The results were pretty good, especially considering I had such low expectations. I cleaned it well with water, polished with a soft cloth, and let it dry. First, I rubbed the banana itself all over the disk, then I finished by rubbing the waxy interior of the peel all around the disk's surface. WHAT? A banana? Yep, this was advised by multiple sites online, so I had to try it. I think any furniture polish would work I just used what I had under the sink. It was a close second to the car wax - and it smelled better. But with a seriously scratched disk that wouldn't play, I had to polish twice with Pledge for it to come back to life. I have always used Pledge furniture polish on scratched DVDs, and when I tried it on a minimally scratched disk, Pledge brought it back to life easily. The purple dinosaur rides again, and car wax did the job! I placed the disk back into the player and, amazingly, it went straight to the menu and played flawlessly. I rinsed the disk thoroughly and let it dry.
I put Turtle car wax (liquid form) onto a soft cloth and buffed the disk in an in-to-out motion (not wax on wax off /Mr. I took a fingernail file to a Barney disk (boy was that satisfying), and when I placed it in my DVD player, the screen read "invalid disk" (again, wonderfully joyful). Methodology: I used two forms of scratched disks, ones that had small scratches resulting in a few skips or pixilation points on the disk, and then seriously scratched disks that wouldn't play at all in my DVD player. So here are the unscientific results of my attempts to fix disk scratches with common household substances - from best (#1) to worst (#4).
The Internet is full of solutions - claims that handy products you might have around the house will fix those scratches. Whether it's DVDs, CDs, or game disks for your Xbox or Wii, there are ways to fix and buff out scratches. So when the favorite DVDs get scratched and stop playing, it's a problem! I have two children they have their favorite DVDs and sometimes mommy needs them to be watching those DVDs.