Home theater may be killing the blockbuster, but the DVD boom ironically seems to have sparked an unprecedented interest in the earliest forms of cinema—or, at least, so you'd infer from the spate of boxed sets devoted to the medium's infancy. The four-disc Treasures from American Film Archives sold well enough to spawn a sequel, More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931, and was reissued as a lower-priced "encore edition" this spring. Kino's voluminous Edison: The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918) ($89.96), boasts 12 hours of unfiltered actuality, early narrative and unconscious surrealism, along with hours of interviews and commentary. In their omnivorous sweep, the Edison films provide a fossil record of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; alongside a young D.W. Griffith's turn in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest is post-quake footage from San Francisco and a whimsical short riffing on Theodore Roosevelt's fondness for hunting. To call the Edison films an essential part of movie history almost diminishes them: This is American history, full stop.

A more idiosyncratic cross-section is offered by Unseen Cinema: American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 ($99.99), a jaw-dropping seven-disc collection whose definition of "avant-garde" encompasses everything from abstract collage to Busby Berkeley fantasia. A whopping 19 hours from start to finish, the box is as daunting as it is rewarding—even one of its thematically curated discs is too much for a single sitting—but measured viewing yields practically bottomless dividends. Purchase is a no-brainer for any serious a-g head, but like the Treasures boxes, Unseen Cinema may be best for those who don't know they want it. Its provocative cross-referencing demolishes prejudices high and low, opening doors you didn't even know were closed. Even better: At less than a c-note (significantly less through some retailers), it may be the best minute-for-minute deal on the market. (For a fuller accounting, see Screenpicks.)

Speaking of steals, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection ($89.95) packs almost all of the silent comedian's classic features as well as a hefty helping of short subjects onto three two-disc sets, filling a gaping void in one fell swoop. (Each twofer is sold separately, but the box comes with a bonus disc awash in archival clips, interview snippets, brief bios and a sampling of Lloyd's non-nude 3D photography.) Lloyd often took credit for creating the most "realistic" of silent comedy archetypes, a bespectacled, straw-hatted striver he called "the glasses character," or simply "the boy." Inevitably ranked third in the pantheon, Lloyd has neither Chaplin's blithe buoyancy nor Keaton's deadpan obliviousness; instead, he's bourgeois can-do-ism personified, a make-good artist who bluffs his way through death-defying feats while wishing he was safe at home. In Safety Last!, home to Lloyd's iconic clock-face dangle, the derring-do of his 12-story human fly act is undercut by his desperate attempts to scramble to safety; in The Freshman, often called the most successful comedy of the silent era, he turns his bookworm body into a human tackling dummy in an almost pathetic bid to be liked. (His stuttering attempts at communication with the fairer sex in Girl Shy are almost too painful to contemplate.) The shrewdest of his contemporaries, Lloyd maintained control of his own negatives, and as a result, the films in the collection look uniformly lovely (better, in fact, than Keaton's or Chaplin's). The set has a few gaps, some filled by Kino's two collections of Lloyd shorts, but after so many years of digital drought, the sudden flood of Lloydiana will sate all but the thirstiest fan.

Warner Bros., who have established themselves as the undisputed leader in packaging Hollywood classics, turned out boxes galore this year: collections devoted to Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Steve McQueen, among others. The heavyweight, though, is their 10-disc Greta Garbo Collection ($99.92), a mammoth trove of enigmatic Scandinavian goodness, despite its odd lacunae (both the silent and sound versions of Anna Karenina are absent, presumably held for a future two-shot). More modest if no less obsessive are multidisc sets devoted to Ben-Hur and The Wizard of Oz, each embossed with an intimidating wealth of extras. The Oz disc is particularly a delight, boasting a stunning new transfer whose digitally aligned Technicolor elements practically melt through the screen. Extras include genuinely informative commentary, a disc-length documentary, and no fewer than five previously filmed versions of the Oz story, a reminder of the popularity of L. Frank Baum's original books.

A little further off the beaten path, there's Warners' five-disc Val Lewton Horror Collection ($59.92), which boxes up all nine of the eerie, spectral horror movies Lewton produced for RKO during the 1950s, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie among them. Keep going and you'll run across The Fernando Arrabal Collection ($79.95), three discs of radical, bloody-minded surrealism from the director of Viva la Muerte. For more visionary thrills, any volume of the Director's Label Series Boxed Set Vol. 2 ($79.98) will do you: the firm of Gondry, Jonze, et al. has finally unleashed a second wave of music video collections, a disc apiece for Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn and Stéphane Sednaoui. Romanek's disc allows endless spins of Jay-Z's "99 Problems" and Johnny Cash's "Hurt," both evincing the director's preoccupation with flesh, but it's the mainly unseen clips on Glazer's disc that make the deepest impression, especially the video for UNKLE's "Rabbit in the Headlights," which finds Beau Travail's Denis Lavant traversing a tunnel while speeding cars batter his body.

There's physical abuse aplenty in The Looney Tunes—Golden Collection, Vol. 3 ($64.92), but the most eye-catching part of Warners' four-disc set is the black box on the back reading "Intended for the Adult Collector." Are Bugs and Elmer finally getting it on? No such luck; the disclaimer is the studio's first step toward releasing some of the sensitive material in its vaults, vintage cartoons that often trample on modern sensibilities. The racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers in the WWII-era "Private Snafu" shorts are par for the course, while Speedy Gonzales' indolent compañeros seem to be balanced out by their industrious countryman. Perhaps what makes "Gonzales' Tamales" potentially offensive is not the beaner stereotypes but the reference to "marijuana par fumar" which creeps into the lyrics of "La Cucaracha." The alternate audio track offers the surreal experience of hearing Speedy actually speak Spanish, but not surprisingly, the weed reference gets lost in translation.