The Case of the Dusty DVDs

I am definitely no Sherlock Holms or Jessica Fletcher (for those of you in Rio Linda, she is the main character in a TV show from the 80s called ‘Murder, She Wrote’) so this mystery has got me.

This thing crept up upon us silently while our attention was elsewhere. The DVDs were sitting on the shelf in plain sight for some time when they decided to hide inside some boxes, occasionally showing themselves before we got distracted again. I really started noticing the ‘dust’ on the DVDs just after our last move, into our current residence.

One of my youngest daughters saw a Disney movie in her class and wondered if we had it. After clearing off the dust and looking through all the boxes, she was successful in finding a copy. She and the other kids watched it, a movie they hadn’t seen in some years. They enjoyed it and then over the next week, surprisingly, watched several more.  But then the dust began to accumulate again. And there they sit today, in the dark in several boxes, not knowing if they will ever see the inside of a DVD player again.

Does anyone even use DVDs anymore? Yes? No? Sometimes? When my kids were growing up and really too young to take to the theater, we would purchase them on VHS. When we could afford a DVD player, we started our collection, mostly movies for the kids but occasionally we would get one here and there for ourselves.

We purchased all the animated Disney movies, and the Toy Stories, and the Shreks. We purchased all the Christmas movies, Home Alones, Inspector Gadgets, Hong Kong Fooeys, Land of the Losts, and a myriad, a host, and various kid friendly movies and shows in DVD format thinking that it would provide entertainment for them when needed. Indeed they did, for a time. As they got older, their tastes in movies changed. They still watched the occasional kid movie, but less and less as time went on. Then came their hand held games. But we still continued to purchase DVDs and Blue Ray disks because the price of one was way cheaper than the price of 7 tickets at the movie theater. Then their attention went elsewhere again. Now, this marvelously diverse collection is sitting once more in boxes with a layer of dust.

What caused the dust? Netflix? Hulu? The kids got older? They are involved in things at school like band, sports and drama club? Are the movies not worthy of watching again? Is it time to off load your once glorious collection of video disks? I don’t know. But I am sure that the great Sherlock Holms or Jessica Fletcher would, although I would never invite Jessica to our house. Someone always gets killed wherever she goes.