The Corner Penthouse

As evident by the Reviews section here on The Corner Penthouse, I am an avid collector of physical media. For disc-based video formats, I've been collecting them since the mid-1990s when I bought my first laserdisc player. I graduated to DVD around 1997 or 1998. I remember going into Blockbuster Video at that time and asking them if they had DVDs. They looked at me like I had two heads! Suffice it to say, I have seen quite a lot of DVD, and later Blu-ray and 4K packaging over the past 25 to 30 years. A lot of cases are quite good, but there are many that are utter crap. This is especially true for the last few years, as the studios look to save as much money as they can when they repackage individual Season sets into "Complete Series" sets.

Now, before I go any further, I want to make it clear that despite the title of this article, I will NOT be looking at all multi-disc all-in-one DVD & Blu-ray cases. There will be no discussion of Digipaks, Digibooks, Steelbooks, spindled-Keepcases, and any other cases where discs are overlapped or stacked on top of each other.

I am specifically writing about the THICK CLEAR multi-disc plastic cases that the studios have been using for the past few years for their "Complete Series" DVD and Blu-ray sets. These are all "DVD case" width and height - roughly 5.5" x 7.5" - but have varying thicknesses. I have gotten so many of them with the various "Complete Series" DVD and Blu-ray sets - yes, the studios use DVD-size cases for Blu-rays - that I'm frankly tired of describing them each and every time. I figured that if I write this article with photos of the cases, I can just link to it in my reviews and say, "This set uses Case #1 as described here".

I was going to list the studios that tend to use each case, but there is no rhyme or reason to usage. Warner Brothers and Paramount/CBS have used both. In the case of Young Sheldon: The Complete Series, Warner Brothers used Case #2 for the DVD release and Case #1 for the Blu-ray release. Also, all images below can be clicked on for enlargements, should you wish to examine the details.



Oh, where to begin with this complete piece of shit. How about with the disc holders that have ZERO give to them (they don't bend or move in the slightest), so it is neigh impossible to remove the discs without feeling like they're going to eventually break. (I have some discs that have cracks in them due to this.) This is in addition to one disc being staggered on top of another. Each "page" is capable of holding four discs, two per side. Each page can snap into another so that a "book" of many disc pages can be achieved. However, these snaps are prone to breakage, especially if being shipped through the mail. The final insult is that this entire "book" of disc pages is NOT CONNECTED TO THE EXTERIOR CASE! Yes, it's not connected to the actual "case" that it's supposed to be a part of.

It might be possible to "fix" the disc holders if you - after removing all discs first - use a razor blade, box cutter, utility knife, or other such razor-sharp tool to very slightly put a little cut into the base of each of the tines that hold the discs. This might make them bendable enough to allow the discs to be removed a bit easier. I have not personally tested this out myself just yet, but I think the concept is sound.

You can blame the JohnsByrne Company for this abomination. They filed U.S. patent number 10127946 for it in late 2016. The images below are the case that came with the Manifest: The Complete Series Blu-ray set.




Some sets I reviewed that use this case, with photos, are: The Powerpuff Girls (1998): The Complete Series DVD and Succession: The Complete Series Blu-ray.



This is the lesser of the two evils, but it's still evil. The discs are a bit easier to remove, and the holders are actually attached to the exterior case, but that's where the positives end. These cases have multiple discs (I think four maximum) stacked on top of each other on a spindle, and then that stacked set can be staggered on top of another stacked set. Each page, including the front and back covers, can hold two sets of stacked discs. There are a total of 12 spindles in this case, allowing 12 discs, 24 discs, 36 discs, or as many as 48 discs to be stored inside. The disc holders do have a little bit of give to them, but it still requires a bit of finessing to get the discs out.

This case was produced by Scanavo, based on a patent filed in 1997 by Aldo Pozzoli (U.S. patent number 5743390) for a compact disc case. The images below are the case that came with the Bewitched: The Complete Series Blu-ray set.








Some sets I reviewed that use this case, with photos, are: Dexter: The Complete Series + New Blood Blu-ray, Drunk History: The Complete Series DVD, Hawaii Five-0 (2010): The Complete Series DVD, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): The Complete Series DVD, and Young Sheldon: The Complete Series DVD.


Sadly, if you bought a set that utilizes one of these crappy cases, there isn't much you can do about it that doesn't involve a LOT of work and extra money. You would need to buy new cases to put each season's worth of discs into, find case art images to print out (be it custom art or scans of the official season artwork), print them out in color at Staples or some other print place (assuming you don't have a high-quality color printer at home), then cut them out and put them into the cases. To ensure the case art prints at the right size, I suggest loading the case art image into the Windows program Undercover10, print it to a PDF, then put the PDF on a USB stick and print it out at the Staples self-serve printer/copier. Given all of that, if it's a "Complete Series" DVD set, you might be better off just checking second-hand marketplaces for used copies of the original DVD season sets; assuming they weren't made by Warner Brothers between 2006 and 2008. If it's a newly-released Blu-ray set, then you'll have to see if anyone made custom artwork designed for a set of smaller-capacity cases.

I am not aware of any other crappy cases like these, though if I have the displeasure of coming across them, I'll add them to this article.

Thanks to Reddit user "Snoo-42643" for the header photo, sourced from this thread.