UNDER CONSTRUCTION – come back tonight about 10pm for finished version
The last few years, I have been discovering new passions, or interests.
2018 was really me getting into slabs (sealed and protected graded comics) as well as headphones and to a small degree statues.
Buying my first 3 statues (and as of this writing still my only 3 statues) in 2018. It was also the year I began my dive into graded or slabbed comic books. I started 2018 with 0 slabbed comics and ended the year with over 2 dozen. I also got into headphones big that year, getting about half a dozen audiophile quality headphones.
By 2019 I had put the brakes on the slabbed comics, as well as the headphones (selling most of the headphones, only keeping a couple). Instead in 2019 I got bitten by two new collecting bugs, folding knives and Blu-ray Steel-books. Managing to control my collecting bug a little more in 2019, I only treated myself to one folding knife, my first new knife in over 10 years, but on the Steel-book front I have jumped in with both feet.
Having only owned one steel-book going into 2019, and having largely just not made time for physical media in the last several years, since 2014, by the end of 2019 I had definitely made up for lost time, i had amassed a collection of over 3 dozen mostly steel-books, with a smattering of digi-books thrown in. I won’t bog you down in all the great items I picked up in 2019, but will just shut out some that put a smile on my face every-time I see them, and that I highly recommend to other collectors out there.
THE THING – I saw this steelbook, a mingling of beautiful art piece, and quality remastered and feature rich version of one of my favorite movies, on someone’s youtube channel and I was blown away. While I appreciate the improvement of Bluray over DVD, I was never a fan of the Bluray packaging, branding. It looked cheap, it looked ugly, and in the age of streaming, you do have to justify what you allow to take up space in your home. So while not one of those extolling ‘physical media is dead’ for me at least, it had slowed down to absolute must haves, that I did not want to leave to the vagaries of streaming licensing deals, to ensure I could view it.
But with this Shoutfactory/ScreamFactory release of the THING I was introduced to something new in the market, boutique companies treating these Blurays as quality works, deserving of quality branding. So yeah, as funds allowed in 2019 I picked up ShoutFactory steelbook after steelbook, and they have just been homeruns. And 2019 was a particularly good year, because they were doing the John Carpenter series of films, and his work in steelbook… well let us say i can not think of many other genre filmmaker that I would have been as passionate about collecting as John Carpenter.
As of this writing there are only a couple of his films, that I still need from Shoutfactory. So big kudos to that Youtube channel and to ShoutFactory for making steelbooks a definite passion for me (and seemingly many others) in 2019.
And naturally Shoutfactory’s Steelbooks opened the door for me to great and must have steelbooks from other quality Bluray labels, such as Universal, Criterion, Disney, Indicator, Arrow and many more.
Some quick shoutouts for 2019:
STEELBOOKS
THE THING -ShoutFactory
PRINCE OF DARKNESS – ShoutFactory
LIFEFORCE – ShoutFactory
THE LAST JEDI – Disney
ROUGE ONE – Disney
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA -Zavvi
Under Construction- Come back tonight 10pm EST for completed post
In the meantime check out these 2020 DEALS!!!
I don’t love this poster, it is picturesque enough but doesn’t really give a sense of the movie. However the trailer on the other hand does foretell a stunning future landscape of man and machine, and the calamity that waits at the heart of that meeting. This is a well worn cautionary ground, as old as Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, but here with enough of a visionary twist to make me very excited. 
Heroic Times 