FOR THOSE WHO MISS THE ‘80s, LASER ROT IS BACK, BABY! Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore; UPDATED with response from WB.

It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can’t be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn’t a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.

So, what can be done about this? Nothing. As stated in this RetroBlasting video, we had ticking time bombs on our hands, and the only way around the problem was to rip our faves to something like PLEX, but it’s too late for the majority of discs. Warner Bros, of course, has yet to comment on this, so people like me have thousands of worthless discs cluttering our shelves. Here’s the most comprehensive list of titles available.

So far, Blu-ray Discs aren’t affected, although all HD-DVD discs put out by WB in this period are basically expensive coasters.

Note that “Warner Bros has reached out to us with a statement from their Home Video department offering to make good on the ruined DVDs – if possible.”