Anatomy of an Entertainment Center

Raquelle at Out of the Past posted photos of her DVD collection today (click title of this post) and encouraged fellow film bloggers to join in. I thought I'd participate, particularly as it gives me the opportunity to show off my husband's beautiful woodworking craftsmanship:


DVDs of various TV series are in the righthand section. There's a little bit of everything, TV wise: DICK VAN DYKE, DONNA REED, UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS, and REMINGTON STEELE alongside FRASIER, SPORTS NIGHT, and GILMORE GIRLS.

The two sections to the left are mostly movies, except for my daughter's STARGATE collection and my son's shelf of MAGNUM, MACGYVER, and ROCKFORD. There are three shelves devoted to Disney, including a shelf of Disney Treasures and True-Life Adventures tins. Two shelves hold more recent films, and there are also good-sized collections of Peanuts, Veggie Tales, and holiday DVDs. The rest of the shelves contain mainly Golden Era films from a wide variety of genres.

The TV just visible on the right is a Sony 36-inch flat screen where we do much of our family viewing. However, I tend to watch many movies on a smaller TV in our den, in part as I often wind down after a long day of homeschooling and proofreading by watching a movie late at night after the rest of the family has gone to bed. (The den TV is further from the bedrooms!) Sometimes I can only watch 20 or 30 minutes of a movie at a time, spreading a single movie over three or four days; it's not always the ideal way to watch a film, but I squeeze them in as I can.

Like Raquelle, I have a "secret stash" of movies recorded from TCM; many of mine are housed in this closet alongside cooking magazines, paperback books, and my crockpot:


They're shelved alphabetically by the first movie on the tape, and I find what I'm looking for with the help of an Excel spreadsheet.

We also have a free-standing cupboard in our bedroom which contains more TCM recordings alongside "store bought" VHS tapes and what's left of my collection of Beta recordings. (I didn't own a VHS player until the mid-'90s! Happily, I've been able to buy many of the shows I'd recorded on Beta on DVD and I've gradually been discarding the Beta tapes. We still have a Beta player hooked up in our living room alongside DVD and VHS players.) I also have a large shelf of movies on loan from my father's extensive collection stored in that cupboard. The Excel spreadsheet is an invaluable way for us to keep track of who's got what movie.

Also like Raquelle, we have a Netflix account; when our daughter is at college she uses the account, and when she's home -- or in England, as she is this semester! -- we rotate the choices among the six of us. Sometimes the choices are related to our homeschool lessons; tomorrow, for instance, we're expecting the old SHAKESPEARE PLAYS production of THE TEMPEST, which my 10-year-old recently read in an abridged format.

(Note to self: don't assume just because "it's Shakespeare" that it's OK for all-family viewing. We recently Netflixed the 1999 MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and because of the subject matter I didn't pay attention to the rating, as I usually do. The children found it more than a little "surprising," and we think we'll stick to the Dick Powell-Olivia DeHavilland version in the future!)

So...that's a small peek at the collection behind "Tonight's Movie"!