Room

Don't give me disposable income. Just don't, because I'll spend it on anything. Seriously. Comics, Video Games, DVD's, CD's, Wrestling Gear, Magazines, Football Tickets, Oreo's and anything else that takes my fancy. Every room in my house is groaning with DVD's and CD's. I can barely bloody move. I had a clear out around Christmas time and ended up bunging 4 bags full of stuff to the charity shop and I STILL can't fit everything in my house. I've had to cut down on my DVD purchasing and I've stopped buying comics altogether. I told myself that I did this to save myself some money but really I did it because I just didn't have enough room to store 15 issues of "Bat-Wing" and another 15 issues of "Invincible" (Which was one of the non DC or Marvel comics that I quite enjoyed along with "Hell Yeah". Only "Hell Yeah" survived the cull though, probably because I only have 5 issues of that)

I am a little down about this because I was really enjoying the Doctor Who/Star Trek cross-over comic "Assimilation Squared" and "Death of the Family" had just started as well. I guess I'll have to wait for the trade on those two. I would love to jump back in at some point if for the only reason that I love discussing comics about as much as I love discussing sport and wrestling. This must be why I like CHIKARA so much as it seamlessly combines athletic endeavour with wrestling showmanship and comic book incredulity. Having a drunken discussion about how awesome Jason Todd is with my friend Phil in a MacDonalds late on a Saturday night are the kind of moments that I live for.

At the moment, the things in my house taking up the most space are my ever growing collection of football DVD's. It started with me just picking up some Everton DVD's online (95 FA Cup Final, Cup Winners Cup Final etc). I then started getting some of the Everton matches not officially released on DVD from certain unnamed sources. I know that you shouldn't really buy bootleg DVD's but these were matches that weren't sold in the shops or online. I actually contacted SKY Sports and ITV, who own most of the rights to the matches, and asked them if they would have any intention of releasing any of the matches officially. ITV declined to answer and SKY essentially fobbed me off with a "we'll take it under advisement" reply. I for one find it a crying shame that I've been reduced to getting hold of the games this way.

Anyone who knows me will be able to tell you that I am more than happy to buy the official release of DVD's and CD's. The only time I would ever buy a bootleg DVD would be if it was impossible for me to acquire the footage legally. There are so many VHS's of old WCW shows that you just can't get any more. In the UK, you can't even get WWE on Demand so you are essentially left with only two options

1. Not watch it

2. Get it via illegal means

There's nothing more frustrating than being denied something when you are practically begging the people involved to take your money. How WWE don't have a service where you email them, pay a fee and then have them send a DVD of whatever you want baffles me to this day. It would essentially give them a license to print money as there would always be a nerd like me who will happily shovel money into their coffers in return for every episode of ECW Hardcore TV (uncensored with real music. WWE could do this with an on demand DVD service as it wouldn't be a mass marketed DVD. It's impossible for Metallica's lawyers to check EVERY personalized DVD WWE send out. The man power alone would make it non-financially viable)

Since buying the Everton DVD's I've since tried to add to my collection by picking up other matches. I started collecting FA Cup Finals on DVD and thankfully it's easy to pick most of these up through ILC Sports. You can buy most of them from the ILC website or through Amazon. DVD prices range from about £3 to £11-12 for the rarer ones. DVD's of league cup finals are a bit sparser so I've had to rely on bootlegging to pick some of those up. These are mostly ones from the 80's. However, if they start selling some of the bootlegs I have on official releases, I will pick those up, mainly because a nice official DVD looks better on a shelf. My house is filling though with random football DVD's that I keep picking up, both official and bootleg. World Cup and European Championship matches prove much harder to get hold off through official channels so most of those reside in my bootleg collection.

A large chunk of my wrestling collection is official releases. Pretty much anything WWE and ECW is official mainly because they seem to have been most on the ball when it comes to releasing DVD's. ECW, despite being arguably a much smaller company, completely eclipses WCW when it comes to releasing events on DVD and VHS. ECW released every PPV from 97-2001 in the space of two years. They were even bringing them out after the company had folded. WCW released a pitiful amount of pay per views during the same period. They released Uncensored 99, Spring Stamped 99, Bash at the Beach 99, Starcade 99 and then the first 6 of 2000. Yes, they skipped about 6 shows in 99. This may have been a blessing in disguise because most of the 99 PPV's were horrible.

Still though, who the hell was overseeing the Video department during this period? WCW's internal woes seemingly translated from the incoherent booking of the product to incoherent schedules for their video releases. There was a market for WCW Stuff in the UK as well. I still haven't seen most of WCW's pay per views during their big boom of 96-98 because getting hold of them is next to arduous. ECW not only released their PPV events but also re-released most of the home video shows (granted with over dubbed music) and a couple of compilations of Hardcore TV. WWE are miles ahead of both companies though, especially as regards to making most of their releases available to UK customers. WWE not only releases pretty much all of its DVD's in the UK (aside from The Billy Graham DVD from years back) but also release "WWE Tagged Classics", which is where they pretty much weld their old VHS releases onto DVD and release them for sale.

The only downside is that WWE will soon no longer be dealing with Silver Vision which means that we can probably say goodbye to the tagged classics range which sucks mighty hard. Thankfully, I've plugged most of the gaps in my collection using the Tagged Classics series as far as PPV shows are concerned, which was the main benefit I got from the series really. It may have been cheaper to traipse between e-bay and amazon to pick up the original In Your House Shows on VHS but to just pay £15 and have them on a DVD really simplifies matters (And more importantly, takes up less space on my shelf). If it hadn’t been for years of collecting WWF/E pay per views on VHS, I would just take the financial hit of buying all the tagged classics and would sell/throw out all the VHS’s I have. This would be far too much hassle though so I haven’t really contemplated it.

I wouldn't consider myself a hoarder. It's not like I can't bring myself to chuck away a used tissue or an old bus ticket. But when it comes to DVD's, CD's. Books and Magazines I suddenly don't want to see them go. At some point I'm going to have to get rid of more stuff, if only to avoid the strain it will put on the emergency services to dig me out from under a mountain of 4-4-2 magazines. The only other thing for it is for me to become vastly better off and move to a house where I can have a special room where I plonk everything down in continually rising stacks. . That would be the biggest perk of being rich, being able to afford a room big enough to store my DVD and Comic collection. That and a brand new Honda Accord straight off the car lot! Sadly, that is a mere pipe dream so it looks like I'm going to have to keep finding nooks and crannies for all the nonsense I collect for many days to come.

Oh and to all the companies complaining about piracy, maybe if you made your product easier to purchase, people would actually purchase it through official channels? Just a thought.