New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Bill1978 » April 2nd, 2021, 4:42 pm

I have no memory of Battle For Endor even existing, so I might check that out. I don't remember anything about Caravan except I was excited to see the Ewoks again. Sees I was easy to please as a kid haha

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by gaastra » April 2nd, 2021, 5:42 pm

Battle for endor is the better film but gets dark fast. It even had a warning in front of it on abc it might be to scary for kids! Neat thing is the ewok films were released in theatres in uk and other countries.



Now playing has a funny reaction to it. "Did david fincher direct this movie?"

https://nowplayingpodcast.com/episode.htm?id=1369

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Ben » April 2nd, 2021, 6:36 pm

Blocked. :(

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Daniel » April 2nd, 2021, 7:16 pm

The podcast, I'm guessing?

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Ben » April 2nd, 2021, 7:52 pm

Didn’t notice that link! I meant whatever the video is, "blocked by CBS CID" on copyright grounds.

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by gaastra » April 2nd, 2021, 9:48 pm

Strange the link and video works fine for me. Now playing talks about history of films and reviews them and tends to have a comedy side to them as well. They do sometimes curse however.

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Dacey » April 2nd, 2021, 11:42 pm

I actually have both Ewok movies on disc...but have no idea if they will work in my player or not. I accidentally purchased bootlegs, and have been afraid to try them.

Also an accidental bootleg I purchased: Cool World. Again, no idea if it plays or not.
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Ben » April 3rd, 2021, 4:49 am

If they’re DVD-Video authored discs, there's nothing to be lost in trying them in a regular set-top player or even a computer disc drive, Dace! They can’t transfer anything malevolent (or maleficent!) in a player, and if it’s a drive and a window pops up then just don’t click on any executable buttons. But that won’t happen if they’re DVD-Video discs.

At best, you’ll just have rips of the original discs, or they may just be probably more compressed to squeeze a DVD-9 onto a blank DVD-5, but still watchable. At worst, they’ll be terrible copies, or just not load. I’m sure you know the noises your drive usually makes when it loads a disc: get close to the power switch and if anything seems to be taking longer or sounds like it’s got "stuck" (the same "whir" occurring over and over) then just cut the power. Switch back on and eject the disc.

During lockdown I went through a whole bunch of old blanks that were recorded on an old DVD-R machine and half of them had gone bad, and the only way to see what to throw out was to do exactly this process each time. It doesn’t mess anything up. :)

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by gaastra » April 3rd, 2021, 8:46 am

Heads up for those of you watching the ewoks cartoon. The network ordered it to tone down the shows second season to match smurfs leading to more "cute" stories with a new AWFUL intro song, new looks and worse plots. Paul dini still pulled some gems however. The last episode (is the next to last episode on disney plus so it's out of order) is great and has the empire, droids, stormtroppers, ships and even emperor palpatine! It tells why the empire comes to endor to start with and takes place right before return of the jefi. (note it's followed up by a issue of the comic ewoks and droids that explains why they acted like c-3po was this big magic guy in jedi.)

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Ben » April 3rd, 2021, 8:58 am

We are the E...E...E...E...Eeee...Ewoks, and we're one big happy fam-i-ly!

Fun fact: the Ewoks were going to be Wookiees in Jedi, and we were finally going to see Chewie's home world, but ol' Georgie-porgy realised he could sell a whole new toy line if he turned the name Wook-ie backwards and call them E-woks. One of the many reasons Gary Kurtz left the third film, as he felt it wasn’t being developed on story points, and merely for more for toy sales. Harrison Ford wasn’t even going to be in it, until he did it as a favor to thank George for giving him Indiana Jones. This is why Han basically has nothing to do in Jedi. True story.

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by ShyViolet » April 3rd, 2021, 12:22 pm

Wow, that’s quite interesting! :).

Han is hands-down my favorite character from all three films. In my opinion he REALLY made the OT. He was charismatic, funny, mercenary, complex. And Harrison apparently knew him so well that he was able to devise on his own that PERFECT goodbye line we all know so well.

(That and Ford basically saved most of Force Awakens FORTY YEARS LATER. :shock: )
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by gaastra » April 4th, 2021, 9:47 pm

Raya is now for sale on the digital sites like vudu and prime for the same price as "unlocking it" on plus but you get 4k and tons of extras and deleted scenes you don't get on on plus for the same price then if you just waited and you don't have to pay each month for disney plus or lose your copy you payed $30 for!

Will people ever learn?

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by EricJ » April 4th, 2021, 10:28 pm

gaastra wrote:
April 4th, 2021, 9:47 pm
Will people ever learn?
Will Disney ever learn that those are the exact same arguments, word for word, Warner used ten years ago to convince us that deep down we all secretly "hated" our discs, and it...didn't quite work out for them as well as they'd hoped? :lol:

(Oh, wait, no, Warner also used "Don't you hate that you can't take your disc collection on the go?", because studios couldn't figure out why digital wasn't taking off the way MP3 music had with CD.)

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Randall » April 5th, 2021, 1:25 am

Look, guys, the fact is that SOME people WILL pay the Premier (sic) Access price. They're not dumb, they just make their own choices on how to spend their money. Just like audiences would pay to go to the theater (at least pre-pandemic), even though a film could be rented or would be on Netflix a while later. (And we would/will spend ludicrous amounts on the snacks, too!)

My brother is ready to plunk down the Premier (sic) Access price to let his daughter see black Widow at home ASAP. Me, I can wait a few months. And I'll be buying the Blu-ray, even though I'll be able to watch it on D+. Why? Because I like Blu-ray and its bonus features. That's just how I roll.

It's not like Disney expects all of us to go Premium. And no studio expects everyone to go digital. Or to buy discs. Or to even get D+ or HBO Max. They're operating on more than one business plan here, trying to maximize their profits and satisfy each consumer. We all make our choices. No need to belittle anyone for making his or her choice, or a studio for catering to it. (Except for putting theaters out of business and shrinking the film production industry. That you can complain about.)

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Re: New Disney Streaming Service: Disney+

Post by Ben » April 5th, 2021, 8:26 am

Thank you so much for the (sic). That actually made my morning! :D

Totally agree...these are, at the end of the day, traditional business models that have been in play since television came along. In fact, although the 50s and 60s are traditionally seen as when TV became a "threat", since that’s when the sets became more affordable, but the medium was around as a home viewing format almost as long as the movies learned to talk. Indeed, in the UK, WWII interrupted a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was playing on the BBC — when transmission resumed seven years later when the war was over, they began by replaying that very same cartoon again, appropriately Mickey's Gala Premiere. :)

So films have always been sold to TV. At first they were often "repurposed" to fit the medium, usually many years after their initial release. Bigger and longer films were often sold as "events", stripped over two or three nights (of course, Walt Disney would typically present one of his movies over two episodes of the weekly Disney show, and soon pioneered — as he so often did — the idea of home premieres by way of films made for TV, usually again stripped over multiple episodes but also recut for theatrical exhibition, Davy Crockett being the first major example). Walt was doing Disney+ style premieres in 1955!

When home video took off in the 70s, studios did not initially have their own home video divisions, so licensing became the norm, with several companies undertaking the transfers, replication and distribution, among them Magnetic Video for 20th Century, Rank for Disney and such fly by night names as Alpha Video and Select, etc. It was routine then that titles would still be at least the same year or two or even three year window before they "came home", with TV still five years or so before films went from big to small screens.

All that changed in the later 80s and 90s when cable/satellite TV came in and home video went from a rental to sale, or "sell-through", model. Studios by now had largely taken distribution in-house, and could essentially dictate their own terms, closing down the home video windows to a year, then six months, and TV licensing to around a year. Over time these windows continued to shrink to three to six months for home video and a year for pay TV, and still three or four for free to air networks. As pay TV and obviously streaming has taken hold, those windows largely follow the home video route, with a basic tier nowadays of theatrical, three months later for all home video/pay TV releases, six months to a year for subscription TV services and then a couple of years later for free to air.

So all that is really happening, and has been since the 50s and 60s, is that the windows have continued to shrink and shrink and shrink. It makes sense, eventually, that films will be made direct for the small screen, though I do hope the theatrical experience survives, since just as you might welcome a small theatre troupe into your home to perform a play, you probably don’t have the space and it isn’t as good as sharing it with a larger audience and making an evening out of it! It’s the same for theatrical films, and it’s heartening to see audiences actually willing and wanting to get back to that big screen communal experience.

Certainly at home here, we’ve really missed our audiences in our screening room, and it’s just not the same with just me and the wife and the dog! There’s something much nicer about sharing the whole thing, being excited and laughing together. That’s why the movies are the movies!

It’s great that there are so many choices to see a film. A film is worthless, after all, if it is never seen. And it is even better if it’s seen by many people. It’s good that some films that might never have been seen are being picked up by varied audiences. And I have, at the end of the day, no real issue with films premiering on subscription services and in theatres the same time, although personally I would love to see at least an "opening" timeframe where a film is given a chance to shine the way was intended for as much of a month before any other access, which would be nice.

My only real beef with Disney's model is that it’s inconsistent, and asks one to pay OTT for that same initial access. People obviously do, and it’s up to them, but I don’t really get why, when the same content comes along a month later for free. It also sets up films as being "better" or more "worthy" than others, which has a subconscious effect. Personally I think Universal's deal with one of the theatre chains is the best route: release theatrically first, which is your "premiere" engagement for a month or so, and then go to streaming, as a PVOD offering initially for another two months, and then onto streaming (unless, of course, the film is basically a TV movie made direct for streaming anyway).

I’m surprised the studios haven’t worked that out yet, since it allows for three bites at the same cherry, maximizing each market without sacrificing the prestige of the big screen experience, the early premium pay TV aspect, or the subs services, since that would then be the same time as a home video release and long before regular cable (still six months to a year) or network TV, still a year or two or three years.

At the end of the day, I just wait to see most stuff at home in our awesome room anyway, or if I’m in no rush, when it turns up on network TV free to air. But even then I’m in no rush for a new big screen film to make it to my home. Pre-pandemic I was often in a store and surprised to see a "new" film on the shelves, seemingly right after it had premiered in the cinemas what felt like only a few weeks before. So that time flies by pretty quickly anyway.

If the studios were smart, they’d start combining cinema and PVOD budgets to run advertising for a month and essentially "combine" those releases, and then another campaign for home video/streaming a couple of months later. VOD and network TV don’t get campaigns anyway, so leave that to the providers to make their own promos and just let those ancillary markets roll the cash back in. If the studios were smart... ;)

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