DVD now available directly from Warner's webpage!

What there IS is a movie that was previously unavailable transferred from the best sources possible from the studio that owns the rights to it.

As a consumer if you don't agree with the price you certainly don't have to purchase it, in spite of the sales and discounts that are rather frequent with Warner Archive releases . . that is indeed your prerogative.

However, to imply that their product is somehow inferior simply because they're manufactured on demand is rather a ludicrous statement. Hundreds of websites use this practice for all kinds of products and the prices are, quite naturally, somewhat higher as this is what small-run manufacturing requires in order to make a profit. Warner Archives are not villains for using this practice . . it's simply how business works . .

As to there being "no real restoration" and no extras, so what? Are you honestly of the opinion that EVERY film released to DVD is somehow restored from original camera elements? In my experience, with the thousands of titles released every year, my observations have been that restored films are decidedly in the minority and in at least half of the cases where that word is used as a marketing gimmick the entire "restoration" consists of nothing more than a single brightness/contrast tweak for the entire film, which non-lazy viewers can easily accomplish with the controls on their own TVs . .

Regarding your fanboy snobbery of DVD-R discs, I would be very much interested in why you fanatics have a problem with them as they carry the same binary data as pressed discs, which naturally means there is no degradation whatsoever. I have had experts in the field tell me that the only possible difference is that DVD-R discs MAY have some issues in forty or fifty years . . which is no real problem as far as I'm concerned since you'll probably be able to fit the entire Warner catalogue on a flashdrive by then . .

Lighten up, Ellis . . if anything you should thank the Archives for making titles available that wouldn't otherwise be marketable, rather than grousing like a petulant child who got the wrong flavor of ice cream.