Decided to watch The Road Warrior, on Laserdisc, tonight. Haven’t watched it in quite a long time. About two minutes into the movie, I started to see little black flecks appearing randomly on the screen. “Ah, crap,” I thought to myself. “My first disc with laser rot.”

This is the first Laserdisc in my collection that has shown any signs of the dreaded “laser rot.” Fortunately, for The Road Warrior, it’s only showing up in the first few minutes of the movie, and it’s very mild. In fact, my wife, who was watching the movie with me, didn’t even notice it, until I pointed it out.

This is also one of my very first Laserdiscs I ever purchased, when I started collecting them in the early 90s. So, it’s been with me for a while and I’ve watched it quite a few times. With a little luck, we should still get several more happy viewings of this classic movie, before the disc player deems it un-readable. Sorry, Max.

I suppose we’ll have to watch some of the discs we haven’t seen in a while, to see if any more have started to degrade in this way.

For posterity, I recorded a copy of it, as we watched it, with our Neuros OSD. At least, this way, if/when the disc does become un-watchable, we’ll still have a copy of the movie in some fashion. I think I should also try and track down another copy of the movie on VHS.

Video Capture of the “rot”

