Saturday 4 March 2023

TV

Doctor Who
2x18 Escape to Danger
aka The Web Planet Part Three, aka The One Where a Zarbi Bumps Into the Camera — a bit of drama, at last.

Mystery Science Theater 3000
Tom & Crow’s Unsupervised Year-End Review Revue
The final livestream of the season is a clip-filled whistlestop recap of the first year of the Gizmoplex. As well as trailers for all 13 episodes of season 13, plus a selection of highlight clips, it also covered other goings-on — things like game nights, classic episode remasters, and aftershow interviews. At 40 minutes it was a pretty quick and fairly concise recap, but that's a good thing really — seeing as it was primarily a selection of trailers for and clips from things most viewers will have already seen, making it much longer could’ve been excruciating.
[Watch it (for free) on the Gizmoplex.]

The Wheel
3x09 Episode 9
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Operation Mincemeat (2021)

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

A week later than expected, but it finally happened: I passed 2,000 Blu-rays! I remember when I first started buying the format, I thought it would never surpass my DVD collection — my intention was to buy selectively; to keep buying on DVD stuff that didn't 'merit' HD. Ah, naïve times. The market, and my taste, has changed quite a bit since then — although we still see some relatively-major studio titles get DVD-only releases, while the boutique labels are putting out Blu-rays (or even 4Ks) of incredibly niche stuff. Funny old world.

That said, I did buy a DVD this week; but it was of a BBC serial from the 1970s, so fair enough. (Classic Doctor Who looks remarkably good on Blu-ray, free from DVD compression and lovingly upscaled, but you can't expect that for every old recorded-in-SD programme.) So, my DVD collection briefly grows again, but I wouldn't be surprised if my next "landmark" is that finally sinking below 1,000 titles. It's shrunk by an average of 25 titles a year over the last five years (although 2022's decrease was notably lower than 2021's, which was notably lower than 2020's), so maybe sometime in 2024 or 2025...

Number of titles in collection: 3,036 [up 4]
Of which DVDs: 1,035 [up 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,001 [up 3]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 239 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 7,487 [up 3]
Number of films: 3,711 [up 3]
Number of additional cuts: 305 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes: 9,559 [up 8]
Number of short films: 1,042 [up 1]

This week's additions also include the Criterion box set of the Infernal Affairs trilogy. The films are restored with new special features, so I'm sure it was worth buying, but in terms of the stats counted here, it's such a one-for-one upgrade on the old trilogy Blu-ray set that it doesn't register anywhere. If they'd put it out on 4K... but, alas, no.

See you next week, faithful reader.