Dr What

Who and What is Dr What?

 

With over 36 000 titles in over 100 categories in our inventory, there a good chance we have what you are looking for. We specialise in rare and lesser known DVDs and videos, we support independent and low budget film making industry. We cater to film companies, industry based organisations, film students and teaching institutions, advertising agencies and cinephiles.

Dr What Store Cartoon

Dr What reaches 31 Years

 

When Dr What Video opened its doors in August 1981, it was one of the first video rental stores in Australia. Before rental stores, punters purchased videos (mainly Betamax) for around $60 from outlets like specialty book shops.

The first video players sold for around $1500 and were the size of a suitcase and weighed as much as a washing machine. In those days, a video workout would have involved just lifting the recorder.

Some of our oldest customers still remember these early days after Dr What first opened the video rental department. It was only a small section in the front of the store. The rest of the shop was a cross between Dick Smith and Clint Crazy Bargains, selling electronic products like video recorders and CB Radios. 

By 1983, the video rental business was increasing as the price of the video recorder came down to less than $800. With almost 20% of households in the Eastern Suburbs now owning video recorders, this was the fastest uptake in Australia (and Australians were buying video recorders faster than anywhere else in the world). More titles were being made available and the video rental department of Dr What had became more than 50% of sales and floor area.

When Neal Crisford joined the company in February 1983, Dr What had stores in Bondi Junction, Leichhardt and Dubbo (yes, Dubbo) Having a background in retail management Neal Crisford was employed to oversee the expansion of Dr What. Through a combination of company owned and franchised stores, Dr What was going to have outlets all over Australia to take advantage of the emerging rental market.

Within six months Burwood, Parkes, Albion Park and another store at Dubbo were added to the empire, Dr What was off to a promising start. So what happened? What went wrong?

Part 2

“This is Where The Manure Hits The Fan" will continue in our next issue and will include the legend of the fast talking guy with the pink socks, two Ferraris and a Rolls Royce, the Filipino Prison ransom incident and the affair of Fred Nile and the X-rated movie business (Does this sound like a movie? I have always said the best scripts come from real stories).

 

Dr What Video Production

In late 1980’s Neal Crisford (Dr What Owner) stated a Video Production and Video Training Business located under Dr What’s Video Store with the large number of Industry professional moving through Dr What door more and more people made requests for Neal to do transfers and editing. Quickly video production become a key service that Dr What provided to not only Industry professionals but domestic clients as well.

Over the years we have seen many changes in formats and technologies, through it all we have continued to up grade and retrain to meet the ever changing video world.

Why choose Dr What for your Video Production needs?

  • The editors at Dr What have years of experience in editing in a variety of different contexts, audiences and formats: personal and professional, analogue and digital.
  • We guarantee the quality of their job and our services
  • We use state of the art technology and premium stock to produce the best quality results
  • We are constantly updating our hardware, software and skills in line with the rapidly changing industry
  • Our competitive prices – we produce quality films to suit your budget.
  • 87% of our work comes form return customers and referral.