Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

4th Doctor: Sit down. Sit down. What did you call those robots?
Leela: Creepy mechanical men.
4th Doctor: Yes. You know, people never really lose that feeling of unease with robots. The more of them there are, the greater the unease and of course the greater the dependence. It’s a vicious circle. People can neither live with them nor exist without them.
Leela: So what happens if the strangler is a robot?
4th Doctor: Oh, I should think it’s the end of this civilisation.

Doctor Who: The Robots of Death 1977

I’m a great believer in the idea that there is no point in buying a movie if you don’t watch it regularly.

So when I started buying movies on Amazon Prime I got into three different rotations on watching them

1. Watching them in order that I bought them
2. Watching them in order that they were released
3. Watching then in the order of the year that the movie takes place in (for the LOTR movies I consider it pre-history)

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, it was a great time killer during the COVID lockdowns but it got a tad interesting a year or so back because I bought the TV series The Time Tunnel so I keep having to jump back into that series when they jump into a particular year comes up.

Yesterday I finally go to the 20th century and went to put on the 1938 version of Dawn Patrol staring Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone which I bought back in 2019.

So imagine my surprise when instead of the propeller that opened the credits of the 1938 Errol Flynn movie I suddenly saw an opening announcing the 1930 version of the movie staring Richard Barthelmess in the role Errol Flynn would replace him in, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the role that David Niven would grab and Neil Hamilton who would gain worldwide fame as Commissioner Gordon in the 1960’s batman TV series in the role Basil Rathbone would take over 8 years later.

Now I had never seen the 1930 version so I began watching it but found myself a tad put out by the idea that I had bought one movie and had another one switched on me without my knowledge or permission.

I tried to search for the 1938 version on Amazon and found it was no longer offered as a streaming movie in the US (but it was still offered in England) which does me no good of course. I suspected that for some reason Amazon lost the rights to the Errol Flynn version and substituted the other.

And while all of the flight scenes (except the closeups) and all of the scenes of the Germans and 2nd unit stuff were actually identical I wanted the movie I purchased so I contacted Amazon and had them call me back.

This was quickly escalated beyond the basic guy and the advance tech I got had me look up my initial order from 2019. The screen shot looked like this:

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As I had suspected they lost the streaming rights to the 1938 version and substituted the Howard Hawks 1930 one. That this was done is was bad enough but not only did they substitute the 1930 version of this movie in my movie library but they edited my invoice after the fact to say that the 1930 version of the movie was what I ordered.

That really pissed me off.

Well the guy did the best he could. He refunded the price of the picture and left the 1930 one in my library with the assurance that if the 1938 version became available to Amazon Prime for streaming again it would restored to my library automatically, but there is no way this should have been done without notification and even if I had been noticed the editing of my existing invoice to indicate a purchase I never made is beyond the pale.

Now in fairness the act of substituting the 1930 version might have been (and likely was) some kind of global edit in their system so they might not have realized it would have edited the invoices of old purchases, but they SHOULD have known.

There are three lessons to this story

1. When you “buy” a movie or TV show from Amazon prime make sure you know you’re not “buying” a movie in the same way as a DVD, you’re buying a license for unlimited streaming of the movie for as long as Amazon has the rights to it, nothing more. Make sure you know this before you buy.
2. When you have a digital order or any order from amazon for that matter look up the invoice and when it says “Print it for your records” do so the very day you made the purchase because you can not trust that the records in the Amazon system stored digitally will be the same as the day you bought.
3. If you actually want to be sure that you will own a movie that you want BUY A HARD COPY

For myself Trust is gone I have made my last streaming purchase from Amazon, it will be BluRay or DVD’s or VHS tapes (I have my old Dawn Patrol copy around here somewhere) for me and when it comes to any other purchases from Amazon you can be damn well sure I’ll print out a physical copy of the order the moment I make it.

I can’t think of a greater incentive to go to your local department store and buy your goods in person.

Closing thought: Given what we’ve seen from other digital services like Youtube I think rules 1 & 2 should concerning Amazon should always apply across the digital world, particularly if you’re a conservative as I would not trust any of these services to refrain from creating a false digital trail for their own ends.