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My name is Meeko, and I have been a Disney fanatic my entire life. My favorite movie is The Fox and The Hound, which I saw at the movie theatre when I was 5 years old, and will always hold a special place in my heart. Some of my other favorites are Lady and The Tramp, The Lion King, and Mulan.
I am also a big DVD fan. I bought my first DVD player in 1998, back when people would pick up a DVD at the store and look at it with confusion. I overheard my share of "what are these?" that people would ask each other when looking at the DVD aisle at the store, which would mostly consist of 1 or 2 rows at most. I was also frustrated at the lack of Disney titles that were being released on DVD - namely none!
This may come as a shock from looking around in DVD stores now, but Disney was one of the last studios to begin releasing movies on DVD. I so badly wanted to watch Disney movies in a high quality format that in 1997 I bought a Laserdisc player (think of a 12" diameter DVD, if you've never seen one), and I bought all the Disney laserdiscs I could, including the special edition box sets, which if you could find for under $100 each you were lucky.
Even though I was one of the last adopters of laserdisc, I was a big supporter of the newer, technically superior DVD format, and I was very anxiously waiting for Disney to start releasing thier animated movies on DVD. So in either late 1997, or early 1998, I started my first "Disney on DVD" page on www.meeko.org It would have news and rumors on Disney DVDs, but the main draw was a petition which people could fill out to say they wanted Disney to release their movies on DVD. I was planning on printing it and sending it to Disney when I reached a certain number of signatures, but I never had the chance to because they finally came around and started supporting the format in late 1998 with their first DVD release, Beauty and The Beast: The Enchanted Christmas
So at that point, I took the petition off my site, and began posting news on Disney DVDs, and created a list of which Disney DVDs were available. Each DVD had its own page with information about the movie (release dates, running times, rating, description, etc...). My grand vision was to keep a comprehensive Disney DVD database containing every Disney DVD title that would become the best resource on the Internet for finding out about Disney DVDs. This was easy to do at first because so few movies were being released (and I also was not working full time, so I had plenty of time to work on the site). As Disney's releases came faster and faster, and I began working full time, the site became much harder to maintain, and I began falling far behind on it, until eventually it was so out of date that updating it became pointless, I knew if I was going to do anything with it, I would need to start over from scratch. I kept promising myself that someday I would get back to it but the procrastinator in me always won out, and the site remained in its old state for years, collecting cobwebs.
Finally in the summer of 2005, a rush of ambition took over me, and I became determined to finally redo my "Disney on DVD" page and make the ultimate resource to go to for Disney DVDs. I knew I had a *lot* of work ahead of me, but I began in the late summer of 2005. I worked on the site almost every available hour I had, after my full time job. I would work about 4 hours every night on the site, creating the databases and writing all the code (all the code on the site is programmed by me, I didn't get it from someone or have someone do it for me). In between actually programming the site, I had the very tedious act of entering all the information for the DVDs into my databases. At this time, I still only have maybe half of all the Disney DVDs in my database, I try to add several more each week. I get the information for each DVD from several different web sites, and each title can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to enter, depending on how much data there is. I'm actually capturing a lot more data than I am using right now, this is to allow me to add more exciting features to the site in the coming months, so please stay tuned for it.
I finally got the site into a presentable state by the end of 2005, and the results are what you see here. The site is in no way even near complete, I still have many things I'm going to be adding, but I'm proud of the way it has turned out and I hope you enjoy the resource as much as I have enjoyed creating it. The most recent addition to the site is obviously the News Section (as this is the first news "story"). In the near future you can expect to see a better forum section, a more advanced search feature, more ways to link between movies to find what you want, user reviews, and much more!
If you want to keep up with the site, and keep up with new Disney DVD titles as they are released, please join the Disney DVD Movies Newsletter! Thanks everyone and enjoy the web site!
