I recently bought Todd and the Book of Pure Evil: The End of the End. The story of buying it is interesting, and I will include it in the Afterword at the bottom of this article.

After two seasons of the television show Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, it was canceled. So the producers go money to make an animated final film to tie everything up. This was great, because more or less the same thing was promised for the series Deadwood, but it fell through and it really sucked.

It was advertised as a blu-ray set. I assumed it contained 3 blu-ray discs. The problem was that I didn’t own a blu-ray player. But I bought a blu-ray player for my computer, and shelled out $39.99 for the product — such was my desire to finish off Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.

What $39.99 Buys You

But for a product advertised as blu-ray, this was pretty short on blu-ray discs. It contained one blu-ray with extra features, a DVD that contained the audio commentary as the only interesting extra, and a CD of the soundtrack. I’ve never been much of a fan of the music on the show. It’s okay. I suffer from the problem of being a trained musician with wide taste. I can tell the difference between greatness and mediocrity in most forms of music. And Todd and the Book of Pure Evil has always featured professionally created mediocrity.

The idea that someone who wants the movie would want the soundtrack is preposterous. This is why soundtracks are sold separately from films. So the soundtrack was just added for padding. Basically, your $39.99 gets you one blu-ray disc and that it is. They threw the other two discs in to justify the price.

Price Gouging

Think about this. Throw away the CD, and you have one DVD and one blu-ray. And the DVD is simply a subset of the blu-ray. What is the point of this? You either want a DVD or you want a blu-ray. You don’t want both. So what the distributor is doing is simply forcing you to pay an exorbitant price for an extra disc that you do not want and probably can’t even use. (Blu-ray has never taken off. Most people are perfectly happy with their DVDs.)

This is madness. It’s not as though DVDs and blu-rays are not already expensive enough. And in the case of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil all of the extras are on the Blu-ray. So if you do not have a Blu-ray player you don’t even get the full complement of extras that at are available.

It would be a trivial matter for the producers of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil to have released a single disc DVD of the film selling for 10 or $15. Or they could have had a second DVD with the extras one it and sold it for $20. But instead they have been depending upon people like me who would be willing to pay more than double the value of the set just to watch the film.

This Film Didn’t Need to Make Money

And remember that this movie was primarily financed by an Indiegogo campaign. They did not have to pay back most of their backers with money but rather gifts. Mostly, they gave backers stupid things like a Crowley High diploma or six playing cards they made up. For $25, you could get a downloadable version of the film. This was by far the biggest donation level. If you wanted a DVD, you had to donate $99.

But some of those gifts weren’t even things. For example, for just $2,500, 7 people had their likenesses used in the cartoon to be killed. That’s better than free money because otherwise, they would have had to either make up a face, or pay someone to use their likeness.

Now I know they got money from other sources, but I suspect the Indiegogo campaign was the main financing since they were only asking for $75,000 and ended up getting $123,160.

Money Grab

What I most love about psychotronic films is that they are usually made for love. Yes, their naive makers often hope they will make money. (Trust me, I know about this. I’ve had published three books published, and only one of them has made more than the advance I was given. When the first one was published, I really thought it would do well. But I have to admit that the first one I wrote is the one that actually sold pretty well — and is no on its second edition.)

So why the money grab? I really do wonder. I think blu-ray is a scam anyway. Most people do not care about the higher definition. And at least on computers they run incredibly slow slowly. Most people would prefer to simply have DVDs (with some system that made NTSC and PAL or regions the same so no one ever had to worry about it).

It’s like cassettes and 8-track players. The sound quality of both were much worse than LPs. So are CDs! But why were cassettes and 8-track players really popular once and way are CDs popular today? Because they were easy to deal with. It’s the same thing with video.

The End of the End Isn’t That Good

To make matters worse, the final episode is not nearly as good as the series was simply because it is animated. There is something very funny about watching gallons of fake blood fly everywhere in live action. Animated it’s just stupid. When The Student Body (episode of the same name) rips apart and blood flies everywhere, I could hardly stop laughing. I didn’t laugh a single equivalent sight gag in the animated film.

So I ended up paying substantially more ($39.99) for an 80 minute animated film that was mostly funded by donations than I did for 9 hours of the television show (series one and series two — less than $20 for both — as I write this, $17.68 plus tax) which was much better.

Is Todd and the Book of Pure Evil Psychotronic?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that they got to make the final film and to pull it all together. And listening to the commentary it is clear that they had thought out the entire series completely before they started it. So it all works well. But this just leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth. And it makes me seriously consider redefining the meaning of psychotronics.

But what do I expect when psychotronic film goes mainstream? I will stick to the older psychotronic films. They never break my heart.

Afterword

I see how Amazon stays in business: good customer service. Because they are a vile and manipulative, and I would even say criminal organization. I have been waiting six years for the constantly promised final end to “Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.” And finally, late last year it came out: Todd and the Book of Pure Evil: The End of the End. So I went to Amazon. It had it in blu-ray, which I didn’t want (because I didn’t have a player at that time), with three discs and all kinds of extras. But there was a little link, “DVD.” It was cheaper and came on only one DVD. But I just wanted to watch it. I didn’t need the extras. So I clicked and bought it with one click.

But I made a mistake. The DVD button didn’t take me to a one-disc DVD version of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil: The End of the End. (And note, nothing said anything like “You might also like!”) It took me to the page for the first season of the show, which I’ve owned for years.

My Mistake

Okay, my bad. I should have been more careful. But this page is clearly designed to make people do exactly what I did. So I was going to send it back. But I couldn’t just send the item back, I had to use one of their services, all of which cost $4.99 to ship. Fun Fact: it is cheaper to mail a DVD first class than media mail. Obvious conclusion of fun fact: Amazon screws its customers at every opportunity.

So okay: I blew $10. No big deal. But I wanted Amazon to know that I was unhappy. Unfortunately, there was no way to do it except if you ship it back. I wasn’t going to do that. I was just going to give it to the library. But eventually, I found their phone number and called on the off chance that I could talk to an actual person. Remember: all I want to do is say, “I think this page, and many more like it, are deceptive and I think you should stop doing it.” That’s it. I didn’t want money. I knew that Amazon would continue to screw over their customers. But I wanted to have my say.

Customer Service

I called and got to a live person almost immediately. The representative talked in a way that made me think he wasn’t listening to me. But he did. He followed me better than anyone ever has before. Apparently if you go to the trouble (the first time anyway) of calling them, they’ll do more. The representative told me keep the DVD and they would refund my money. I had them refund it to my Amazon account because I thought there was a streaming version that I could purchase. There isn’t. There’s only the $39.99, three disc set of which I only want one.

So through great customer service, they saved a customer. But I still think they are evil. I know they will continue this practice and that 99% of the people will not take the time to find their phone number and call. When most of them see the shipping rates, they will drop the whole thing. They are still an incredibly evil country that will destroy capitalism and democracy in this country.

But I got to see the movie. See my page on Todd and the Book of Pure Evil. There isn’t much there yet, but it will slowly get finished.