Noticed this sticker on a sealed LD i found locally awhile ago.

https://ibb.co/wgyjpwm

"laser star certified"
Was this much of a thing? Did other releases have a similar sticker?
Cheers family.

got a 1992 standard edition of ALIENS that happens to be so Certified... for what it is really worth;

I’ve never seen this before. Sounds like a short lived marketing thing, perhaps even from a single shop.

There was a trade group called the Laser Disc Association that certified releases based on sales.

50k: 3 stars
75k: 4 stars
100k: 5 stars

Source: Billboard Vol. 107, No. 4 Page 76

It looks like they changed their name to Optical Video Disc Association around 1996.

No wonder I never saw this, we stopped collecting new LDs around 1993 and the last new one I bought was around 1996 with Heavy Metal and then started around 2000 to pickup
on ebay.

An interesting sticker.

The text on it - LAST CHANCE to Own the Original Version of STAR WARS was also used on a sticker applied to the outer wraps on the heavily hyped VHS releases of the Star Wars films before the releases of the later Special Edition versions.

Thanks for posting it on here.

The earliest mention I found of this organization was in a May 1992 Billboard article commenting on 1991 Karaoke unit sales.

You can visit ovda.org via https://web.archive.org/. Looks like it went dead after 1999.

Some interesting US sales data from the site:
48,776 LD players sold in the US in 1997
2,410,000 LDs sold in the first half of 1997

From a page archived November 13th, 1996:

• 50,000 Sold
  
  • Broken Arrow (1996) [0896385] Rank 58
  • Casper (1995) [42571]
  • Cinderella (1950) [5265 AS]
  • Congo (1995) [LV 33038-WS]
  • Crimson Tide (1995) [5255 AS] Rank 49
  • Seven (1995) [ID3364LI] Rank 97
  • Waterworld (1995) [42680] Rank 55
• 75,000 Sold
  
  • Abyss, The: Special Edition (1989) (Uncut) [1988-85] Rank 39
  • Alien: Special Widescreen Collector's Edition (1979) [1090-85] Rank 63
  • Aliens: Special Widescreen Collector's Edition (1986) (Uncut) [1504-85] Rank 31
  • Apocalypse Now (1979) [LV 2306-2WS] Rank 79
  • Die Hard 3: With A Vengeance (1995) [8858-85] Rank 14
  • Goldeneye: Special Edition (1995) [ML105544] Rank 6
  • Home Alone (1990) [1866-85] Rank 85
  • Predator (1987) [1515-85] Rank 63
  • Pulp Fiction (1994) [3614 AS] Rank 28
  • Sound of Music, The (1965) [1051-85]
• 100,000 Sold
  
  • Apollo 13 (1995) [42580] Rank 19
  • Braveheart (1995) (Uncut) [LV 33118-2WS] Rank 3
  • Clear and Present Danger (1994) [LV 32463-2WS] Rank 33
  • Die Hard (1988) [8905-85] Rank 86
  • Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990) [8906-85]
  • Lion King, The (1994) [2977 AS] Rank 26
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) (Uncut) [LV 32301-WS] Rank 51
  • Star Trek VII: Generations (1994) [LV 32988-2WS] Rank 36

From a page archived October 9th, 1997:

• 50,000 Sold
  
  • Amadeus (1984) [PSE96-073]
  • Casino (1995) [42782] Rank 91
  • Days of Thunder (1990) [LV32123-WS]
  • Eagles: Hell Freezes Over (1994) [ID3061GF]
  • Tombstone (1993) (Uncut) [2544 AS]
• 75,000 Sold
  
  • Firm, The (1993) [LV 32523-2WS]
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) [LV 1643-2WS] Rank 67
  • Mask, The (1994) [ID2992LI]
  • Rock, The (1996) [8887 AS] Rank 23
  • Star Trek VIII: First Contact (1996) [LV332433-WS] Rank 21
• 100,000 Sold
  
  • Mission: Impossible (1996) [LV31899-2WS] Rank 7
  • Toy Story (1995) [6703 AS] Rank 16

Titles in bold are in the Top 100 here. I tried to match the most likely title. I do not know if it includes prior releases or the P&S versions.

Additionally they had lower criteria (10k/20k/40k) and a separate list for special special editions that are not included above.

That’s good sales info. I’m glad someone brought up this otherwise worthless organization.

Quantities seem...roughly what I expected them to be. It’s a shame there was no Soundscan or something similar for video.

Wow, I can't believe the limited amount of sales.
LD would totally be killed if this went on shark tank now.

50,000 of Broken Arrow, 100,000 of Apollo 13.

Can't believe how LD lasted as long as it actually did with these types of sales.

They were $40-50 movies, don’t forget.

Yes indeed


With Lion King CLV bringing in potentially $3 million+ and the boxset bringing in another potential $2.5 million+ that seemed decent to me..... until I read the VHS release brought in an estimated $520 million just in the US.

Exactly.

Here are some factors I thought of with some being more reasonable than others:

• Replication at Pioneer USA cost $10.50 (plus a $1900 setup fee) based on this old webpage. Discs might could have cost half that if you were going to do massive runs. So the profit margin for a $50 disc was good. I'm sure it was even better if you owned the film and a manufacturing plant (Sony and Warner).
• The market in Japan was much larger than the US market. I was able to find 2.5 million discs were sold in the US in 1989 (Telecommunications Update Volume 7 Issue 2 Page 2). Japan sold 12 million that same year (Weekly Television Digest Volume 29 Page 197). If they were already going to press a release for Japan, how much more of an overhead was it to press a US release? No idea if this is actually valid since there would be separate masters and sleeves, just an observation.
• They could have wanted to genuinely appeal to fans as well as release their film in the best quality possible. This has more merit if you consider the cheaper and more obscure releases by large studios. i.e. there are titles that were never released in theaters that had a MSRP of $19.98
• There are 18 LD releases of The Abyss and 19 of Terminator 2 (re-releases were lucrative)
• MCA/Universal released 50 titles in the US in 1996. The net profits can add up quick with that many releases.
• Trade organizations like the Laser Disc Association might have actually had some pull. Membership consisted of pretty much all of the publishers and manufacturers.
• The belief that at some point they would gain greater popularity. It looked like it was really going to take off in the early 90s.

Yeah, you’d make a lot of money from Japan because most of the big sellers in Japan are American movies and most of the time there is a US and a JP disc with the same master. Therefore if you only sell 10k in the US at $40 it doesn’t make much money but if you then you sell 100,000 copies in Japan at $60-100 each...way more than pays for the extra graphic design, subtitles, and higher quality paper.

Stuff that was US-only and small run must have been a total loss unless it was Criterion or someone who could get away with charging up to $150 for a single film.

These prices were PER SIDE, not per disc. Universal got better pricing ($8 per CLV side, $7 per CAV side), so "The Frighteners" box set cost $64 just to replicate the discs. Pioneer took a bath on the title selling it for $49.99.

Thanks for that info Blaine. That makes me wonder about the titles I see here with an MSRP of $14.98 and $19.98.

These prices were based on the most recent prices used by online sellers.
They must have been discounted to clear stocks towards the end of their activities.

It's not the original publisher's price, but it's the only hard source I had at hands.

Julien

Yeah, I never saw prices that cheap unless they were closeout, I think the cheapest off the shelf was 24.99 that I ever saw but that may have also been from
a larger reseller like Tower Video?

We only ever bought from Tower, J&R, amd some random closeout stores in the city back in the day.

Edit: the only disc I think we bought for new that I can remember the price was Predator, it would have been 24.99 or 29.99
as a special offer at tower.

Remember first diehard was 49.99 or around that since it was 2 disc, pretty much all fox stuff was higher priced.
They were sort of on part with Criterion until they released the 80-100 CAV sets.

I really wonder now how much longer LD would have been around had Criterion not pushed their special boxes when others didn't have them.

The only things I ever payed less than $30 for were music videos and even then I think just 8” ones.

The Enya disc I have with four videos on it was $30 from Warner USA. This, btw, is the only LD I’ve ever bought that came with a square plastic inner bag (non-round bottom).

I wasn’t buying LD until 1992 so almost every recent US movie was $40 for me. When AC-3 hit and running times started to go back up again making more movies two discs prices went to $45-50 for those movies. If, like the vast majority of LD users, you had no way to use AC-3...you still paid $5 more.

And then there’s Criterion who were like, “Yeah, this thing is $99.99 despite being a public domain film. No, there are no special features, take or leave it.”

And then there’s Japan. The same movie as the US one but twice the price (very basic subtitles and a nice jacket are your consolation.)

A four disc movie for $40 seems suicidal and also unique. I’d expect at least $80 for anything with four discs.

I found two more articles that help to shed some more light on sales:

From Billboard's August 1st, 1992 issue:

• 200,000 units of Fantasia and 100,000 units of Ghost were sold.
• At that time, it cost $7 to manufacture a laserdisc (in large volumes), including the packaging.

From Billboard's February 11th, 1995 issue:

• 350,000 units of T2 and 290,000 units of Top Gun were sold.
• 7 million units were sold in 1993 totaling $267.5 million.
• 8.3 million units were sold in 1994 totaling $345.4 million.