FREE DVDS!!!

Folks, you might find this hard to believe, but the state of physical media in this world was once so much more plentiful, that studios would just give you some for free!  Major motion pictures, Oscar Award winners, hit TV shows, junk, you name it.  You could just pick them up at a store, find them mailed to your house unsolicited, or get with a box of cereal.  No kidding.  I lived through it and I saved the evidence.  So let's have a look; it can't all be boutique label comparisons.  I gotta live up to the name of this site and post something offbeat once in a while.  So let's start at the bottom and build up to the most interesting.

It's easy to understand why these first couple discs were given away for free; they're basically just novel forms of advertising.

In 2005, I was buying something at Suncoast Video in my local shopping mall.  And on the check-out counter was an open box of DVDs that said "FREE- TAKE ONE."  So I did.  It was a little promotional DVD for Tyler Perry's film Madea's Family Reunion, which was coming to theaters in a couple months.

So what's actually on there?  Not that much.  After a couple warnings and logo screens, for The Tyler Perry Company and Lion's Gate, we get the teaser trailer for the film.  That's followed by the full theatrical trailer.  And finally that's followed by what might have been interesting for big Perry fans at the time, but isn't worth much now that the film's out and readily available: a two minute clip from the upcoming film.  It's all non-anamorphic and improperly interlaced.  But looking it up, it seems like the home video release of this movie doesn't include the teaser or trailer, so maybe there's like one super hardcore fan out there who's happy to own this DVD.

if you only click to enlarge one screenshot in your entire life...

And along the same lines but a little more compelling is DVD Inside: The DVD Entertainment Magazine from Artisan Home Entertainment.  Calling this a "magazine" is exceedingly generous - it's basically just a collection of, as it says on the front cover, "over 30 movie trailers."  They're divided into exciting categories such as "What's Out There," This Holiday Season" and "$15.00 and Under."  But there is a magazine-like aspect, starting with a weird ass 30-second video of a woman talking to a creepy CGI man on his television (don't worry; he ends up in prison!).  Another woman speaks to us on the menu screens, explaining what all the options are.  And like the Madea DVD, it also tries to get us excited over an exclusive clip - in this one from their upcoming T2: Judgement Day restoration.  It's also non-anamorphic and and problematically interlaced, so I wouldn't say they do a good job of selling it.

But there is something marginally worthwhile on this disc, too.  An exclusive interview with Steven Soderbergh and Terence Stamp at a Virgin Megastore about their film, The Limey.  It's only a couple minutes long, but the actual Limey releases don't have any on-camera interviews and are generally starved for extras, so at least it's something.  There's no year on this, but given what they're marketing, this must be from 2000-2001, and it has buy.com branding on the back.  They had a whole website and (actual paper) magazine subscription service where they would send you a whole bunch of stuff; and they produced DVDs with whole movies on them (search "InsideDVD" on EBay).  But this is the weird freebie I got.

This next disc, I don't know, my parents just randomly got it in the mail one day in 2008?  The actual name of the disc is TWC_NY_MAILER.  It's a promo disc for TNT's show, The Closer.  It starts with a joint commercial for The Closer and Saving Grace, focusing on how they've "redefined what it means to be a woman on television."  Then it gives you a complete episode of The Closer, apparently from season 3.  That's it, no gimmicks or ploys, just a free episode of the show in the mail.  And despite being newer than the other discs, it's still non-anamorphic and badly interlaced.  But hey, back before most people had streaming, a free episode of a show in the mail was kind of a neat, random surprise.

everything's playing in that little box in the middle.

A little less straight forward is this promo disc for Lost that came free inside an issue of TV Guide from 2009ish.  No whole episodes here, but for fans, it had some interesting odds and ends.  The menu screen constantly plays ocean sounds the entire time unless you click the mute button, which you absolutely will want to do, because all of the video plays inside a window on the menu screen.  So yes, the ocean sounds play during, and conflict with, the audio from the videos.  It starts with a trailer for season 2 and a teaser for season 3.  But then we get some deleted scenes from season 2, and a couple behind-the-scenes featurettes, including an interview with JJ Abrams.  I looked it up, and some of this stuff wound up on the Lost season 2 boxed set, but one of them was only on the Spanish and German sets, and these particular deleted scenes appeared on any of them.  Something interesting for the Lost devotee who has everything.

But enough of these scraps!  Didn't I say entire, major motion pictures were given away for free?  Yes, like these two from 2005: 12 Angry Men (the original) and 1998's The Man In the Iron Mask, which were part of Kellogg's Movie Lovers Collection.  See, once you collected five "tickets" from your cereal boxes, you could print out an order form and mail them, select from one of eight titles.  The others were: Agent Cody Banks, Hackers, It Runs in the Family, Return to Me, Baby Boom and Honeymoon in Vegas, and later, they re-ran the program but with Fox DVDs.  So you just mailed them an envelope, and they mailed you back the DVD in a glossy paper sleeve.  You could even cut off part of the sleeve and use it as a $2 coupon on MGM special editions in stores... but I'm too much of a collector to cut up my DVD covers.

Anyway these, to be clear, are not special editions.  They're completely barebones.  They don't even have menu screens.  They're also fullscreen 1.32:1 editions, which was a little surprising, since MGM had already released the correctly framed widescreen versions at that time.  And yes, they're interlaced.  Apparently, all free DVDs must be interlaced, no matter what.  Maybe it's intentional sabotage to make viewers want to double-dip?  It was a little hard to complain, though, when they didn't even ask us to pay for shipping.

But the best gifts are surprises, right?  So here's an Academy Award winning movie that arrived completely unsolicited and unexpected, delivered in a paper envelop inside our morning newspaper (specifically, The Home News Tribune): Smile Pinki: A Real-World Fairy Tale.  It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 2008.  It's a documentary about, and funded by, a charity called Smile Train, which performs free cleft lip and palette surgeries on impoverished children in India, focusing on one particular little girl named Pinki Sonkar.  It's a little schmaltzy and self-congratulatory - if you pay attention to Academy voting in the documentary categories, they often favor causes they like over what happens to actually be the best movie - but it's genuinely well done, filmed on location and following her journey first-hand.  I believe the reason Smile Train distributed this disc free of charge was a way to promote their charity, and hopefully make back the expense in new donations.  You can't be mad at that, especially when the only consequence for us was a free movie.

That's Chris Melonie in the dark green.  They just... let him do that.

Again, of course, it's non-anamorphic and interlaced.  English subtitles are burnt in and not always easy to read.  And obviously it's completely barebones, right?  No, that's where you're wrong!  There are actually hours of bonus features!  There's a featurette about how Pinki was flown to America so she could walk the red carpet at the Oscars and a traditional 'making of' featurette.  And then there is tons and tons of video by and about Smile Train.  It's like an infomercial broken up into pieces: "Walter Cronkite Reports," "10th Year Anniversary," "Report from Bangladesh," etc.  And there's tons of celebrity endorsement videos, by people like Diane Sawyer, Christie Brinkley and Alex Trebek, plus the chairman and founder (that's two separate people) of the charity.  There's even a piece about actor Chris Meloni (star of Law & Order SVU and Wet Hot American Summer) traveling to India and wvwn performing part of one of the children's surgeries.  Honest, for real!  Hey, it's all for a good cause, but I can't imagine any human being on Earth actually watched all of it.  But the stuff that actually acts as DVD extras for the movie are nice to have, and certainly unexpected.  Just like the disc itself.

But that's what life was like before 2010, young readers.  Sometimes the world just gave you DVDs, whether you asked for them or not.