This Christmas, I heard a lot of people express skepticism about buying new DVDs and blu-rays. The reason was because was are supposedly going to go to digital streaming and storage of movies. What do you need a blu-ray for when you can have all the movie you want on a hard disk?

I remain skeptical of this.

I’ll ignore for the moment any arguments about technology. I’ve been streaming netflix movies to my TV for some time and they look fine. I’m sure that will only improve. I have no doubt that a lot of movies will be watched that way. And while there are concerns that the internet infrastructure can keep up, I’m sure enough money will make the problem go away.

But I remain skeptical that an iTunes like device will completely replace the video library, at least for a long long time. My skepticism is based on three recent events.

First, I recently bought both The Dark Knight and Star Trek on blu-ray with the so-called digital copy. If this is the future of home video, you can leave me out. The digital copies are only authorized on a certain number of machines (and the bad code caused it to register on my laptop twice). Hollywood has been immensely stupid on DRM and I have no intention of putting my movie pleasure at their mercy. I suspect I am not alone in this.

Second the recent incident in which Amazon yanked copies of 1984 off of Kindle was alarming. Bezos apologized but the reasoning behind it sounded ominous — a copyright violation. What might happen if we have, say, a “Coming to America” style copyright dispute? Will the movies vanish from our hard drives? Or what happens if some government agent decides that, for example, “The Tin Drum” constitute kiddie porn and then unilaterally yanks it from every video library in America?

Finally, there is the very real danger that certain directors (*cough* Lucas *cough*) might decide to put out new and improved versions of their movies, replacing original copies while you sleep. Do we want to give them that power?

The fundamental problem here is that Hollywood’s (and Washington’s) attitude is that you do not own digital copies of movies, music or books — you merely license them. I see this as the pin that may eventually burst the digital ballon. Until we move to a fairer system of copyright law — on in which you permanently own copies and fair use is protected — there will be curmudgeons like me who will resist. And with good reason.

It’s simply a fact that the technical hurdles of the digital movie era may be nothing compared to the pinhead politician problems. I’m not sure that has a solution.

My daughter is really into the Disney Princesses right now. Princess shoes, Princess play castle, Princess diapers, Princess dolls. When we got the play castle, she ran upstairs, grabbed a diaper and gleefully found which princess matched it. I — nerd that I am — was very proud that she could do image matching. But was when the Princess thing really began.

She’s also starting to get into TV now, which is a little scary. I know she likes it but I’m trying hard to limit it. This is difficult on weekends when neither of us has the energy to play with her all day and the temptation to use the Electronic Babysitter is strong. But we’ve mostly limited it to stuff like Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer (which she was exposed to through friends, not us). Lately, she’s also gotten into Bugs Bunny. So the natural extension is the Disney movies.

Unfortunately, Disney’s oddball DVD policy prevents us from buying Cinderella, Abby’s favorite. But we did pick up Sleeping Beauty, her second favorite. Thanks to the Stomach Flu from Hell, we’ve watched it a dozen times in the last few days.

The movie is actually very good. In fact, I worry it’s a little intense for a 2.5 year old. It has decent characters, especially the delightfully evil villainess. The scene in which Sleeping Beauty is drawn to the spindle is also very well done (it always provokes Abby, who has watched it raptly every time, to say, ‘No, Sleepy Huey! Stop!’)

But I watching a scene of Maleficent’s demons. It is very similar to the “Night on Bald Mountain” scene from Fantasia — probably one of the most incredible pieces of animation in film history. That remind me of this video, which accuses Disney of ripping itself off.

A multi-billion dollar corporation that gets zillions from kids and is brutal in defending its copyrights needs no defense from me. But artistically, I will defend:

1) No one imagined that future generations would break these movies down from home videos.

2) This sort of thing is overlooked when it’s not a company that evokes hatred in certain quarters. George Lucas, in particular, loves to homage other movies, including his own. The Star Trek films and series have repeatedly reused F/X footage — notably the Klingon Bird-of-Prey explosion from ST6.

3) The original animations were based on filming live actors, an expensive process to recreate for a medium that was not terribly profitable. If you got it right the first time, why screw it up the second time?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to recovering more of my childhood through Abby. Although I think I might hold off on Watership Down until she’s old enough to handle it. 38 should be good.

Update: In other weird Disney criticism, I just remember this paragraph from Roger Ebert’s review of Snow White (which is the first movie I remember seeing in a theater):

Richard Schickel’s 1968 book The Disney Version points out Disney’s inspiration in providing his heroes and supporting characters with different centers of gravity. A heroine like Snow White will stand upright and tall. But all of the comic characters will make movements centered on and emanating from their posteriors. Rump-butting is commonplace in Disney films, and characters often fall on their behinds and spin around. Schickel; attributed this to some kind of Disney anal fixation, but I think Disney did it because it works: It makes the comic characters rounder, lower, softer, bouncier and funnier, and the personalities of all seven Dwarfs are built from the seat up.

Ebert has kids so I’m sure he can also appreciate that kids find butts and butt-related actions to be really really funny.

There’s a video out there — a long annoying video — that is a full bore attack on the Star Wars prequels. Even having slogged through most of it, I stand by what I previously said (and Robert’s insightful comment). I think the movies are decent to almost great. That they are not as good as the original trilogy doesn’t bother me; I didn’t expect them to be. A lot more works than doesn’t. And much of the anger is generational — i.e., most intense among those who grew up on the first trilogy.

I was actually mulling over making my own video response to the critique. But I can’t imagine where I’d get the time.

I will add one thing to my previous post: the prequel trilogy was a losing proposition from the start. Prequels, in general, do not do well. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single on that really worked except for the prequel half of The Godfather. Reboots sometimes work, but prequels rarely do.

The reason is not because prequel makers are idiots but because they are faced with not one but two impossible tacks. First, they have to match the quality of a film that was so good it merited a prequel. Even a small regression to the mean is inevitable. It’s just not easy to make two magnum opi.

Second, prequels are, by definition, narratively confined. We know where it’s going to end, so drama and surprise are out. More importantly, the plot ceases to flow from the characters. The characters become slaves to the plot. This is one of the biggest problems with the Star Wars prequels — characters like Padme have to serve more as walking plot devices than actual characters.

As a writer myself, I have often envisioned the end of the story only to find the characters marching it off in a different direction. With prequels, that freedom is lost.

Still, I enjoy Episode I-III for what they are. They do a reasonable job, although not as a good a job as they could. And I’ve never really understood how someone could be so enraged by them as to do things like make an annoying and deliberately obtuse 70-minute video.