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I bought the limited edition and quite expensive Blue Underground Mondo Cane collection new in Austin back in 2005, while covering that year's SXSW. Though I had no real need to, I opened up the package in my hotel room (I didn't have a DVD player there, so I was basically just playing with it), and found that all was fine except that the first disc, of the original Mondo Cane, was missing from the case entirely. At the time I was working part time at a place that sold DVDs, and had someone come to me with that story I doubt I would have believed them. To make matters worse, I was out of town, so limited in my time and options to do anything about it. As it happened, the place I bought it from, which also rented DVDs (it's the cool record store on Lamar; I can't remember their name), had the same set up for rental, so without any trouble gave me their rental copy of the first disc and refunded all but their cost of the whole set, saving me something like $45. In the end, I was pretty happy about how that all went down.

Raymond Marble wrote:As it happened, the place I bought it from, which also rented DVDs (it's the cool record store on Lamar; I can't remember their name)

Waterloo Records

Yup, that's the one.

mteller wrote:If you don't have a receipt, you're probably shit outta luck. Even with a receipt you'd probably be shit outta luck. Just curious... why'd you wait so long to open it? First thing I do when I get a new DVD/Blu is rip off the shrinkwrap and make sure everything's okay in there.

Agreed. Sometimes I forget to do it but it should be done ASAP after buying a film.

Years ago I went through 3 defective Kino Metropolis DVD's (with the same exact issue: movie went all green about half way through the film) from the same BN store. The third time I went back to BN they just issued me a gift card.

I put in a face in the crowd last night, which was the only remaining title from the amazing controversial classics set I hadn't seen. First time I'd pulled the disc off the hub. Unfortunately an hour into the film it froze hard. Inspecting the disc it has an arced scratch / scuff on the rim. With over a 1000 dvds this is only the first or second time I can recall a brand new disc having a factory defect and not playing. Damn disappointing the film is utterly phenomenal, but at least I can rent it on Amazon this weekend. Is there a tool I could use on the computer to extract it?

movielocke wrote:I put in a face in the crowd last night, which was the only remaining title from the amazing controversial classics set I hadn't seen. First time I'd pulled the disc off the hub. Unfortunately an hour into the film it froze hard. Inspecting the disc it has an arced scratch / scuff on the rim. With over a 1000 dvds this is only the first or second time I can recall a brand new disc having a factory defect and not playing. Damn disappointing the film is utterly phenomenal, but at least I can rent it on Amazon this weekend. Is there a tool I could use on the computer to extract it?

Only if you have a disc drive capable of reading Blu-Ray Discs.

Thanks for your very fun stories about weird mishaps. A little surprised that no one else seems to have had my issue (getting a first release DVD disc instead of a re-issue Blu), which definitely seems more plausible than some of the very bizarre totally unrelated switches. Odd.

To answer the very good question of why I didn't open and check as soon as I had purchased it:

When I was a lad, and my parents would take me home from the record/video store, I would always tear open shrinkwrap just to spend a few minutes looking at some cold, hard physical media, just to make the 7-minute car ride more tolerable. It felt like Christmas. Years later, when I hound Criterion sales for 10 blu-rays at a time, I take them all home and let my kevyip pile-up, so I can have that Christmas feeling anytime I wish by just taking an unopened package off my shelf. I think I have some few dozen unopened blu-rays (2/3 Criterion) on the shelves.

I will definitely check all of my discs from now on. I know I will never have time to check that there are no encoding defects or the like, but at least I can make sure I'm not getting 1 OOP/trumped DVD in place of TWO blu-rays.

I e-mailed Mulvaney over the weekend and haven't heard anything. He might be up to his neck in brown Blus. Should a non-response be taken to mean "sorry, buddy"?

teddyleevin wrote:Thanks for your very fun stories about weird mishaps. A little surprised that no one else seems to have had my issue (getting a first release DVD disc instead of a re-issue Blu), which definitely seems more plausible than some of the very bizarre totally unrelated switches. Odd.

To answer the very good question of why I didn't open and check as soon as I had purchased it:

When I was a lad, and my parents would take me home from the record/video store, I would always tear open shrinkwrap just to spend a few minutes looking at some cold, hard physical media, just to make the 7-minute car ride more tolerable. It felt like Christmas. Years later, when I hound Criterion sales for 10 blu-rays at a time, I take them all home and let my kevyip pile-up, so I can have that Christmas feeling anytime I wish by just taking an unopened package off my shelf. I think I have some few dozen unopened blu-rays (2/3 Criterion) on the shelves.

I will definitely check all of my discs from now on. I know I will never have time to check that there are no encoding defects or the like, but at least I can make sure I'm not getting 1 OOP/trumped DVD in place of TWO blu-rays.

I e-mailed Mulvaney over the weekend and haven't heard anything. He might be up to his neck in brown Blus. Should a non-response be taken to mean "sorry, buddy"?

Probably the brown blus like you said, I've never had an issue with their customer service.

I had a similar situation a few years ago with BN. I bought Last Year At Marienbad from them online and when I opened it there was no disc inside and the booklet was torn down the middle as if someone took a pair of scissors to it. I called BN customer service and they sent me another copy free of charge. I thought that it was very strange.

I definitely check my purchases now. Last Black Friday, I bought a Prometheus that turned out to have a small divot or dent, like something pointy had hit the disc from beneath, and it wouldn't load. Fortunately this was a few days later so I was able to exchange it. (Actually I tried to just return it, since I was having buyer' remorse over the night's spending, but Best Buy would only let me exchange even in the case of defective merch.)

But having learned my lesson, I at least open everything to check for obvious damage and if I have time or if it's something more spendy like a Criterion, pop it in and see if it loads. I still have several items way past their dates so I just have to hope for the best, but honestly, that's the only such problem I recall out of the perhaps 200 movies and CDs I've bought new.

Here's my tale...

Back around 1990 or so, a friend of mine bought a copy of the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls." He opened up the longbox and the jewel case and found there were two discs inside! So I kept the second disc. I put it in a spare jewel case, cut up the longbox into an approximation of the correct artwork (I even made the top flap into the jewel case "spine"), and ran off a track list on my dot matrix printer which I taped to my ersatz "booklet."

Four or so years later, I bought an actual copy of "Some Girls" (it got remastered and reissued in gee-whiz mini-LP packaging) and gave away my "homemade" copy to someone, I don't remember who. Life went on.

Then, in 2010, I was rifling through the dollar bin at a local CD store's annual Labor Day sale and I found my bespoke copy of "Some Girls"! Same cobbled-together artwork, same dot-matrix track list, same 20-year-old Scotch tape.

I thought about buying it back, but decided I should leave it in the wild and see if it came back again in 2030. I told a friend about it that afternoon, and she demanded I go back and get it for her because loved the story. So I went back to the store and of course my disc was gone. Maybe it was never there at all...

About ten years ago there was a Mormon-exploitation film called "Sons of Provo" that apparently got some of it's copies mixed up at the authoring company and the DVDs came with a porn film on it instead. It was pretty big news around Utah valley and, looking back on it now, I wonder if it was perhaps an intentional prank by someone doing the disc pressings.

I bought a supposedly new DVD copy (definitely at a new price) of The Secret in Their Eyes at B&N. I bought it with another Blu-ray and just carried it out. I was almost all the way home when I noticed the case was pretty light. I shook it... Not a sound. I returned it and, sure enough, there was no disc in the box. I couldn't even have a funny screw-up, I just got the infuriating one.

The best part is when they looked at me suspiciously as if I had stolen the disc, re-wrapped the box, and put their sale stickers back on it.

Update after a week and a half. Still now word from Criterion. Do you think its worth e-mailing again?

Over 10 years ago I bought ten brand new DVDs of FM, released by Anchor Bay, at the local Suncoast store. At the time, the FM was out of print and selling for hundreds of dollars online. I started selling them through Amazon and ebay and some of my buyers contacted me complaining that their DVD wasn't playing. It seems that many, if not all of those DVDs produced by Anchor Bay were cursed with DVD rot and after several years they will simply stop playing. I found later on that the FM DVDs that looked gold were the ones affected the most while the silver ones apparently have survived longer than expected.

Original poster update: Mulvaney finally responded and asked for some proof of the mishap and my address. I took comprehensive pictures of what I found and he responded saying he would be sending out the replacement discs the next day.

Victory!