I buy a lot of movies on Blu-ray¹And 4KUHD, but that’s basically the same format on steroids. and while the stuff from your major studios (Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, etc) generally ends up pulled from the case and filed away in a slipsleeve, my boutique label collection is something I like to show off.²With the exception of Kino-Lorber because they have almost uniformly terrible design.

Here in the US there are two cases that pretty much everyone has agreed to, with the most common being the bog-standard 12mm Amaray that you got when you bought Magic Mike’s Last Dance. It’s blue; it’s thin; it’s ugly; I hate it.

However, you can find also find clear versions of this case, and they create a more pleasing shelf experience for someone like me. Here’s a hastily-taken photo of some of my Shout Factory releases:³Yes, I am very tempted to sort them by their catalog number and not their title.

There’s also the Scanovo case, which you might be familiar with from Criterion’s releases. Clear and 14mm thick with no header at the top, making them a sort version of a clear DVD cases. The insert is the art, with nothing to distract you from it.

Now, you’d think some spares of those two varieties be all someone like me would need, right?

Oh, no.

Because I am a sicko with a region-free player, there are some English imports in my collection and they use a 14mm thick variant of the US standard, meaning that they’re ugly, have a header for the Blu-Ray logo⁴Which is just the worst damn thing. and thick⁵Yes, I know how this feels. and really hard to find clear replacements for — or so I thought.

I actually posted about this to the Boutique Blu-Ray subreddit and lo and behold, someone saved me by saying “Hey, you remember the PlayStation 3 gaming system, manufactured by Sony from 2006 through 2017? Those games use that exact case!”

I went to eBay, found a listing promising a set of sealed cases for just $10, and soon received five mint copies of Cabela’s Survival: Shadows of Katmai. Rather than source actual replacement cases, companies are now sending dead stock of games out to people:

(Side note: this game actually got decent reviews, around 7/10 on most sites, but it never caught on for some reason.)

So anyway, I threw away the discs, put all the paper components into the recycling, and now have a nice home for some films by Kore-eda that currently don’t have a domestic physical release:

Yes, I lead a very exciting life.

I’m sure a better writer could come up with how this is a metaphor for building your career or finding your niche in your industry or something. Me, I’m just going to say that this is all because I’m a weirdo with a very specific strain of not-quite OCD.