Wasting time 50% faster

My DVD player burnt out a few weeks ago. It started out skipping every once in a while, then twice in a while, then almost all the time in a while. A little disappointed in its performance to be honest. It got regular, but definitely not excessive, use which should not cause a DVD player to die after a little less than 2 years. Seems a bit suspect.

But rejoice in the fact that we live in a world where players are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. For the price of approx. 3 DVDs, I now have a new panasonic in my room and it seems to be working fine so far.

One of the first things I watched on it was the new Popeye collection. If you're a fan of any kind of animation I'd encourage you to look at this set. The Fleischers did some amazing stuff with the early Popeye cartoons, but the DVD also has a lot of info about the really early animation pioneers as well. Included on the disc are some of these, for lack of a better word, "primitive" shorts. They're presented without sound and the animation, while fascinating, is a little rough on its own. Just to see if the animation was still watchable I hit the FF on the remote and it picked up to 1.2X speed. 1.2? Hit it again and it goes to 1.5X. At that speed, the animation smoothed out a little bit and it didn't seem overly fast. Turned out to be a good way to watch these shorts. But then a funny thing happened as the next short started up. I heard music playing. This is the first DVD player I've used that has had a FF mode that has worked with sound. Neat feature.

Before you start asking, no I don't watch the features and the like at this speed, but what it works great on is all those making of/behind the scenes/semi-documentary babbling features on so many discs. Everything is still viewable and all the speaking is completely understandable. It just sounds like everyone has had too much coffee. So now I can be done with some of these 15 minute extras in 10 minutes. Too much fun.