Consider yourself lucky you don't have to sit through the "Piracy - It's a Crime" warning that we have in the UK - which I find exceptionally irritating.
Everyone I know who wanted to relive the first movie has already gone straight to their nearest torrent site and grabbed a copy, and likely won't replace it with an official copy, other than maybe as a combo with the new movie.
The only reason I could see is if Disney was embarrassed by the first movie, and thought that having it out there would reduce ticket and future sales of recordings of the sequel.
The hypothesis I've heard is that Disney fears people will find the original Tron dated and campy. This might in turn make people less interested in Tron Legacy. It seems Disney will rather lose some DVD sales for the original than risk lower ticket sales for the sequel.
You missed the point. Disney has always valued money over embarrassment in the past with regards to releasing movies, with the exception of Song of the South.
Talking about that, I recently bought some DVDs and they had no English captions (I'm hearing impaired). I was incredibly pissed off, so I pirated them. Then, I was given House as a gift (TV Series) - lo and behold, no captions. sigh
Are you sure it had no captions? Or do you simply mean that there were no english subtitles?
I've bought a couple of TV DVDs in the past (ER, I think) where there were no subtitles, but if I enabled the closed captioning feature on my TV, the captions were displayed.
They can charge $30-40 (maybe more) for a box set of the 2 movies plus some filler content.
But a rereleased DVD of a 1982 film that came out in 2002 would be in the $5 bin in no time.
With those margins they can't spend on advertising for the original one either. So it makes sense to manufacturer that added value in well timed bursts.
Maybe you ought to check Amazon; used Tron DVDs are starting at $99 and VHS tapes at $55. Unless they put out a large number of them, I doubt they would hit the discount bins very quickly.
Right - that's because the stock has been kept artificially low which is necessary for the strategy to work.
What I'm talking about is that if they continued to flood the market with those dvds it would be in the $5 bin and make people a whole lot less likely to buy the box set.
Quit with the "added value". Sell us the damn movie!
/downloads. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/files/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg
(side note: why can't you pause on the FBI warning? What if I really wanted to read it? Can't rewind either...)