Obscure Media Formats

I love obscure media formats.

Maybe I just like obscure things in general. But something about obscure media formats are so… I don’t know, alluring to me? There’s just something really fascinating about them and their history, I suppose.

For example, the LaserDisc. I don’t collect LaserDisc (but there are a couple I would love to own), but something about the format is so cool to me. Maybe it’s the fact that its literally just a huge ass silver platter with data on it, like a DVD (but not quite since LaserDisc is an analog format, unlike DVD). I don’t collect it, but I love looking into it and seeing the oddities of it and its history and whatnot.

Two Laserdisc players having sex :)

MiniDisc is really cool too. I think it’s because I’ve always been a sucker for small things, so seeing something like MiniDisc is just really cool. It’s always interested me how much people here in the States never cared about it too much, but in other countries like Japan, it did pretty well. Facts like those make me really interested in the format, but like I said, the form factor itself is also a really big part of it too. Small things and discs are awesome.

Which leads me to my most favorite obscure media format….

Okay, calling it obscure is maybe a bit of an overstatement. The PSP did sell pretty well, so it’s not like UMD was doing horrible. I like UMD for the same reasons I like MiniDisc, being it’s small, it’s a disc, and it’s… somewhat obscure, I guess. But most of all, I like it for what they tried to do with it. UMD wasn’t just a platform for games. Enter UMD Video (and Music, and whatever other things they tried to do as well that I don’t remember right now, but I’m mainly talking about UMD Video).

I’m not quite sure why I like UMD Video. Maybe it’s because it’s so… odd, I guess. It’s odd seeing any movie or show on UMD that I like. For example, shows like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Spongebob, Family Guy, etc all made it onto UMD Video. A decent amount of movies did too.

However, my favorite release on UMD Video, and why I love the format so much, is a release I bet many people don’t really know exist:

The NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Decade Memorial Box Set

Released in 2006 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of EVANGELION, Bandai released this box set. It contains the game NEON GENESIS EVANGELION 2, but also contained an exclusive release of Death (True)2 and, my favorite, End of Evangelion.

These UMD movies were apparently supposed to release as a standalone product in the future, but to my knowledge never did (probably due to the fall of UMD Video), so it’s just kind of an odd product to me, and probably my favorite piece of EVANGELION media that I own.

So yeah, that was my little write-up about obscure media to brag about owning the Evangelion movies on UMD Video lmao. I do enjoy the rest of the format though, and hope to find some interesting movies on it. One I wanted to get my hands on was American Psycho, but I’m not really sure if it actually ever released. It apparently released on March 14th (my b-day haha), 2006, but I never found any listings or photos of it online :(

Hope you enjoyed my random little thing on this topic.