My Fair Lady
... how loverly ...


I've got a love for retrostuff, so I bought a LaserDisc-player last year.

LaserDiscs (LDs) may have been common in the US and Japan, but not in Europe. It's damn hard to find a player or some discs in Belgium. You could call a LD the forerunner of a DVD.

Yesterday, I visited the excellent "Record Collector", a shop in Antwerp. They have a small amount of LDs for sale. At five bucks each, you can't go far wrong. These babies cost $30-$50 when they were still produced. But 24 hours ago, they were all gone in said store. Vanished without a trace. Up in smoke.

When I asked the shopowner where all the LDs had gone, he told me some guy purchased the whole lot for a good price. "What a pity!" I thought, because "Record Collector" still had some titles I would have loved to have.

"what about that My Fair Lady over there?" I asked. "Oh yeah", the owner replied, "I forgot about that one. Well, you can have it for $8."

What a bargain! The normal price was $20, but the original price (when the disc was released in 1994) was over $100. Because this isn't "just the movie". This is a collector's box worthy of the name "special edition" - unlike some DVDs that just offer a making of and a trailer and still boost "special collector's superduper expensive-but-in-the-end-not-worth-it edition" on the package.

This 30th Anniversary Edition features the movie in a THX restored version (on three discs), the CD-soundtrack, a book about the making of the movie, 6 lithoreproductions of the stunning fashionwork done for the movie, an actual filmframe and a brochure.

... for $8!!!!

I'm officially a lucky bastard. Whatever people say I am not, that's what I am.



Julian De Backer, 2 April 2006