Between 1990 and, say, 2005, there were so many technological upheavals and completely new experiences that I honestly don’t think we’ll ever see the like again — at least not in my lifetime. The sheer novelty and rarity of some of these, like getting used to the world wide web or portable music players, are moments in time that can’t be replicated.

One of these was the proliferation of the DVD player in the late ’90s. It was around 1998 or so that prices for these players came down enough to be affordable (my first one set my parents back $200 as a Christmas gift), and the actual selection of DVDs were pretty scarce. Yet it was such a mind-blowing move forward in visual media from those VHS tapes we’d been consuming for a decade-and-a-half.

Suddenly, we didn’t have to rewind tapes. The image was crystal clear. You could easily skip around in chapters. The sound was incredible. And a lot of work was usually put into the menus and extras, giving you even more bang for you buck when you picked up your favorite movies.

And you’d have to be selective, because DVDs were expensive. When I started seeing them pop up, most everyone I knew only had a handful of movies to play on them. That became a party attraction — you’d go over to someone’s place and they’d proudly pop in a DVD to entertain the crowd.

For whatever reason, it seemed like a lot of people had two or three of the same initial DVDs in their collection, too: Austin Powers, Twister, and Lost in Space. So why was this the case? Twister makes sense because it was a popular disaster flick that also was the very first movie released on DVD (that would be March 1997). Fun fact: Twister also became the last movie released on HD-DVD.

So why the other two? My gut feeling is that Austin Powers was a huge fan favorite at the time that people loved to put on and quote. Lost in Space, if I recall, had a pretty fun assortment of menus and features, came out around that time, and was a shiny scifi flick that showed off the vibrant picture that DVD could produce.

Sometimes I think about those handful of titles that graced my shelf when I go into thrift stores and see rows upon rows of extremely cheap orphaned DVDs. From rarity to common place to abandoned format in two decades, that’s crazy to me.