Let me take your mind back to the days of old, circa 2003/2005, when burnt DVD copies of movies were all the rage. Illegal as anything, but wildly popular. Somehow, most of us got a hold of entire books worth of fresh new films that shaped our entire childhood. Let’s unpack this, shall we.
Remember when one day, your dad or your mum would return from work with like, a book full of DVDs? And most of the time they’d look legit as fuck, with pictures on the discs and everything? Why is this a universal experience for us?
They’d usually say something like, “I have a friend at work who gave me this,” and then you’d look through all the premium selections and decide that you would never be bored again. Who was this mysterious friend? What did they do for a living? Why were they burning SO many illegal copies of films and making them look presentable? I have so many questions.
If your dad was one of the DVD burners, please hit me up, I want to know the secrets that formed my childhood.
I remember I had classics in my DVD book like Shrek the Third, Chicken Little and Robots, and then in the back end of the book were things like The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby and The Forbidden Kingdom, which were for the adults to enjoy.
The biggest thrill, however, was the sheer amount of movies that were either currently in the cinema or hadn’t even been released yet, which made watching them even more satisfying.
In fact, I didn’t even think twice about this entire experience until I randomly came across this video from Peach, which exactly described what happened to me as a kid. That’s when I started wondering, why do we all share this?
https://www.tiktok.com/@ritalinprc/video/6914209601298746626?lang=en&is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v2&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=6891480247364371970
She even mentions that in some of the DVDs you’d have heads moving across the screen, which makes me full of nostalgia. They’d be moving around like someone getting out of their cinema seat to hit up the toilet, and you wouldn’t even care because you were watching Madagascar 11 or some shit. Pure bliss.
I would always wonder as a kid how the movie was so perfect if it was filmed in a cinema? Were folks just taking tripods and cameras into Hoyts?
But hey, shout out to my dad’s friend from work who supplied us with all the goods. You probably broke many fkn laws in doing that, but you helped a young boy broaden his taste.
