Shia LaBeouf, Harrison Ford, and Karen Allen in 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'
Paramount Pictures

Knickknack Outrage: "Sorry, kid, you only get this thing if you buy the movie at Target."

According to Cinematical, there will be at least five different doodad-laden DVD releases of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, depending on where you make your purchase.

Circuit City will give you lithographs. Target has a book. Kmart and Sears offer mini-posters, while Trans World has steelbook packaging. Oh, and that doesn't count the actual crystal skull featured in the Cinematical post, which you can get at Best Buy.

Seriously, stop soaking the nerds.

In defense of the devotee's wallet, after the jump...

 

Make no mistake: these sets aren't there to induce you to buy your movie at Circuit City instead of Kmart, or at Sears instead of Best Buy. The idea here is for true devotees to buy all of them.

There's been a huge secondary market in promotional detritus for at least as long as there's been eBay, but this tactic is a particularly aggressive attempt to separate nerds from their wallets.

It's hit television seasons on DVD as well — consider the multiple options there were for purchasing season 3 of The Office. Will you go for the mousepad? The soft-sided cooler? Your own Dundie Award? The same was true of season 4. Stapler-in-jello keychain, anyone?

Studios have often taken a pounding from fans when they release special "extended editions" of movies on DVD only months after releasing the "regular" editions — read some of the seriously peeved Amazon reviews of the Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring "extended edition" that went on sale in November 2002, three months after the ordinary edition.

But at least in those cases, you are buying a new product. At least when the extended edition comes out, you're buying something that wasn't available before. Different prizes for running around buying the same thing at more than one store just seems...designed to capitalize on people's worst, most fanatical, junk-hoarding tendencies.

At their best, obsessive fans make their own junk — their own wonderful, imaginative, intensely weird junk. Duping them into running from Best Buy to Sears so that they can purchase the Obsessive Fan Treasure Trove Of Junk?

That's just not fan-friendly. Because honestly, these are not artifacts that the sexy archeologists of the future are going to be digging up.