This is quite a list, I'd forgotten how much Disney has done or now owns. There's a lot of nostalgia here for me; I remember watching stuff like Candleshoe and the Apple Dumpling Gang as a kid with my mom. This seems like a no-brainer for me to grab a yearly subscription. I have kids who I'll have to turn the wifi off just so they'll go outside. Here's The Complete List of Movies & TV Shows Coming to Disney+ on Launch Day
I'm going to hold strong, and not subscribe until it's up and running so I can hear more from you guys about whether or not it's worth it.
I might as well give-in to the temptation and go ahead and subscribe. I can always cancel. I know I will never buy digital Disney from Amazon again. It's like magic how they can delete something you "purchased".
I get the appeal of streaming and digital over physical media. But people need to understand, when you pay that $20 to Apple or Amazon or whoever, you are not buying the movie. You are buying a license granting you access to a digital file containing the movie, and that access can be revoked at anytime. It's absurd and ridiculous. I buy Kindle books from Amazon, immediately download the file, strip the DRM, and then back it up. There's too many stories of books and movies just vanishing from collections. Physical media, like DVDs, blu-rays, and CDs are going away, and most people won't care. But for fans of hard-to-find classics or more obscure stuff, there's a good chance you won't be able to find what you like. Hang on to those collections.
Too true. (And I still have VHS's that are rare or nonexistent on DVD.) I only have one working VHR though. When that goes it will probably be over. As for Disney streaming; I am not sure yet. Probably wait to hear reports as well.
I wish I could find where I read this, but my understanding is that with each iteration of home video technology, far fewer films were made available. So a lot more stuff was released on VHS than on DVD, and more stuff on DVD than on blu ray, and now streaming has less stuff overall as well. That might seem counter intuitive, since people have this notion that a company can just hit a button and upload their films, but digitizing them takes time and money. Most companies are laser focused on developing their franchises and have little interest in releasing an obscure Rene Clair film to Netflix that almost no one will watch anyway. If you love Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the like, it's a great time to be alive. If you love older films, especially stuff not called Casablanca or the Wizard of Oz, it will probably get harder and harder to find stuff to watch.
If anything obscure or even semi-obscure comes on TCM, my husband is kind of obsessive about taping it.
I've been amassing a collection of classic disney for the last few years. What I've got streaming on my plex app puts Disney plus to shame. The classic stuff is out there, Disney just won't share it. To see what they've even bothered to digitize look up any title disney owns and go to the UCLA television archive library site and you can see what status it is. Not much hope for obscure searchers whatsover.
I count my lucky stars that I have a copy (poor as it may be) of Song of the South. It was copied from a laserdisc so the quality isn't spectacular, but it's definitely better than nothing.
I too have a copy of Song of the South. I ordered it online and it would not even play; but luckily I had a friend who had software that cleaned it up and made a pretty decent CD.
Disney's version of visiting the strip club for the hardcore collector, 3 hours to watch hoping for something....only to leave empty handed...
[Caveat: Not a croc and did not cancel] Disney+ had some launch issues. And while most of the focus was on error messages, there are other bugs and glitches as well. I'm sure these will be ironed out. Even part way through the day it seemed like most everything was up and running. But there are some other issues. The Simpsons is broadcast in widescreen instead of its original 4:3 ratio so that the top and bottom of the picture are cut off. It ruins different sight gags and makes the show look...odd. I've read other complaints about how older shows are streamed. That said, my kids are beyond excited. Everyone has their own profile and they all greedily added a dozen titles to their watchlists. It's a relatively smooth, simple interface. The biggest thing is the content. I read complaints about how Disney+ "only" has 500 movies and TV shows. True, but they're all movies and TV shows that, for the most part, everyone has heard of. A lot of these are classics. If you're not into them or you already own the ones you love on DVD or Blu ray, fair enough. But I subscribe to Hulu and Netflix and it's refreshing to log on to Disney+ and see movies I've heard of and content my family is interested in. I think longterm Disney+ will need to offer compelling original content. It's one thing to read lists of what's being offered and have waves of nostalgia wash over you—there are dozens of old movies on here I watched as a kid. But now that Disney+ is live, I'm realizing that I'm busy and that some those movies weren't all that good; am I going to spend hours reliving these things? Am I going to watch Escape to Witch Mountain, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Love Bug, Candleshoe, and The Apple Dumpling Gang? Maybe. But wistfully reading those titles is different than burning hours of time watching them. That, I think, will be Disney's challenge going forward.
Huge DVD collector, home taper extradoinaire. There is literally no movies or programs on there that I don't already own on dvd and already transferred to a hard drive for preservation. Correct that there are originals...Lady and The Tramp and Noel....I'm sure they will eventually played on freeform. Just can't justify the cost when I've already got 1000 times their library set up to stream to my tv already.
