After a couple of months of de-cluttering, and disposing of as much stuff as I could online, I was finally ready to head out with the remaining haul to one of our local charity shops - a haul that actually contained amongst everything else a frankly depressing number of bad purchasing decisions from the very recent past:
I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but there are a lot of DVDs (and Blu-rays) in my collection I've only ever watched once; the four on the left here being prime examples. Unlike many of the others though, these four I was pretty confident I'd never want to watch again.
Face Off, The Grudge, The Eye - all decent, but action and horror are two genres where the movies really have to be top notch, Terminator 2/The Omen calibre stuff before I'll watch them more than once. Unfortunately I bought all these before I'd finally come to realise that.
As for stand-up, I've yet to see a comedy set I've had any desire to rewatch; I'm starting to suspect that maybe it's just not my thing. (Thank goodness I don't get lumbered with any of the stand up DVDs that seem to come out in their thousands every Christmas).
The Goldfinger DVD on the other hand, I never watched at all. I picked it up for €4 in a CD Wow sale back in 2009. Seemed like a great deal, but then I ended up picking up the whole Connery Bond collection for €20 a couple of months later, having barley removed the shrink wrap from this. Whoops.
And finally, The Ministry of Sound Annual 2000. Or is it?
Actually, no. Inside, to my dismay, was the previous year's compilation which I'd already picked up a couple of years before. Not that I blame the seller on Amazon, with MoS using the year 2000 to market their CDs for two years running. I can only hope that the eventual charity shop buyer doesn't mind a bit of surprise. :D
The only engagement I had with Omen remake up until very recently was listening to a really softball interview with the director the Summer it came out while checking out the copy of Tekken 2 I'd just bought on eBay, simultaneously thinking "Yeah, this movie's going to be shit" and "Man, I should have that PS1 I ordered like, tomorrow. This is going to be awesome!". No, it was my brother who picked this up while we were browsing around GameStop several years later. I'd never watched it and I had no intention of doing so either. But, curiosity finally got the better of me last Halloween and I popped in another bloody copy of it I've ended up with it in the Omen box set, and yep, it's every bit as pointless and lame as I imagined.
Speaking of lame: Revenge of the Sith. So having finally accepted that Episodes I and II were mostly junk, I pretty much ignored this when it came out in '05. Over the following year though I started buying more and more into the consensus that "hey, this one was actually pretty good" to the point where I finally caved-in and bought the DVD. And it was terrible! Again! Well, alright: Palpatine was enjoyably over the top at times, but the rest of it? No thanks. *sigh* Another €18 own the drain. :D
Probably the best of the trio, but something I doubt I'll ever rewatch is Dodgeball, which I impulse bought in a sort of panic after fruitlessly (and exhaustively) searching the ex rental section of a video place for (non-existent) bargains back in the mid aughts.
A few more CDs. 1977, I decided to part with after upgrading to the awesome 3-CD reissue from 2009. The other two were duplicates I'd ended up with. I'm pretty sure the copy of Thriller I hung onto was the superior version, but there are so may at this stage you'd need an extremely elaborate chart to properly access that.
Of all the stuff here, I'm pretty gutted I ended up having to give away the two Lost sets. You'd think they'd still be worth something even in 2011. I mean, they used to cost like, €60 at one point, but I just couldn't offload them. I suppose it didn't help that A. most people lost interest early on, B. the rest were still pissed at the ending, and C. why get it on DVD when the Blu-rays were already relatively cheap? Actually that's pretty much why I got rid of these. I hadn't picked up Seasons 3-6 yet and I didn't see the point of continuing with the DVD sets when I'd finally started getting into Blu-ray.
Blu-ray was also the reason I was doing away with the Back to the Future DVD set. Kind of. I'd been meaning to grab BTTF on DVD for years and the new set they announced in 2010 sounded great, even better on DVD because it was only £10, so I pre-ordered it, months in advance. Obviously at such a low price point, I should have guessed something fishy was up, but it wasn't until I started watching the movies (appropriately enough the night the clocks were going back that year) that I realised that not only did this set not feature match it's identically-packaged Blu-ray sibling, it didn't even have the special features from the previous DVD sets. It was a repackaging of the original DVD releases of the three movies from back in goodness knows when. While was certainly fun watching the movies themselves again, this wasn't the release I signed up for.
Having had access to just two channels growing up there's a lot of things I missed out on. Slowly but sureley I've been checking out a lot of that stuff over the last few year and these Beavis and Butt-head sets were the first things I picked up as part of that project; a good place to start I thought, as I'd already seen and enjoyed the movie quite a bit. The show was great too, but while I was able to secure Volumes 2 and 3 for the tidy sum of €7.50 each, it was a year or so before I spotted the first volume for a decent price. Somewhat unfortunately it was exactly the same price as the full collection was going for (about €22) , so I decided to go for that instead freeing up some precious shelf space in the process.
Something else I missed out on as a kid was Twin Peaks, though I think that may have been for the best; I think I'd have been pretty freaked out by it at the time. Unlike Beavis and Butt-head though, I'm pretty certain this was on RTÉ at the time; as soon as I heard the theme music I had a hazy memory of hearing it in the background when I would have been five or six maybe. I picked this up on sale after Christmas '09 with no idea of how I was going to get hold of Season 2; it's UK release was still in limbo at that point. When it finally did hit, much like Beavis and Butt-head, it was priced high enough that it made more sense to pick up the Gold Box set and grab the extra special features than to buy it individually. I'm even more glad I didn't pay for just Season 2 now given how dumb I now know it gets. :D
And so finally, in May 2012 (good grief, I've dragged this thing on forever :D), I carted this lot, all the books, all the cassettes, and all the videos I'd gathered up off to charity shop land. I was a bit worried going in though that they'd send me packing again with half the stuff I brought (They did seem to be only selling books and clothes out of this outlet), but they were quite happy to take the donation in it's entirety, no questions asked. All that clutter, all that stuff I thought I'd never see the back of was finally gone. The Clearoutageddon was complete.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
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