...And then there was only The Final Cut on shelves :)
While running errands last weekend, I swung through a local Target department store to pick up some personal necessities, and opted to take a few minutes and stroll through the DVD video section of the store to see if I ran into anything new or noteworthy (Target's being at the near-bottom of my list as far as illustrious places to peruse for new media, you understand). I glanced over some DVD titles, a few new, a few old, a few priced to move...and then I saw it:
The simple, no-frills 2-DVD set of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. All on its own, unadorned with any fanfare or special promotions, priced at a consumer-friendly $14.99.
And it honestly just really moved me to see it sitting there so unremarkably and mixed in with everything else. Because above all, it meant to me that Ridley Scott FINALLY got his definitive version of BR onto mass-market shelves in mainstream department stores, where people old and young who have never seen or heard of BR before will see it for the first time in its very finest possible version; and, if they're thrilled by what they've just seen, they can also toss on the second disc with the jaw-droppingly stupendous Dangerous Days documentary, and a whole new universe of BR might just beckon forth to them: "holy moly, I had no @#$% idea that this movie had THIS much history to it!!"
Please don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying goodbye to BladeZone; this forum and the folks here mean the world to me. But I think I was partially so moved by the moment described above, because it almost felt like I'd come full circle in a way with the entire Blade Runner experience that all of us here have been through over the last few years, of having heard rumors and gossip and occasional brief acknowledgements of Scott's revisiting BR to finally create his ultimate, truly definitive edition of the movie (not to mention taking all the time and efforts necessary to create an exhaustive Special Edition DVD set for the ages, which we now have thanks to C.D. Lauzirika & Co.) There were many years when I know almost all of us here at BladeZone probably just said, "ah, to hell with it, it's never going to happen," and just wrote it off as another one of our top ten ardent-movie-enthusiast pipe dreams.
But it really DID happen, all of it. After all our decades of shared enthusiasm and devotion (and a few years of patience ), our BR dreams really did come true, and totally beyond our wildest hopes. And now they're sitting inconspicuously on a shelf at your local department store at the priced-to-move rate of $14.99, for us to share with our friends and loved ones, and for everyone else to discover for the very first time. How unbelievably sweet that is.