First off... I need to apologize to my friends who have commented over the years (past decade?) and not heard diddly from me. It wasn't until this evening that I noticed that anyone had even commented. I thought that when someone commented on your blog that you would get some kind of notification. That is incorrect and I'm sorry for being dumb. I have turned on comment moderation so this will not be a problem going forward. Thank you to my friends Tom, Todd and Ian for the comments. It is nice to know that y'all are checking in.
One major update is that the sister-in-law ended up having to sell her house and moved back in with us last year. It is what it is I guess. We are getting paid rent this time so that does help things.
On a sad note, we had to say goodbye to one of our cats on Saturday March 4th. Abby was around 12 or 13 years old. We adopted her in 2014. A that time, the place we adopted her from thought she was probably born in 2010 or 2011. She had been having some issues lately, so we had to make the tough decision before things got really bad and she was in a state of constant suffering. We'll miss her and so will the other 3 cats, especially Taylor.
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In the stupid movie department, I have another six collections. Here is the long drawn out story on those. Another apology for the verboseness, but it's a story and I haven't talked to you all in a while so get over it. 😜🤣
It all started on a sleepless night on February 20th 2023. It was 1:30am. I had run out of games to play on my phone, so I went through my email where there were some eBay search results from the previous day. One of the searches was for a the 250 movie packs that were becoming more rare to come by. It was also a form factor from Mill Creek that I didn't have yet and even though I probably had a good number of the movies, I still wanted to have one like that. A bucket-list item if you will. I didn't even care what the category was. There was a Mystery one, a Horror one, a Western one and a Family one. If I had my choice of them, I would have wanted to have the horror one. However, that one was both the hardest one to find and also the most expensive. Horror movie fans are crazy like that. They love their weird and hard to find movies.
There was one that I had my eye on for a while, a Mystery 250 movie pack. It wasn't the greatest price ($34.95 including shipping), but was still ok if I had to buy it. However on this night, when I checked the search results.... it was gone. Checking the Completed eBay listings showed that it had been purchased 4 days ago. At that moment I went into 'fear of missing out' mode. Most of the other similar 250 packs were going for $40 or more which I thought was too expensive. But there was one which looked to be in decent condition with a price of $39.99 with free shipping. Of note, however, was that it was the only one with the Make An Offer button. I figured I might as well go for broken and send a low-ball offer of $29. If they accepted, yay me! If not, I could still try to make another offer of $35.
I then moved my thoughts to some 200 movie collections that I also been running a search on. I had cross referenced these sets (Tales Of Terror, Cult Movie Collection, The Trail West) a while ago but hadn't done it recently so I had no real idea what the overlap was going to be. . Of the ones that were available, there was one for the Western pack which was an old-fashioned auction with the starting $23.40 w $3.65 shipping. There were no bids. The auction was going to be over at 1pm the next day. Not wanting to possibly have the seller bump up the price, I decided to not make a bid then but instead to try to snipe it the next day. I finally fell asleep after doing some more eBay searches but not really finding much else that interested me.
I woke up the next morning and checked my email.... and at 2:15am the seller had accepted my offer. I guess someone else was having a sleepless night and thought the offer was good enough. So yay for me. Knowing I had purchased the Mystery Collection 250 movie, I felt good with the buyer's high.
I then went about my work day. At lunch time I met up with a co-worker. Towards the end of the meal, I told him about the 250 pack I had just purchased. I then remembered about the Western 200 movie pack auction. It was already like 1:45pm and I thought it had ended at 1pm but I checked anyways. To my surprise there was 15 minutes left. So I waited and waited until there was about 2 minutes left and put in my bid. I anxiously watched the time count down to zero and, Hooray!, I was the winning bidder. Later on that day, I redid my cross-reference homework on this set and found that there were only 10 that I did not have. While I could have gotten those movies on two other smaller packs (Ten Thousand Ways To Die 12 movie pack and Ten Thousand More Ways To Die 12 movie pack), getting those two sets would have set me back about $10 each and I wouldn't have gotten the cool 200 movie box, so I am not too disappointed. The front cover it pretty cool in that it is like a layer shadowbox kinda thing where they are different layers put together to make it seem 3Dish.
A couple of days later, I was checking in on my purchases to see if they had tracking numbers yet and if they had shipped. While doing that, eBay recommended an item that looked interesting. It was called Fists Of Vengeance and contained 16 movies. I did some cross referencing with the movies I already had and found that there were 5 movies that I didn't have yet. Seeing how it was $3.75 including shipping, I clicked Buy It Now. Mine!
The next day, the wife and I were watching TV. The set I had purchased recently were all from Mill Creek. My brain then started wondering if the company that made my Fists Of Fire and Legends Of Kung Fu had any more sets. I searched for a little while but was really only finding those two... until I tripped across the King-Fu Crusade 10 movie pack. I went downstairs and cross referenced everything (including the new Fists Of Vengeance that I bought the previous day) and to my surprise I had none of these movies. The price tag was $13 w free shipping, and while it was above my dollar per movie 'limit', I decided that since everything in that set was new that I would buy it. I then went back upstairs to watch some more TV and continue surfing eBay.
I found a couple more sets from Brentwood, Tough Guys Of Kung Fu 10 movie pack and Return Of The Warriors 20 movie pack. They were both around $11. It was late and I didn't feel like running back downstairs so I decided I would do my cross referencing the next day. However it wasn't the next day. I was still on a buzz, so I couldn't sleep, so as I lied there sleepless I did a little bit of research and found that all of the movies from Tough Guys was on Return Of The Warriors. I also found a couple more older Mill Creek 20 kung fu movies sets (Martial Arts and Kung Fu) and got the movie lists for those as well. Then I finally fell asleep.
The next morning I got up and did my cross referencing. As expected, I already had the movies in the Mill Creek 20 movie packs on other Mill Creek martial arts movie packs I already had, so I didn't need to worry about those anymore. When I checked the Warriors 20 movie pack, I found that I didn't have half of the movies. Since it was only a little more than my one dollar a movie threshold, I decided to buy it. I was a little surprise when it came in. Instead of it being hard clamshell like my other 10 kung fu movie packs, it was in a paper one about the same size with a fold out where you could read about the movies in the collection. Inside was a smaller 10 DVD 'wallet'-sized clamshell.
All of my purchases quickly had tracking numbers and they all started showing as being received for shipment by USPS.... except for the Mystery 250 movie pack. It just sat there in 'shipping label printed, USPS waiting to receive the item'. After about 5 days, I started getting nervous. As has happened to me before, I was growing concerned that the seller was not going to be able to find the item and have to issue a refund. But I tried by best to keep my cool and not start emailing the seller 'cause I could 'spook' them and they would immediately refund when they simply just hadn't found it yet. I started to panic a little bit and started looking for a replacement, but of course, it was the same 250 movie packs that had been there for the past week with the cheapest one being for $39.99 with shipping and none of them with a Make An Offer button.
As Monday rolled back around, 7 days after purchasing the 250 movie set, I was starting to lose hope. I had told USPS to text me when there was a change in the status (and had also been frequently checking the eBay site) but there was no change: SHIPPING LBL CREATED USPS AWAITS ITEM. The wife and I sat down that evening to watch our daily YouTube videos and TV shows and whatnot. Around 8:30pm, my phone buzzed. I checked... and it was USPS... 'USPS picked up item, San Diego, CA'. It was on its way! Thank you Jesus! The next day it made it to the Los Angeles Distribution Center. The next 5 days involved me constantly checking for the updates. After that, I knew I probably wouldn't get any updates until it got into Cincinnati, and I was right. It got scanned at the Cincinnati Distribution Center around 2am on March 3rd, and was delivered to me on Saturday March 4th. The box was bigger than I though it would be. The shipping box was a bit roughed up with a whole punched into one side, but thankfully it was in the empty area of the box and my precious 250 Movie Mystery Collection was in my possession.
I had off and on looked throughout the week for other movie packs but only one other one struck my fancy and from eyeballing the list of movies, I knew I had most, if not all of them. The buzz was wearing off and I was feeling a bit... stupid. Just like my movie collection. At this point, I'm not sure what else I would get. Most of the other movie packs that I know about I already have all but like 4 or 5 out of 50 of the movies, so unless I can get them for a steal, it's just silly.
I still need to cross reference the Mystery set and do the checklists for the Mystery and Trail West collection which involves looking things up on IMDB. I'll update the main Stupid Movie Collection blog entry then and ......
Oh... before I forget... As I was showing my Stupid Movie Collection blog entry to my co-worker, I thought I noticed that one was missing. I eventually checked and, yes, I forgot (and almost forgot again as I was typing this up) about a collection I had bought back in the flurry of activity in 2017. The set I forgot to mention was Mill Creek's 'Song & Dance Classics Film Collection' 20 Movie pack. I had purchased it at the Half Price Books in Montgomery for 3 bucks, which was good since it only had three movies which I didn't have yet. Most of them were in the original Musical Classics 50 Movie Pack.
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If you're curious (or if you're not... too bad!), here is what a typical checkoff list looks like. This is the most recent template I have been using. The first movie on the disc start with the disc number. This is followed by the IMDB rating, the movie name (and any common aliases), the year it was made, the top three actors in the movie, the running time and if it is in B&W or COLOR. Many time the set will contain mostly movies of one type, so I usually put at the top of the checkoff list that a movie is in COLOR unless otherwise noted. Sometimes when I am checking IMDB will list different running times, so occasionally I have to plunk the DVD in and check to see what the running time on the version I have. Most times it is shorter but every now and then it is longer. I print these checklists out and put them in with the DVDs for the set and check them off as I watch them from that set. I still don't have a good system for getting the dupes checked off in the other set. I think a few years back I went through all the sets I had then and did the dupe work then. I haven't done that in a while. I also haven't watched any of these movies in a while which is also why this whole thing is a bit ridiculous no matter how you look at it.
Anyhooooooo..... This example is how the checklist for Return Of The Warriors starts out:
Return Of The Warriors 20 movie collection - All movies in COLOR - Total Time: 1746 minutes
Movies (10) marked with a comma(,) were unique to my whole collection at time of writing (2/26/2023)
1___ (5.4) The Screaming Tiger (aka Wang Yu, King Of Boxers) (1972) Jimmy Wang Yu, Ching-Ching Chang, Fei Lung - 85m
___, (6.4) Sister Street Fighter (1974) Etsuko Shihomi, Shin'ichi (Sonny) Chiba, Asao Uchida - 85m
2___ (7.1) Street Fighter (1974) Shin'ichi (Sonny) Chiba, Etsuko Shiomi, Goichi Yamada - 90m
____ (6.4) Return Of The Street Fighter (1974) Shin'ichi (Sonny) Chiba, Masafumi Suzuki, Yôko Ichiji - 88m
etc etc etc
I have been toying around lately with the idea of creating a dedicated blog entry for each of the movie packs that I have. In that blog entry I would repeat the story about getting and then include my checklists in the blog entry. Then, if I was out shopping somewhere and found a movie set, I could do a search on my blog to see if a collection that I currently owned contained a certain movie. Just a thought for future me I guess. How else would I know if one my sets contained the sci-fi movie 'Laser Mission' starting Brandon Lee? (The answer I would find out is that it is contained in both the Sci Fi Classics 50 Movie Pack and the Excellent Eighties 50 Movie Pack.)
If you made it this far. Good for you. I hope all is well with you. Again, I apologize for not responding to your comments in the blog. I honestly didn't see them. :( As always, Take care!
-----------------:darrin
