Clinging to physical media for movie collecting has become an increasingly difficult prospect in this age of plentiful and convenient video streaming. First and foremost, the very idea of collecting movies for permanent ownership has fallen out of favor with the general public. Even for those of us hardliners who refuse to give up our… Read More First Impressions of a Second 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player
Although the title is undoubtedly more famous as the second movie in the James Bond film franchise, From Russia, with Love was originally the fifth novel by author Ian Fleming to feature his Agent 007 character. In bringing Bond to screen, the movie producers had very little concern for translating the work faithfully. The books… Read More Bond in Books | From Russia, with Love (1957)
Far too often, after rewatching a favorite movie from my youth in the 1980s and early 1990s, I get a compulsion to also play the tie-in video game that accompanied it at the time. This is often a mistake, as most of them are terrible games. I was especially nervous to revisit the 1989 Nintendo… Read More 8-Bit Replay | Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1989) for NES
Welcome to 2025. We’re still in something of a vacation mode here at The Video File. To start the year off, we’re easing in with a mostly off-topic article that has no direct connection to either video or home theater, but that we hope some of you will enjoy anyway. Freshly unboxed is an item… Read More G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1982-1994) | Skybound Comic Compendium Set Unboxing and Review
Poor timing was just the first of many failures that befell the official Nintendo Entertainment System video game adaptation of James Cameron’s The Terminator. By late 1992, the original Terminator movie was already eight-years-old, and even the blockbuster sequel (that presumably inspired the release of this game) had left theaters almost a year and a… Read More 8-Bit Replay | The Terminator (1992) for NES
As a tie-in with its wildly successful Energon Universe line of comic books, Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment has also licensed the right to reprint the original Marvel Comics run of The Transformers, first published in 1984. Re-reading it today unleashes a flood of nostalgic memories from my own ten-year-old youth. The Skybound reprint of The… Read More Commencing Revival Procedures | The Transformers Issue #1 (1984) Marvel Comic Book Reprint by Skybound
At the end of 2023, collectors of the 1980s G.I. Joe toy line received a wonderful gift in the form of a huge coffee table book documenting The Art of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (reviewed here previously). Supporters of that project’s original Kickstarter campaign were additionally promised a supplemental Blu-ray set to follow… Read More Snap-On, Stay-On | The Art of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Blu-ray Digipack (2024)
A couple weeks ago, a local community event space put up a makeshift screen and hosted a viewing of Luc Besson’s 1997 sci-fi epic The Fifth Element in my neighborhood. Although admittedly not, on a technical level, the best cinematic experience I’ve had in my life, and certainly not up to my usual home theater… Read More A Visual History of The Fifth Element (1997) on Home Video
In September 2023, two new non-fiction books were published to capitalize on what was originally intended to be the theatrical release of Denis Villeneuve’s mega-budget sequel Dune: Part Two. Unfortunately, that film’s launch date was postponed to early 2024, leaving both books stranded with no obvious thematic tie-in, except each other. I’ve previously reviewed A… Read More A Secret Report within the Guild | The Spice Must Flow (2023) Book Review
The summer of 2023 may have belonged to Barbie, but the year also closed out with a very lovely tribute to her longtime rival from toy store shelves. Arriving in book form rather than a movie, The Art of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero is a gorgeous and exhaustively comprehensive chronicle of one of… Read More Relive the Adventure | The Art of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (2023) Book Review
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