That financial argument I can buy. The argument that there is no actual improvement in quality I can't.

What I said was that there was no HUGE improvement in quality, not that there's none at all.  The other thing with VHS tapes, especially if you rented them, was that once they started getting a bit worn they started looking really bad, but DVD's of course look brand new no matter how many times they've been played. 

There's just not that level of improvement from DVD to Blu Ray.  Of course, there's the other side of the financial argument as well.  Once somebody has spent all the money on a hi-def TV and Blu Ray player, they're certainly not going to tell other people that they only notice a small improvement, they'd sound silly for having spent all that money.  We've all seen Hi-def TV's in stores and yes, when you stand 3 feet in front of a 60" hi-def screen it looks quite impressive.  But when you stand 15 feet from a 32" high def screen, like I would in my own house, the difference is only moderately noticeable.

01) BATMAN - liked this quite a bit.  It was rather weird, relatively exciting, and had good action.  The characters were quite good, which was the most important thing to me.  Head and shoulders above any of the other Batman movies.

02) MARS ATTACKS - Meh, it was fair.  Humorous the first time I saw it, not something I'd really make a point of watching again.

03) SLEEPY HOLLOW - couldn't get over the fact that Edward Scissorhands was supposed to be some sort of investigator.  Never made it past the 15 minute mark.  Kind of overblown from what little I saw. 

04) PLANET OF THE APES - this was just a complete joke.  From the attempts at political correctness that were downright comical, to the apes bouncing around like a rubber balls, to the long boring part before the climax.  Actually rates pretty high on the so bad it's good scale.

05) CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY - haven't seen it.

It was always my opinion that Trask wasn't terribly concerned with finding the actual witch or ridding the house of evil - he was mainly concerned with persecuting someone.  With all of the Trasks, I always got the impression that the whole religion thing was somewhat of a sham.  He got power and position by doing what he did, and it's much more efficient to persecute someone who's already been named than to conduct an actual investigation.  That would take time, there would be doubt as to the guilt of the accused (not so with Vicki as Abbigail and the Countess were already convinced of her guilt), and there's always the possibility that the actual witch might have been a member of the Collins family - now that wouldn't have done at all for Trask's reputation.  Much better to persecute a lowly servant.

I suspect you're thinking of his attorney Tony Peterson, who went to Lang's house to clean up his estate and seemingly was the only person to go through his papers for legal purposes.  Of course Julia also went through his papers, and more, to learn how to perform the experiment.

I was thinking of when Jeff Clark went over to Lang's to look through his stuff, and Barnabas was there.  I think Barn's excuse was that he was looking through his papers or something.  He seemed to sound like he had the right to do that...I dunno.  I just got the impression that Barnabas was in charge of tidying up Lang's estate (or at least that was his excuse for being around there so much).  But I'm probably wrong 

I never noticed any sort of echo effect on the DVD's.  Guess I'm just not paying close enough attention    One thing that is annoying though, with my most recent set (# 21), when you put the disk in you get the new menu (which is quite pretty and nice), however, when you choose an episode, the theme music gets annoyingly loud.  Way louder than the episode when it begins, and it's a real high pitched bit of music, so it really grates on my ears.

"...Stop Sobbing Over The Men Who Don't Love You And get A Life.  Second Edition."

Was she in the 1897 story line?

"...smokin' a doobie and listening to Pink Floyd, up in the tower room!"