DVD Collection - Solution

Each pair of plot summary and DVD image clues a specific movie and its remake. Each plot summary is exactly five sentences long, and each sentence includes something unique to either the original or the remake. This suggests extracting one letter from each movie using binary, with original = 0, remake = 1, and 00001 = A, 11010 = Z. The movies are presented in order of the release date of the original, so reorder by the release date of the remake. Doing so yields the phrase AKACAPONE, or “also known as (Al) Capone.” Searching “aka capone” reveals that Al Capone was nicknamed SCARFACE, which is--thematically--the name of a movie that has a remake and the answer.

Movie	Original	Remake	Sort	Remake	Binary	Letter
Miracle on 34th Street	1947	1994		1994	00001	A
Ocean’s 11	1960	2001		1996	01011	K
One Hundred and One Dalmatians	1961	1996		2001	00001	A
Poltergeist	1982	2015		2002	00011	C
Ghostbusters	1984	2016		2012	00001	A
RoboCop	1987	2014		2014	10000	P
Total Recall	1990	2012		2015	01111	O
Beauty and the Beast	1991	2017		2016	01110	N
The Ring	1998	2002		2017	00101	E

DVD Art

Movie	DVD Art	Explanation
Miracle on 34th Street		Christmas wreath because Christmas movie.
Ocean’s 11		Poker chip because robbing Las Vegas casinos. Waves because “Ocean.”
One Hundred and One Dalmatians		Black and white because Dalmatians. The abacus reads 101 because “101 Dalmatians”.
Poltergeist		TV because several paranormal events involve the TV. Also on the movie poster.
Ghostbusters		Simplified version of the Ghostbusters logo.
RoboCop		Police uniform because RoboCop.
Total Recall		Rekall machine used to implant memories. This is the machine from the remake, which looks a little different from the original one.
Beauty and the Beast		Belle’s ball gown that she wears during her dance with the Beast.
The Ring		The Ring from the videotape.

Plot Summaries

The Wikipedia plot summaries for each movie should be sufficient to distinguish original vs remake, and certain words or phrases can often be ctrl-f’ed to speed up extraction. Detailed explanations of the summaries and DVD images are below, in puzzle order.

Key phrases that distinguish the original vs remake are sometimes marked.

Miracle on 34th Street (00001 = A)

Ocean’s 11 (00001 = A)

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (01011 = K)

Poltergeist (01111 = O)

Ghostbusters (01110 = N)

RoboCop (10000 = P)

Total Recall (00001 = A)

Beauty and the Beast (00101 = E)

The Ring (00011 = C)

Author's Notes

DVD Collection went through a few different iterations. It started with the basic idea that I wanted to do a text-based puzzle involving differences between movies and their remakes. Extracting a phrase using binary was always the first step. My first idea was to have the phrase be something like YEARSBETWEEN, and then the final extraction be taking the letters corresponding to the differences between the release years of the original and remake, possibly mod 26. This turned out not to work because movies are usually remade something like twenty years after the original, so finding good letters was hard. I ended up scraping the entire Wikipedia articles on film remakes (A-M) and (N-Z) and sorting by years between, but I concluded that the movies I would need to use were too obscure and would not be fun to read about.

The next major iteration was to have the binary phrase be something like OGDIRECTORS, REDIRECTORS, and the final extraction be the first letters of the last names of the film directors of the originals and the remakes. Here I ran into a different problem: there's a small set of directors who do remakes and a small set of directors whose films are remade, so the letters are bad again. Adding horror films helped, because that's a different pool of directors from mainstream film, but not enough. The Wikipedia lists were again not enough to find good films.

Next I pivoted slightly to the top-billed/leading actor/actress, with the binary phrase TOPBILLING. This was workable enough to create a full prototype, with mostly recognizable films. During playtesting, we discovered that people 1) strongly preferred to have popular films, 2) didn't think that the final extraction added much to the puzzle, and 3) found solving the binary somewhat tedious.

Giving this feedback, I stripped out the final extraction, created a list of the most popular films with lots of original/remake differences across genres, and found a shorter binary phrase (AKACAPONE). I also limited the lengths of the summaries, and tried to make every difference as clear as possible so that people would not get stuck on incorrect letters. This was especially important because the shorter clue phrase had less room for error.

This design had much better feedback from testsolving. The puzzle was still a bit tedious, but it was shorter and ID-ing the popular movies was more fun.

The final touches were the sort by remake year and the DVD images, which helped with identifying the movies and made the puzzle more visually interesting. All-in-all, I think that DVD Collection worked out pretty well given the initial constraints.

DVD Collection and Storytime were developed independently at around the same time. The similarity is a bit unfortunate, but they were different enough that we felt okay having both.