I’m a veteran of the laserdisc era.

I was thinking about that as I pondered the first decade (or perhaps even 11 years) of the DVD, which 2008 marked, on December 24 of the year.

To a lot of people under the age of 25 — and actually, to just plain a LOT of people — the “laserdisc format” won’t mean too much, because at the peak of its popularity, around 1996 or so, there were never more than about a million laserdisc players in use in the United States.

Those with longer memories, or who spent time in Japan (where there were several million players in use, even in the 1980’s), however, will remember the format: LP-size platters, usually silver on both sides (distinctly non-compact discs was the best way to summarize them), massively heavy, and usually in fairly flimsy LP-size jackets, all containing visual programming (movies, TV shows, still-frames, but in the end mostly movies). They were never overly popular, partly owing to the cost ($25 to $100 list, in a $15 CD marketplace), their cumbersome size, some production problems, and the fact that one couldn’t record in the format. As a clue to their lack of visibility, until the 1990’s laserdiscs were hardly ever mentioned in mainstream video advertising, except as an after-thought.

And other than pornographic titles (which were a big part of the marketplace in the early days, and a whole separate field, figures for which I never recall seeing), the two biggest selling laserdisc titles ever were Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which were released in the same Christmas season in the early 1990’s (1992, I believe). Each moved about 250,000 pieces, one fighting the other for the top spot on the sales charts for weeks.

Probably the laser format’s biggest popular culture moment came early, in the Michael Nesmith Elephant Parts bit about “Video Pirates,” where the scurvy bunch of sea-faring title-characters plunder a ship filled with VHS tapes. They find a cache of laserdiscs on the ship, and dismiss its significance or value because “you can’t record on ‘em.” (I always knew there was a reason — besides composing talent and musicianship — that Michael Nesmith was my favorite member of the Monkees).

Oh, there are still a relative handful of feature films — including from pretty popular genre movies, especially in science fiction, fantasy, and horror — that were out on laserdisc that have never shown up on DVD, either in the United States (i.e. Region One) or anywhere: Val Guest’s The Quatermass Experiment (1955) and Curt Siodmak’s The Magnetic Monster (1953) come to mind immediately, though there are others. And many of the Criterion Collection laserdisc special editions for which I did commentary tracks in the early 1990’s — The Great Escape and Jason And The Argonauts are the first I think of, though there were others — have never been transferred to DVD, owing to licensing issues.

But according to the New York Times this December 24, it seems that DVDs have taken another step into an end of the marketplace that laserdiscs never touched, and it all has to do with Christmas, and the Yule Log, that hokey bit of urban electronic wallpaper originated by WPIX-TV here in New York in 1966, of a fireplace ablaze while Christmas songs play in the background.

I never watched more than a minute of it as a kid. If there’d been some equivalent programming for Hanukah (such as what, I wonder? — you can only do so much with shots of a menorah, and a spinning dreidel might have made people dizzy sooner rather than later, and besides, it couldn’t have been done CGI in those days; and are there an hour’s worth of Hanukah songs to loop together? Where were the Irving Berlins and Mel Tormes of the world when it came to that holiday?) my parents might have resonated to it a bit better.

But even I was fond of it, and the point of this article is that apparently there are now numerous versions of the “Yule Log” on DVD to choose from, with different musical accompaniments as well as different logs in different settings.

There never was a laserdisc of the Yule Log, and probably for good reason — the laser audience was too narrow and too self-consciously sophisticated for it (we were actively choosing the laserdisc format, for quality and programming content); and even if laserdisc players had been in 50 million homes instead of a million homes, using a Yule Log laserdisc would have meant re-starting the platter every 60 minutes (the upper limit of running time), although the sound of those Christmas carols would have been mighty impressive (unlike DVDs, laserdiscs always had room for audio content to spare; that was one factor, though not the biggest one, that gave them a serious edge over an even more archaic video format from the early 1980’s, CED discs . . . but that’s another story, for another time).

I was trying to picture for a moment who would have released a Yule Log laserdisc.

Not The Criterion Collection, unless the loop of the burning fireplace could have been shot by Robert Frank, directed by Francis Coppola, or edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. And probably not Criterion’s lesser known companion line, simply labeled Voyager after the then-name of the parent company, Voyager Company, which tended to put out more arts-oriented programming — not unless they could have gotten a Yule Log loop with music programmed by David Byrne or, perhaps, Philip Glass (I am dating myself with all of these musings . . . . ).

No, if it had happened, it would have been by the route of too many laserdisc releases, by way of a licensing deal off of VHS, from some producer that had produced the program for that tape format.

And that points to the reason why laserdisc languished as a format for much of its 20-year history — too much of the medium was a stepchild of a technologically inferior format, VHS.

It wasn’t until the Criterion Collection came along and got the medium to stand up on its own merits that it had a chance to grow and evolve. It might not have lasted or sustained itself, but without the work done in that field, and the successes that were achieved, in business as well as technology, chances are that the first decade of the DVD would have started a lot more slowly and had a lot less success to offer.

As someone who’s worked in both formats, I can say that’s something, on this anniversary of sorts, that makes the last 20 years — not just the last 10 — feel a lot more fulfilling and, yes, bracing, as I watch the WPIX Yule Log in digital video this Christmas (but only for about a minute . . . .).