34. The Case for Physical Media

Something that has changed drastically about our relationship with screens over the course of the past few decades has been the shift from reliance on physical media to streaming. With the click of a button and an internet connection, you now no longer need the middle man of DVDs, Blu Rays, or rental stores. You have it all. Or do you? If you listened to our four part series on the life and legacy of Elaine May, you know that a legal nightmare has stopped her 1972 classic The Heartbreak Kid from getting any kind of digital release. And the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery in 2022 led to a new practice among streamers of deleting their original programming that didn’t meet standards of requisite clicks such as Moonshot, Mrs. Fletcher, Vinyl, and Run. It turns out that the ease of digital programming is subject to more politics than simply offering a library of content.

But not everyone is content to accept the precarity of the streaming age, and that’s the focus of our show today: the case for physical media. First, we’ll hear from executive director Kate Barr and inventory assistant Joel Fischer from Scarecrow Video, a nonprofit video rental store in Seattle which offers nearly 150,000 titles including rare and out of print offerings that represent over a century of cultural history that they’re here to archive, not delete. Then, later in the show, The Blair Witch Project producer Mike Monello discusses the path toward the latest physical release of the 1999 classic, which finally captures the filmmakers’ intended vision and documents its story in a way that can only be found on physical media.

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