Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Little Mermaid rises from my DVD player


Two years ago in 2006, Disney opened its vault and produced the two-disc platinum edition of The Little Mermaid.  Since Dova was nearly three years old and I had a $3 coupon from BJs, I bought it for her thinking that she might like it.  Little did I know that I was really introducing her to the Disney Princess cult. Our trip to Walt Disney World a couple months later sealed the induction.  Dova watched the movie EVERY SINGLE DAY and became obsessed with mermaids (still is). A few weeks after I bought the DVD set, she lost the DVD.  I came home one day and Doug told me that she simply couldn't find it.  Now, Dova has a penchant for losing stuff by putting things in the darndest places, so we turned the house upside down looking for it. Day after day we searched for the missing DVD.  We looked in the kitchen drawers, clothes drawers, bookshelves (extremely tedious), toy boxes, baseboard vents and even outside.  Doug and I became totally obsessed that the DVD went missing.  After a few weeks, she kept asking to see the movie again, so I broke down and bought a used copy of the original DVD on eBay.  I wasn't going to pay top dollar for another platinum edition. The quality of the original DVD was definitely subpar compared to the new enhanced color version.  And it kept skipping near the end so I was constantly rubbing the scratches out with toothpaste.  We had two DVD boxes for The Little Mermaid on our shelf, the platinum 2-disc version with only disc 2, and the old original version.  Finally after a year or so, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would never see disc 1 again.

Almost exactly two years later, Sandy at Momisodes posted this story about how they lost a CD from the library.  Magically, they found it inside of the CD player after taking it apart.  Her husband had moved the player and thought that it may have gotten lost inside.  Now this thought never occurred to us.  Our player is stacked with other electronic equipment inside a cabinet, so we didn't think a DVD could jump out of the tray inside of the device.  But seeing that picture in Sandy's post made me curious.  After the kids went to sleep that night, I pulled out the DVD player and shook it.  There was definitely something loose inside.  I grabbed a screwdriver and disassembled the unit.  Doug watched over me with bated breath.  As the cover slid off, there was the DVD in perfect condition!  After two years, we had finally found it!!  And to think that we berated Dova for years for losing the DVD.  The next day we played it for them, and sure enough, the color was dazzling and both kids were mesmerized all over.  Thank you Sandy for saving our sanity and finding our DVD!  Without that post, we probably would've gotten rid of the DVD player when it finally broke and never opened it up to find it.

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