Superman Returns is a movie I have been waiting to see in a good environment since summer when the theater had a nasty smudge on the lense covering the lower left quadrant of the projected image. People that know me know I love Superman. I am a geek; geeks love comic books; Superman was the first modern superhero;thereby, I love Superman. When the disc first came out, I couldn’t find one at all in L.A. county. After a couple of weeks of fruitless searching, I just added it to my wish list and decided to wait til Christmas.
It was wrapped and under the tree by my mom, God bless her. Of course, there is no hd dvd player there, so while we kind of enjoyed the sd dvd side at my brother’s one night, I was excited to be out west again so I could REALLY see what it looked like.
Like a good adult, I unpacked my suitcases and put everything away then tended to some business before I touched the movie. I placed it gently in the 360′s hd dvd tray and got comfy in my chair for some superheroics!
Then the error message came on that the disc couldn’t be read. I had noticed some odd color patterns on the hd side’s surface, but didn’t think much of them. After the read error, I pondered those patterns for a moment. They weren’t on the sd side. I didn’t remember seeing them on the hd side before last night, either, and I had shown my brother what the hd side looked like while I was home.
Oh well, I will just have to return it to Best Buy and swap it out for another copy. There is still unwatched superhero action because I got the Hulk, too! I open it, notice the same strange patterns on it and get the same disc read error. The same thing happens with the third disc, too.
Now Superman Returns is the only disc that I opened while in Mississippi, so I can’t know that the other’s weren’t already like that, but as I said, I looked at the hd side of Superman and it didn’t look like this before, now all three of them have the same problem…What did I do between there and here that could have contributed to or caused the problem…The airport x-ray machines! That was my best guess. Of course I wasn’t able to find any information online to give me an indication if I was right or not, and it does seem strange that an x-ray machine would shrivel the foil layers on a disc without warping the surface of the disc. I guess I will never know for sure.
