Recently, when I mentioned to friends that I had spent the night before watching The Matrix, they all reacted the same: a little laugh of disbelief, followed by something like “The Matrix? Really? Why?”

It’s amazing how far the 1999 film, which at the time seemed to mark a new frontier of 21st century blockbuster filmmaking, blending new technology with Eastern mysticism and post-Philip K. Dick philosophizing, has fallen. There are probably a few explanations, some of which aren’t the original movie’s fault. The biggest has got to be the two sequels; the Wachowskis had us all jazzed up about the trilogy, which seemed on its way to becoming the next Star Wars saga, only to completely lose the plot with the outstandingly bad Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, with their monologues and cave raves.

But let’s not hold the sequels against it: is the original still worth seeing? Not so much. The philosophizing seems more cringingly pretentious than ever, and—again, not the movie’s fault—the number of times the film has been ripped off has robbed The Matrix of much of its lustre. Those famous 360º frozen camera moves seem less cool when you’ve seen them in everything from Gap ads to Shrek.

However, if you want to make up your own mind, the new Ultimate Matrix Collection wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Issuing the movies on Blu-Ray, I’m sure Warner and everybody else with a horse in the hi-def race is hoping they take off the way the DVD did (the original Matrix DVD was a big format-seller back in the day). The movies—all three, plus The Animatrix and a special features disc—definitely look pretty sharp, for whatever it’s worth.

Never a huge hit like Seinfeld or Friends, NewsRadio was nonetheless one of the better-regarded, sharper sitcoms of the ’90s, at least while Phil Hartman was still alive. Now the entire run of the show is available in one box set—all 97 episodes. Worth revisiting.