Yesterday, for no particular reason, I was looking over my digital movie collection on my iPad.

While one can have their own personal movie collection through various services, including Amazon and iTunes, mine is primarily through Walmart’s VUDU (you can check the service out here), which works -for the most part- concurrently with Flixster (you can check that service out here).

The primary reason I chose VUDU over almost all the other big digital video services was because I have a very large DVD/BluRay collection and the idea of buying all those films again weighed extremely heavily on my mind -and wallet, of course- and when I discovered VUDU allowed you to port most of your movies from their physical form to the VUDU system for basically $1.00-5.00 (the rate depends on whether you’re converting DVDs vs. BluRays and when you do more than 10 at a time the price is slashed in half!), I went on a tear going through my collection and “digitizing” it.

While VUDU didn’t allow me to convert all of my films to Digital, one of the ones it did allow me to do was my old copy of Phantasm (1979).  Recently, it was announced that J. J. Abrams and his company have remastered the film and this is the trailer for the upcoming release, scheduled for October 4th (ie, three days from now):

I’m a HUGE fan of the original Phantasm and the remastered film was certainly on my radar so imagine my surprise when, while going over my VUDU films yesterday, I noticed the graphics for my digital copy of Phantasm (you know, the mini-poster you click on to see the film) had changed to this…

In this larger graphic you can clearly see the word “Remastered” below the movie’s title but in the very small images you have on your VUDU movie listings, I couldn’t see it.

Curious about the graphic change, I clicked on the movie and to my delight, my original, non-remastered copy of Phantasm on VUDU was, indeed, replaced free of charge with the remastered one and four days before the official release, to boot!!!  I knew it was the remastered version because the “Bad Robot” logo (encased in one of those Phantasm Balls o’ Death) appeared in the film’s opening credits.

So, if you already have a copy of Phantasm via the VUDU system and are eager to see the movie in its remastered glory, check to see if you too have the new version available.

Now, I haven’t seen the full film yet and intend to do so today.  However, of what I have seen so far, up until the point where Jody picks up the mysterious Woman in Lavender and head out to the graveyard, looks really gorgeous.

If you’re like me and are a fan of the original film yet you didn’t have the VUDU version and therefore have to wait for the upgrade, fear not.  The official release is on October 4th.