I'm a huge fan of old movies. Now, when I say old I don't mean movies from ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. I love movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, specifically the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I've always loved this period, and given how hard it is to find many of these movies on streaming, I've made an effort to buy as many of these movies on physical media as possible. As such, I have thousands of old movies on DVD, and among my most treasured titles are a few dozen DVD box sets Warner Bros put out in the mid-2000s, as they control the best library of classic film.
A few months ago, I dug into an old Humphrey Bogart box set to watch a favorite of mine, Passage to Marseille. After about an hour, the disc simply stopped working. The same thing happened with another movie from the set, Across the Pacific. I actually thought my old Blu-ray player was to blame, and given that I was in need of an upgrade anyway, I bought a new UHD player and just forgot about it.
Flash forward to about a week ago, when I decided to throw on an old Errol Flynn movie called Desperate Journey. The same thing happened. This was more concerning to me, as, unlike the other movies I mentioned, this has never gotten an HD release and was unavailable digitally. I did a little research online, and to my horror, I landed on several home theater forum threads (and a couple of good videos) confirming this was no fluke.
It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can't be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn't a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.
So, what can be done about this? Nothing. As stated in this RetroBlasting video, we had ticking time bombs on our hands, and the only way around the problem was to rip our faves to something like PLEX, but it's too late for the majority of discs. Warner Bros, of course, has yet to comment on this, so people like me have thousands of worthless discs cluttering our shelves. Here's the most comprehensive list of titles available.
So far, Blu-ray Discs aren't affected, although all HD-DVD discs put out by WB in this period are basically expensive coasters.
While it would be great of WB was to try to make good to consumers by at least offering us replacement MOD discs from the Warner Archive, I'm not holding my breath. Given that the discs only went bad after fifteen years or so, I'm sure they feel like we got our money's worth -- which we certainly didn't in my opinion. Special shout out to Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader, a superb Home Theater YouTube Channel that was way ahead of this story.
UPDATE: According to one of our readers, FilmFan-89, WB will replace some discs if you contact them directly, with a catch. They will only replace discs that are currently in print, and sadly, many of the defective titles are not. Reach out to them through the WB Store and keep us posted in the comment thread if they come through with replacements.
