not so distant past. Go Figure...

I think your collection looks great. The covers for discovision titles were completely unique both visually and often in terms of the materials they were made from. Sometimes they used unusual foam padding inside the jacket or really tough plastic coating on the outer sleeve which made them almost indestrucible. It was an experimental period in the history of the format. Some copies of a given title would have the plastic coating, others wouldn't which makes it fun collecting multiple copies. You just get the impression they were trying out lots of different things as they didn't really know quite how to package them! Discovision represents the birth of laserdisc and in my opinion the titles hold up very well today, far better quality than almost any pressings I've ever seen produced by PDO UK and I've hundreds of those. When I was buying a new TV in 2009 one of the discs I took to the store to preview picture quality was a discovision title - Olivia Newton-John: Olivia (1978) [74-005]. Side 2 has a massive closeup of her head that fills the whole screen towards the end and the quality is truly breathtaking. It's like she is right beside you and you could see every little detail about her face and count the hairs on her head. The shop owner, staff and everyone in the store that day was blown away at how good the quality was for such an old format. It almost looks like high definition quality, it was so detailed and pin sharp. I've all the music related discovision titles and love them. It's a format filled with lots of quirks yet without discovision there would have been no laserdisc format so it is hugely significant.

I would surely have more of these DiscoVision discs but here in the UK they are rather hard to pick up easily, some do pop up for sale here but they are usually the same few titles & most from the latter DiscoVision releases. Some of the packaging on the earlier releases must have been quite expensive per unit cost to produce. The blank/dead side thing with them also is interesting & some apparently have some pretty strange things on quite a few of the blanks.

Enjoy your collecting .

I've got a few. Lucked out during the summer when a goodwill put a bunch of discovision listings online. The only one I really want now is Dracula. That and Psycho were my holy grails when it came to Discovision.

LDs, baby pls on a daily basis