Today during one of our meandering conversations that Alex and I tend to have LaserDiscs and the players came up and a discussion of their popularity or lack there of and when that popularity may have been.
Alex believing that they were most popular in the late 90s as the wikipedia said in 1998 LaserDisc Players were in 2% of American houses. I believed they were more popular in the late 80s and early to mid 90s.
Thankfully wikipedia also had a link to the LaserDisc Database. Which has an "Advanced search" that was somewhat baffling at first but once we figured out that the check boxes meant not we were good to go. I did 20 queries one for each year from 1980-2000 (the search returned nothin in 1978,1979 or 2001) looking only for releases in the USA in NTSC format and took the numbers down in a CSV text file.
Already we had gone too far with this half baked idea. We have no idea what sales numbers for the players or movies were. But Alex had half joked about wanting a chart for it which I had already been thinking as well and was ready to make as the text file was CSV formatted and ready to be loaded into excel and/or Google docs.
Without further ado, I bring you the chart: LaserDisc Releases per Year in the USA....
Note:I did once have a LaserDisc Player but could never find any decent movies for it, I did have a couple and managed to rent one like once. I think I got it in middle school and dismantled it sometime in High School.
Posted by Ben at May 21, 2008 11:10 AMthey had robocop for laserdisc. damnit, that was so rad.
Posted by: jake on May 22, 2008 10:53 AMI think this was one of our better time wasters, I think our next discussion we have should be on other ways we can waste time.
Posted by: Alex on May 22, 2008 02:08 PM