Top Gun is singly responsible for saving home video. You might be looking at your screen in confusion at this point but the clip below will explain it perfectly if any points are missed in this article. The gist of what went on back in the 1980’s was that at one point and time it cost about the price of a textbook to purchase a home VHS cassette. Yes, they were around $80 to $100 dollars just for ONE. Now you think about that and then think about what the cost of living was back then and the average paycheck and you think that there’s no possible way that Top Gun could have affected that market in such a profound way.
But then you need to think about something else. Product placement and sponsorship.
In a time when buying a VHS was as expensive as a month’s worth of groceries it seemed like the best bet to watch your favorite movie was to wait for it to come back to the theater’s and spend the money on another ticket. These days the movies are in the theater and then onto DVD only a few months later in some cases. The powers that be have realized that the market for home movies has skyrocketed even as the price of theater tickets has gone up. The attitude of “I’ll wait until it’s on TV or DVD” has allowed the home market to expand in such a way that the theater is now more of a luxury than home movies have ever been.
And a lot of it has to do with the Diet Pepsi commercial that was added into the beginning of Top Gun upon it’s release. Stay with me now, it’ll make sense.
Once Pepsi threw it’s lot in with Top Gun the movie scene exploded as the price of owning a movie went from around $100 down to $26.95. That’s right, a piddling twenty-seven bucks versus the hundred that was normally seen. Now you could actually own a movie for a decent price and watch it whenever you wanted, but of course you’d want to fast forward through the commercial every time. From that point on though the home movie scene changed into what we see now.
Granted, the prices haven’t really dropped unless you count the $5 bins at Walmart and other select stores for outdated and less popular movies. But new releases and popular films are still going for around $20 a pop if not more, especially for “collector’s editions”. The movie industry has found a wide variety of ways to get people to buy movies by labeling them as collectors, special, or some other variation of an edition that’s somehow better than the original movie in a case.
Those are marketing gimmicks folks. You learn what people want, you figure out how to get it to them, and then you figure out ways to make it seem more special so people will buy more of it. I mean why just buy the movie when you can buy the collector’s edition that features all the bonuses and extra scenes that you might watch once and then never again?
Top Gun definitely saved the home video, let’s just leave it at that.
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