"In the new "The Naked Gun" movie, Liam Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr. is obsessed with early aughts culture. He laments the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show and being refused Freedom Fries. He's a superfan of the Black Eyed Peas and "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer." And, when it comes to watching his precious episodes of "Buffy," they are (well, at least, they were) all stored on his TiVo which was, crucially, not connected to the internet so the episodes wouldn't expire."
"The early aughts was a strange, but also exciting time when it came to consuming media. There were no streaming services - even watching a movie trailer online, something we take entirely for granted today, could take hours to download if it was something popular like, say, the "Attack of the Clones" trailer. But the explosion of the DVD market was truly exciting."
"Finally, films could be viewed in their proper aspect ratios without the need for bulky laserdisc players that required multiple discs and flipping those multiple discs while viewing. Finally, a whole world of bonus features and commentary tracks were available to the masses, presented in a quality that was, frankly, good enough for the cathode-ray televisions of the era that most people still had."
Frank Drebin Jr. embodies deep nostalgia for early-aughts pop culture, storing treasured TV episodes on an offline TiVo to prevent expirations. The early 2000s lacked streaming services, making online video access slow and unreliable, while the DVD market expanded rapidly. DVDs enabled proper aspect ratios and replaced cumbersome laserdisc setups that required disc flipping. DVDs also brought widespread bonus features and commentary tracks in a quality suited to the cathode-ray televisions of the era. The Criterion Collection pioneered high-quality home media formats, developing many of these technical and curatorial innovations and entering the DVD market in 1998 with Seven Samurai.
Read at IndieWire
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