I never had to worry about finding something inappropriate on these public domain movies as my dad would always watch them before showing them to me to "make sure they worked." I didn't realize until now that maybe he was making sure there was nothing pornographic on or at the end of them.
years ago, another obscure UA-cam channel [Oddity Archive] talked about that video set and basically portrayed the Hamster as if he was a Freddy Krueger-alike that... um... well let's just say there are multiple meanings and intonations you can conjure if I use the word 'assault' in this context.
Another oddities of these tapes is that they have cartoons on them that are still copyright like "The Unruly Hare" "Ski for Two" "An Itch in Time" "Crowing Pains" "Hollywood Steps Outs" "Lumber Jerks" "The Goofy Gophers" "Fin N' Catty" and much more
As a child of the '80s, I absolutely remember these bizarre VHS oddities down to a T. Personally I grew up in a rather poor household, so my mom would bring home any random cheap tapes she found at the store. I distinctly remember having a strange UAV "Mighty Mouse" tape that contained exactly one Mighty Mouse cartoon, followed by several other irrelevant and unusual cartoon shorts from the 1930s-40s. I was always fascinated by the subsequent cartoons on that tape, and a particular one - a cartoon about Leprechauns - was one of my favorites of all time growing up. I was also able to discover quite a bit of obscure animation from these kind of strange tapes, including rare cartoons, foreign animations dubbed in English, and even banned cartoons. Yes, you heard me correctly: a particular VHS tape I acquired as a kid contained random Donald Duck animations, including a rare 1943 wartime propaganda short about Donald Duck saving money to defeat the Axis. I was too young to understand the meaning of it at the time, but later learned that it was an out-of-print animation that was hard to come by in the pre-internet era. And as for Goodtimes Video, believe me, I have my story about that as well. I had an aunt who was mentally challenged and wheelchair-bound in the '80s when she was a teenager, and she was in the care of my elderly grandmother would babysit us with my aunt. My grandma would purchase assorted Goodtimes VHS tapes from the grocery store, as they were cheap knockoffs meant to coincide with official Disney releases. And since my aunt lacked cognitive abilities, she couldn't tell the difference between real Disney and blatant knockoffs. Say for example when Disney's Beauty & The Beast came out on VHS: Goodtimes released their own cheap version containing a public domain animation of the same fairy tale made by a different studio some years prior. I believe my aunt also had a Goodtimes Pocahontas tape as well. EDIT: that's the exact Leprechaun cartoon at 01:01:43!!!
The whole mail away Kids Club thing was rather common in 80's and to early 90s well with toy lines not video in UK. Though Pre Schooler TV shows did ask parents to send in a First name and Photo of their Kids for the Live TV presenter to say their name during show breaks to wish them a happy birthday usally on a homemade birthday card. Cause you never got it mailed back and they still do this today.
In the 90's, Public broadcasting in the US used to have parents give a kid's first name when they did a pledge, and they'd read it on the air. Usually less than an hour after you called in. My parents did that for me a time or two.
That address in Rahway, NJ, is less than a mile from the infamous Rahway prison- inspiration for the show OZ as well as the location that the “HBO Jail special” that Chris Rock did a bit about was filmed.
Thats insane that Jem cut into the Magpies cartoon !! This was such an interesting deep dive as a kid who had a few DVD variants of these but they weren't as terrible as this ! I did mostly watch Tom and Jerry as a kid so it's possible I was given it with some of the Tom n Jerry DVDs I had.
I'll tackle the "The cover is a picture from the actual public domain cartoon" disclaimer. If someone drew a picture of Bugs Bunny and tried to use that to sell a video tape, that would be trademark infringement. But using a public domain image from the contents is okay. Except it isn't and they aren't. Any Warner Bros. lawyer worth his salt should have seen this and sued them for fraud AND trademark infringement. The video tape companies must have gotten half-baked legal advice.
And a lot of these tapes often had a weird "off model" version of Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig on the cover that looked like it was drawn by a four year old, I'm guessing so they could claim "It's not an official picture of the characters".
GoodTimes also had a storied history beyond repackaging public domain movies. They later ventured into video games through the GT Interactive label, though GT Media was sold to Gaiam in 2005. Gaiam would later transition into a conspiracist media house peddling crank content under the name Gaia.
@@toastrave7820 Up until Atari/Infogrames (formerly Hasbro Interactive) acquired GT Interactive. The only GoodTimes VHS videos I own are The Baby-Sitters Club (in conjunction with Scholastic and HBO) and Little House on the Prairie (only available through Time-Life Video).
I'm so looking forward to this!! It's long, so I will be able to watch chunks as I take meal breaks. I miss those old cartoons, and my VHS player. Mine died years ago. I tried to replace it so I could do an old favorite exercise video, but after 2 failed attempts, I gave up. That was about 5 years ago and VHS machines are now out of my price range. Luckily, someone posted a video of my old fave exercise vid on youtube!! I enjoy your channel!! Thank you! 🌷
Loved this video. It's so interesting to me to hear about all the obscure, sketchy corners of media that have fallen through the cracks over the years. Low budget shovelware video games, public domain cartoon tapes, etc. I wonder how hard to would be to get into contact with someone who worked for one of these companies to get an interview.
I remember my dad buying this Mighty mouse and friends dvd and being like "why is Looney tunes on here? I thought this was a mighty mouse dvd, why is there only one mighty mouse cartoon on here????"
My VCRs have been my favorite purchases of the last couple of years, and you've inspired my next collection rabbit hole with this release. I bet you had a ton of fun with this experience! Thanks for the fantastic upload!
The kept making these into the 2000s on DVD. I had so many because they were only $1. They were in very thin cases, and you could get huge sets of them sealed together in plastic wrap for very cheap. They would have Popeye, Betty Boop, Mighty Mouse, and lots of others. They were generally VHS rips, and had static, tracking lines, and watermarks. They would sometimes have black and white movies in them, that weren't labelled on the package. It was very mysterious to me.
This is one of the most fascinating videos I have seen on this site. I think this should genuinely be required viewing for anyone and everyone making Analog Horror, given how many strange quirks of the VHS medium are discussed here, it's definitely giving me inspiration for my own projects.
these companies became popular the same way video brinquedo (they now exist as "Crianças inteligentes" here on youtube) did. instead of making craptastic compilations of already existing cartoons however they made mock busters as a means to make money. these mock busters are marketed as being a more kid friendly, cheaper (price wise....and quality wise lol) yet still on par version of whatever movie disney and dreamworks were coming out with. why see kung fu panda when the little panda fighter is much cheaper. they also sold these movies right next to their official counterparts. so imagine being a kid at a grocery store and your grandma who is half blind but well meaning accidentally grabs ratatoing instead of ratatoullie.
I still have a ton of these old PD tapes for some reason and they were more or less the go-to when we didn't have cable and I just wanted to watch some cartoons, no matter the quality. Ironically due to these tapes, I learned as I got older and more interested in media the purpose and reason why these tapes existed but also later discovered BETTER QUALITY VERSIONS that indeed made the VHS rips look even worse considering how many generations of a copy they were BEFORE they got the to tape. I was introduced to the Superman cartoons via these things and getting into animation later, it made me appriciate them so much more.
excited to see this. i found your channel cause of the public domain vhs/dvd videos, those made me feel nostalgic, i grew up getting tapes/dvds like that either from the dollar store or as hand me downs.
Oh my goodness, you mentioned Kids Klassics. They also did license releases of 80's cartoons, like the Super Mario Bros. Super Show (as I remember having the tape for Butch Mario and The Luigi Kid).
Does it match with the run time? I know public domain distros would just put random crap (usually a cartoon or two) on any given release without saying so, but VCRs came into the public consciousness over a very quick period, and most people were just using them until they broke or ate up a tape. I can remember people just cutting out the ruined area and splicing, especially stuff you'd rent.
11:54 NTA Home Entertainment wasn't a Public Domain distributor: it was the home video branch of National Telefilm Associates, which owned the rights to the Pre-1950 Fleischer/Famous Studios cartoons (except Popeye and Superman) originally released by Paramount Pictures. It just so happened most of those cartoons were also in the Public Domain.
I know right. They are recently known as Republic Pictures Home Video which was recently Worldvision Home Video, a home video branch of Taft Broadcasting (currently known as iHeart Media) who also owns Hanna-Barbera way back in the 80s (prior to Turner’s acquisition of the animation studio in 1991).
When I was little, my grandparents bought me a Popeye tape, but a Fleischer Superman compilation is what was actually on it. A Mutt and Jeff tape had a weird jump in the middle of one cartoon, and went right into the next. A Little Audrey tape ended with a cartoon about kids going to an underwater city, and the opening was cut off for some reason. I had another identical version of that tape, and that one didn't have the cut. I also had Godzilla VS Megalon (which wasn't actually publuc domain) with the first several minutes missing, and it abruptly stops and rewinds once the the ending comes. I used to have a Filmation Ghostbusters tape, but there wasn't anything weird on it.
Prior to the Anchor Bay Entertainment formation, Starmaker previously worked with Worldvision Home Video way back in 1994 and released Thumbelina (anime movie).
42:18 According to a 1986 _Billboard_ article, both Amvest Video and Kid Pics date to 1985, along with Vintage Video. Videofidelity dates to c. 1986, which was used for music performance-type releases under _Jazz Classics._ The Happy Hamsters themselves have a connection to Dante Pugliese's previous label, Springboard International, releasing two authorized Chipmunks Christmas reissues through United Artists Records in 1975 under the Mistletoe imprint. The Happy Chipmunks' first two albums were in 1982 under Audiofidelity's Holiday imprint, so Pugliese likely thought his clear knock-off would fly under the Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. radar (note: nothing _Alvin and the Chipmunks_ does if Bagdasarian can help it).
19:46 "I understand it was the 80's. People were less suspicious" Then you don't understand the 80's at all. In the 80's people were walking around thinking there were child sacrifice rings in daycares and people looking for kids to steal the minute their parents stopped looking at them. This is the era where we taught kids not to talk to any stranger at all for any reason. So if anything, parents just letting their kids send their picture to a guy in a costume on a video is actually worse in hindsight. Although I suspect the expectation from them was that the children would do this of their own volition and with no knowledge or involvement from the parents. It's just a letter for many of them the entire process of sending it could possibly be done without having to drive anywhere.
I know kinda off topic, bytt you're referring to the mcmartin preschool stuff, there was definitely weird shit happening at that mcmartin preschool everyone talks about being pure satanic panic, the fbi recently released documents confirming there were tunnels and weird child trafficking shit related happening in that preschool I'm assuming the hyper religious 80s Christian parents just didn't know really how to explain the weird trafficking shit they were witnessing beyond satanic, I guess Again, I know VERY off topic, but it's really weird seeing people refer to it as pure satanic panic after the FBI has since then kinda confirmed the guy was apart of a trafficking ring (if you want more info I suggest looking at the finders, a guy named mister metokur does a whole stream on it)
The earliest home video distributor that I would think of was The Nostalgia Merchant and Media Home Entertainment (MEDA) where they put out cartoons from Public Domain on VHS back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
One bit of context you forgot to mention and its a particularly big context for these releases. Is that the prints used for these tapes are from multiple old TV packages from 50s to the 70s at the latest. You mention NTA who was the largest distributor but you didnt mention how they had multiple cartoon tv packages prior.
A core memory of mine I’d completely forgotten was watching one of those public domain tapes and being frustrated because the tape was such poor quality.
This reminded me, I can’t for the life of me remember what tape this was but at some point in a ‘00s I had a tape that I was certain was a legit retail tape - and at the end after a bit of blank space there was a stop icon on the screen and it caught a few seconds of a dvd screensaver. I figured I must have gotten ahold of a bootleg but even for a bootleg dubbing from DVD to VHS is a weird method of choice.
Public Domain VHS Bad Experiences: I remember getting a 3g tape from Goodwill and Power Rangers was recorded over it. A kid pics 3-tape set I bought from eBay was not the best: One tape refused to work in my perfectly fine Toshiba Vcr, one tape did, and one was recorded over with an episode of American Bandstand from 1994 from KYW-TV.
I have an Elmer Fudd Tape with a similar issue. The entirety has I think the news recorded over it. That’s what happens when these companies don’t pop the lil record stopper off.
I was looking through old VHS tapes my family had in a garage and only like 2 were PD tapes and they were all loose and only one was a UAV tape that being a Elmer Fudd one I might look through more tapes maybe one day.
I have in my DVD collection a single UAV title, the sci-fi B movie Invaders From Mars. The content itself is in decent quality and I was surprised to see that UAV lasted long enough to put out DVDs.
Hi! Just found out in the 80’s Audiofidelity put out bootleg records by the Beatles on Picture Disc and Frank Sinatra on Cassette tape. For some reason they don’t use the same address from Amvest Video, but use different addresses, but are all in Rahway.
I’m not sure how much this relates to this video, but you brought up cartoons r fun, I’m not sure if you know but there’s a video called the 1995 sonic bootleg tape that involves that company putting out a malicious sonic episode. The story is fake, but it’s extremely well done and worth a watch.
I remember staying in a caravan around 1993/94, and amongst the videos that were there were several different cartoon tapes... only despite having different boxes, they all had the exact same public domain compilation on (which didn't match what was on any of the boxes). Though the only cartoon I can specifically remember from those tapes was A Tale Of Two Kitties.
Oh, and that porno thing happened to my cousin with a pirated VHS copy of the 2002 scooby doo movie (so the very end of the VHS era), she left her son watching the movie while she went into the kitchen, then came back to find a porno that came on at the end of the film (and realised he'd been watching it for about 10 minutes).
with a lot of these tapes it seems like they haven't been erasing them but recorded over them and then strung that mess together. a lot of these seem to have a red tint which is a dead giveaway that these tapes have indeed been reused and re-recorded over.
@@marktheteddyruxpinguy5780 yeah with cartoons its probably film dye more than re-recordings. but i heard somewhere it can result from frequently recording over it. NBC was guilty of this and as a result a lot of pilots were lost to time.
@@angelinacamacho8575 BBC did this with a lot of shows, notably Doctor Who. In that case they struck film prints for international distribution, though... and then threw those in the trash when they were done.
Wow this took a dark turn quickly. The grooming kids for pictures and addresses, information? That’s creepy af. Wowwww. I hope the scum bags behind that operation got whatever was coming to them.
I actually don't find it at all unlikely that somebody who owned the tape would have put a different tape with a Herman cartoon in a different box for a Herman cartoon. My uncle had a collection of VHS tapes once, and he had placed a "Beatrix Potter Triple Feature" VHS in his box for "Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Mr. Jeremy Fisher." When I asked him about this, he said he had misplaced the actual tape, so he put that one in there instead because one of the shows on it was the one listed on the box anyway, so he didn't necessarily consider it incorrect. I can see somebody utilizing the same logic here: "I misplaced the Herman tape that goes in this box, so I'll just put this one in there." If that explanation isn't enough, it's equally possible somebody had multiple tapes out of their boxes while sorting through them, popped this one into the VCR to see what it was (since the label doesn't say), and saw the Herman cartoon that matched on both tapes play on it (qued up to that point due to not being rewound, made the wrong assumption, and popped it into the box he thought it went into.
It's funny because my grandma bought me some of these tapes at the grocery store and pharmacy as cheap gifts when i was a kid and i laughed when you said u had the same experience. It must have seemed like a bargain compared to disney tapes running like 60 to 80 bucks back then. Which seems even more extreme when you consider inflation. Imagine paying $200 for a movie. A $15 vhs tape made a lot of sense when it gets played on a loop all day for the kids lol
wow, this was a journey! I should've figured the places putting out these things were at least some level of sketchy... between the stuff kid pics was doing and then the whole *toothpaste* thing... I'm sure I've seen my fair share of these in grocery stores, but admittedly never gave much thought to the actual operations that went on, but all this sounds about what I'd expect from these shady companies.
from an ESL perspective these public domain cassettes were like reverse russian roulette amateur voice over? actual dub? actual dub with quality known voice actors? could be anything 😭 and god forbid these quality dubs came in a usuable condition... skips, horrible loud hiss and all that 😢
I have the Bugs tape at 13:00. I had no idea it was a cheap public domain tape until I actually played it. The artwork looked quite real and convincing to me 😂😂
Pretty much all SLP/EP Rugrats tapes I've had before had that white screen of death, it's weird. Also, there was some Japanese or two tape I've had where the it had a specific screen with some sort of message saying it was a test tone and intentional. As for a stranger tape I have known as Charlotte Holmes which is a mid 90s release of a weird lost anime dub with a live action framing device (dub adaptation) from 79/80, it has a completely mismatched M&E track on the left side channel and the original tinny audio on the right side and sometime it flickers before settling. The weirder thing is the logo at the start of that tape, and company mentioned on the crappy paper "outer case" are all different, and at the end of the tape it has a recorded quick rewind with high pitched audio and then goes to a gray screen. But the weirder thing about THAT is that I could only capture it once, on the first run as I bought the misfit vhs set new. Every following time I've tried to the tape itself stops playing a little into the rewinding. God, I need to find the original UK release(s, there were 2 tapes/episodes) of Charlotte Holmes lmao that audio is not an easy thing to fix
I would not be so quick to dismiss the previous owner of the Herman Tape being the cause for the mixup instead of the distributor. Some half-senile grandparent cleaning up after the grandkids have gone through the whole shelf of tapes without putting anything back? They're not going to pay attention to things like what company put the tape out. Tape says Herman, case says Herman, that's a match. Then later, the mismatched tape enters the used market and you buy it like that. The only improbable thing here is the grandparent having Herman tapes from two different distributors, but maybe they either had an extensive collection of public domain tapes, or they were a fan of the character and sought out those tapes specifically. To me that seems like a much more likely scenario than 3G somehow getting their hands on TAV's cases, which would have been printed up specifically as a print job ordered by TAV. While we've established that none of these companies had quality control, I don't see TAV ordering more cases be printed than they expected to make and sell tapes themselves, because that goes against the whole notion of "do it as cheaply as possible" that they clearly operated by. It's not like they'd be like "Oops, that's all the Herman Cassettes we recorded, and we still have 200 more cases, let's see if any of our competitors will buy those extras with our branding on them off our hands so we can recoup some operating costs." I don't remember if these were both companies from that cluster that was operating within 5 miles of each other, but if they were, I suppose that the local print shop could have misdelivered an order of TAV cases to 3G, or if somehow TAV did have leftovers, there could have been some dumpster diving, but even those are stretches. I just feel your most likely source of mixup is the consumer, from my own personal experience of working at a Blockbuster from 1995-2000. I couldn't tell you how many times we had to call someone who had dropped off tapes in our return box to tell them that while we appreciated them bringing back the rental case, it had to have the tape we'd given them, and not some other random tape inside before we could check it back in for them. At least one or two a day (which considering our rental turnover, was actually probably a small percentage but it felt common enough), and most of the time it was kids tapes, because as you observed, parents were using the VCR as a babysitter, and weren't really paying any attention to what tapes their kids were actually watching. (Edit: OK, the obvious hole in my theory is that the 3G tape in this instance doesn't have anything written on its label, but that just means it got popped back in the VCR long enough to see "Oh, that's the Herman tape" before getting put back in the first Herman case that was found. Or the TAV Herman tape, which *was* labeled. got put back in the 3G case first, and after the other tapes had been cleaned up, you had the unlabeled 3G tape and the TAV case left so obviously those go together too.)
I remember getting tapes that said they were woody woodpecker tapes and they either had no woody woodpecker on them or only 1 show...pantry panic and it was always just that one
Yeah they could be so hit and miss like I’ve got a few tapes where the focal character is in every cartoon and then I’ve got my Cartoons R Fun Elmer Fudd tapes where the one cartoon he’s featured in he’s barely in at all.
4 місяці тому+2
That was Woody's only PD cartoon. I think Lantz didn't renew the trademark because he remade it in 1946 with the more iconic, stubbier design, which that version still IS copyrighted.
The copyrighted wasn't renewed by Lantz which is why it entered the Public Domain like some other few Lantz cartoons like "Beachcombers" "House of Magic" "Silly Superstition" "Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat" and all the 1931-1932 Disney Oswald Sound-Reissues (Except the one of All Wet) that were made due to the Studio losing money due to the Great Depression being developed.
Despite that, the (Non-Public Domain) “Ski for Two” turned up on some PD tapes, and it’s not known why (and that’s just one of many non-PD shorts that often turned up on PD tapes)
I grew up during the years of VHS amd reruns of old cartoons pre VHS and couldn't stand Baby Huey. I couldn't stand anything coming out of that same cartoon studio. Not even as a last resort when nothing else was on. I prefered the japanese cartoons more that imported to the USA.
They aren't filming the screen, it's a direct feed from composite into a cheap upscaler to make it compatible with modern displays. In order to change the aspect ratio they would need to do that in software and re-render the image. The trouble with that is that the signal is noisy and in order to shrink the image you will need to find the average of a given range of pixels so that they can be reduced to a fewer number of distinct pixels. The noise is going to create artefacts in the footage by throwing off the values of pixels across the entire image, with the data changing on every frame. The majority of video compression algorithms do not do that task well, especially if they're working with a source that was up scaled using a cable instead of a bespoke unit that can be calibrated to suit the occasion. The cable doesn't output 4:3 and trying to get that fixed with editing software is very labour intensive and time consuming for results that can end up being much worse with noisy video sources like these.
I never had to worry about finding something inappropriate on these public domain movies as my dad would always watch them before showing them to me to "make sure they worked." I didn't realize until now that maybe he was making sure there was nothing pornographic on or at the end of them.
we need more parents like your dad
These low quality cartoon compilations and the companies behind them are so fascinating to me, glad UA-cam recommended this, great video
That happy hamster thing looks like if the "1999' creepypasta was real
years ago, another obscure UA-cam channel [Oddity Archive] talked about that video set and basically portrayed the Hamster as if he was a Freddy Krueger-alike that... um... well let's just say there are multiple meanings and intonations you can conjure if I use the word 'assault' in this context.
It was
The hamster club thing is completely insane, even for the '80s. It's literally the plot of the Brixley Talent Time mission in Ready or Not.
Another oddities of these tapes is that they have cartoons on them that are still copyright like "The Unruly Hare" "Ski for Two" "An Itch in Time" "Crowing Pains" "Hollywood Steps Outs" "Lumber Jerks" "The Goofy Gophers" "Fin N' Catty" and much more
Sometimes you'd see the redrawn colorized B&W Porky shorts which are under copyright as well.
@@calzonemaniacsvideocorner0804 Yeah I some how forgot that.
Also "The Lion's Busy" and "Flop Goes the Weasel" are other cartoons that appeared on these tapes that are still copyrighted.
@@JaxCoolKartunes There's at least one tape that's got "Gift Wrapped" on it.
@@calzonemaniacsvideocorner0804 I forgot to include that too.
As a child of the '80s, I absolutely remember these bizarre VHS oddities down to a T. Personally I grew up in a rather poor household, so my mom would bring home any random cheap tapes she found at the store. I distinctly remember having a strange UAV "Mighty Mouse" tape that contained exactly one Mighty Mouse cartoon, followed by several other irrelevant and unusual cartoon shorts from the 1930s-40s. I was always fascinated by the subsequent cartoons on that tape, and a particular one - a cartoon about Leprechauns - was one of my favorites of all time growing up.
I was also able to discover quite a bit of obscure animation from these kind of strange tapes, including rare cartoons, foreign animations dubbed in English, and even banned cartoons. Yes, you heard me correctly: a particular VHS tape I acquired as a kid contained random Donald Duck animations, including a rare 1943 wartime propaganda short about Donald Duck saving money to defeat the Axis. I was too young to understand the meaning of it at the time, but later learned that it was an out-of-print animation that was hard to come by in the pre-internet era.
And as for Goodtimes Video, believe me, I have my story about that as well. I had an aunt who was mentally challenged and wheelchair-bound in the '80s when she was a teenager, and she was in the care of my elderly grandmother would babysit us with my aunt. My grandma would purchase assorted Goodtimes VHS tapes from the grocery store, as they were cheap knockoffs meant to coincide with official Disney releases. And since my aunt lacked cognitive abilities, she couldn't tell the difference between real Disney and blatant knockoffs. Say for example when Disney's Beauty & The Beast came out on VHS: Goodtimes released their own cheap version containing a public domain animation of the same fairy tale made by a different studio some years prior. I believe my aunt also had a Goodtimes Pocahontas tape as well.
EDIT: that's the exact Leprechaun cartoon at 01:01:43!!!
The leprechaun cartoon is called, "The Wee Man (1947)" A great scan of it exists on UA-cam too
Yea, send your picture to a guy in New Jersey. Nothing suspicious there!
And tell me something about yourself!
Totally legit! Remember, we MIGHT be able to include this in our (probably nonexistent) newsletter!
The happy hamster laugh is horrifying enough on its own.
Fr 😓
Yeah. I was thinking it didn't help their cause to make his laugh sound like The Joker.
The elsagate of the 80s
At least Elsagate has ENDINGS, though.
The whole mail away Kids Club thing was rather common in 80's and to early 90s well with toy lines not video in UK. Though Pre Schooler TV shows did ask parents to send in a First name and Photo of their Kids for the Live TV presenter to say their name during show breaks to wish them a happy birthday usally on a homemade birthday card. Cause you never got it mailed back and they still do this today.
In the 90's, Public broadcasting in the US used to have parents give a kid's first name when they did a pledge, and they'd read it on the air. Usually less than an hour after you called in. My parents did that for me a time or two.
That address in Rahway, NJ, is less than a mile from the infamous Rahway prison- inspiration for the show OZ as well as the location that the “HBO Jail special” that Chris Rock did a bit about was filmed.
Thats insane that Jem cut into the Magpies cartoon !! This was such an interesting deep dive as a kid who had a few DVD variants of these but they weren't as terrible as this ! I did mostly watch Tom and Jerry as a kid so it's possible I was given it with some of the Tom n Jerry DVDs I had.
"Yeah, let's send Jason's pics to the hamster that's dressed like Michael Jackson: what could go wrong?"
Thanks for re-discussing these old public domain tapes. I always thought they were strange.
I'll tackle the "The cover is a picture from the actual public domain cartoon" disclaimer. If someone drew a picture of Bugs Bunny and tried to use that to sell a video tape, that would be trademark infringement. But using a public domain image from the contents is okay. Except it isn't and they aren't. Any Warner Bros. lawyer worth his salt should have seen this and sued them for fraud AND trademark infringement. The video tape companies must have gotten half-baked legal advice.
And a lot of these tapes often had a weird "off model" version of Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig on the cover that looked like it was drawn by a four year old, I'm guessing so they could claim "It's not an official picture of the characters".
GoodTimes also had a storied history beyond repackaging public domain movies. They later ventured into video games through the GT Interactive label, though GT Media was sold to Gaiam in 2005. Gaiam would later transition into a conspiracist media house peddling crank content under the name Gaia.
so you're saying GoodTimes helped publish Duke Nukem 3d
@@toastrave7820 Up until Atari/Infogrames (formerly Hasbro Interactive) acquired GT Interactive. The only GoodTimes VHS videos I own are The Baby-Sitters Club (in conjunction with Scholastic and HBO) and Little House on the Prairie (only available through Time-Life Video).
I remember my grandparents ordering me the 50 cartoon collections on vhs. My favorites were Little LuLu and the 3 Stooges shorts.
One of my cousins always said the three stooges gave him nightmares. He was a weird kid.
"Little Lulu I love you-lu just the same"
Little Lu Lu was boring. Could not stand that one.
@@AddMoreQuartershow was it boring?
I'm so looking forward to this!! It's long, so I will be able to watch chunks as I take meal breaks. I miss those old cartoons, and my VHS player. Mine died years ago. I tried to replace it so I could do an old favorite exercise video, but after 2 failed attempts, I gave up. That was about 5 years ago and VHS machines are now out of my price range. Luckily, someone posted a video of my old fave exercise vid on youtube!! I enjoy your channel!! Thank you! 🌷
Thanks! Yeah I never realized how much I missed having a VCR until recently getting a new one. My last one died off probably around 2012.
I honestly didn't expect to watch this whole video, but your OCD research into the subject turned out to be fascinating!
Loved this video. It's so interesting to me to hear about all the obscure, sketchy corners of media that have fallen through the cracks over the years. Low budget shovelware video games, public domain cartoon tapes, etc. I wonder how hard to would be to get into contact with someone who worked for one of these companies to get an interview.
I remember my dad buying this Mighty mouse and friends dvd and being like "why is Looney tunes on here? I thought this was a mighty mouse dvd, why is there only one mighty mouse cartoon on here????"
To be fair, "and friends" was a part of the title.
we need this era of free market agian
My VCRs have been my favorite purchases of the last couple of years, and you've inspired my next collection rabbit hole with this release. I bet you had a ton of fun with this experience! Thanks for the fantastic upload!
The kept making these into the 2000s on DVD. I had so many because they were only $1. They were in very thin cases, and you could get huge sets of them sealed together in plastic wrap for very cheap. They would have Popeye, Betty Boop, Mighty Mouse, and lots of others.
They were generally VHS rips, and had static, tracking lines, and watermarks. They would sometimes have black and white movies in them, that weren't labelled on the package. It was very mysterious to me.
This is one of the most fascinating videos I have seen on this site. I think this should genuinely be required viewing for anyone and everyone making Analog Horror, given how many strange quirks of the VHS medium are discussed here, it's definitely giving me inspiration for my own projects.
Your last video was really good and this one is even better. Good job man!
these companies became popular the same way video brinquedo (they now exist as "Crianças inteligentes" here on youtube) did. instead of making craptastic compilations of already existing cartoons however they made mock busters as a means to make money. these mock busters are marketed as being a more kid friendly, cheaper (price wise....and quality wise lol) yet still on par version of whatever movie disney and dreamworks were coming out with. why see kung fu panda when the little panda fighter is much cheaper. they also sold these movies right next to their official counterparts. so imagine being a kid at a grocery store and your grandma who is half blind but well meaning accidentally grabs ratatoing instead of ratatoullie.
I still have a ton of these old PD tapes for some reason and they were more or less the go-to when we didn't have cable and I just wanted to watch some cartoons, no matter the quality. Ironically due to these tapes, I learned as I got older and more interested in media the purpose and reason why these tapes existed but also later discovered BETTER QUALITY VERSIONS that indeed made the VHS rips look even worse considering how many generations of a copy they were BEFORE they got the to tape. I was introduced to the Superman cartoons via these things and getting into animation later, it made me appriciate them so much more.
excited to see this. i found your channel cause of the public domain vhs/dvd videos, those made me feel nostalgic, i grew up getting tapes/dvds like that either from the dollar store or as hand me downs.
If i didn't know better i would have assumed the hamster club thing was from some analog horror video what the hell
Oh my goodness, you mentioned Kids Klassics. They also did license releases of 80's cartoons, like the Super Mario Bros. Super Show (as I remember having the tape for Butch Mario and The Luigi Kid).
Nowadays I always see random public domain cartoons on streaming services like tubi
"Yes, we promised you Baby Huey, but you ain't getting it... we're just gonna cut off things off right here......"
Does it match with the run time? I know public domain distros would just put random crap (usually a cartoon or two) on any given release without saying so, but VCRs came into the public consciousness over a very quick period, and most people were just using them until they broke or ate up a tape. I can remember people just cutting out the ruined area and splicing, especially stuff you'd rent.
11:54 NTA Home Entertainment wasn't a Public Domain distributor: it was the home video branch of National Telefilm Associates, which owned the rights to the Pre-1950 Fleischer/Famous Studios cartoons (except Popeye and Superman) originally released by Paramount Pictures. It just so happened most of those cartoons were also in the Public Domain.
I know right. They are recently known as Republic Pictures Home Video which was recently Worldvision Home Video, a home video branch of Taft Broadcasting (currently known as iHeart Media) who also owns Hanna-Barbera way back in the 80s (prior to Turner’s acquisition of the animation studio in 1991).
Fantastic video. Great editing. I love it. I remember DEC and they always actually had ONLY the first track listed
When I was little, my grandparents bought me a Popeye tape, but a Fleischer Superman compilation is what was actually on it.
A Mutt and Jeff tape had a weird jump in the middle of one cartoon, and went right into the next.
A Little Audrey tape ended with a cartoon about kids going to an underwater city, and the opening was cut off for some reason. I had another identical version of that tape, and that one didn't have the cut.
I also had Godzilla VS Megalon (which wasn't actually publuc domain) with the first several minutes missing, and it abruptly stops and rewinds once the the ending comes.
I used to have a Filmation Ghostbusters tape, but there wasn't anything weird on it.
Re the Filmation Ghostbusters: Clearly the ghost caused the tape to NOT have anything weird with it. Plot twist!
Prior to the Anchor Bay Entertainment formation, Starmaker previously worked with Worldvision Home Video way back in 1994 and released Thumbelina (anime movie).
42:18 According to a 1986 _Billboard_ article, both Amvest Video and Kid Pics date to 1985, along with Vintage Video. Videofidelity dates to c. 1986, which was used for music performance-type releases under _Jazz Classics._
The Happy Hamsters themselves have a connection to Dante Pugliese's previous label, Springboard International, releasing two authorized Chipmunks Christmas reissues through United Artists Records in 1975 under the Mistletoe imprint. The Happy Chipmunks' first two albums were in 1982 under Audiofidelity's Holiday imprint, so Pugliese likely thought his clear knock-off would fly under the Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. radar (note: nothing _Alvin and the Chipmunks_ does if Bagdasarian can help it).
19:46 "I understand it was the 80's. People were less suspicious"
Then you don't understand the 80's at all. In the 80's people were walking around thinking there were child sacrifice rings in daycares and people looking for kids to steal the minute their parents stopped looking at them. This is the era where we taught kids not to talk to any stranger at all for any reason. So if anything, parents just letting their kids send their picture to a guy in a costume on a video is actually worse in hindsight. Although I suspect the expectation from them was that the children would do this of their own volition and with no knowledge or involvement from the parents. It's just a letter for many of them the entire process of sending it could possibly be done without having to drive anywhere.
I know kinda off topic, bytt you're referring to the mcmartin preschool stuff, there was definitely weird shit happening at that mcmartin preschool everyone talks about being pure satanic panic, the fbi recently released documents confirming there were tunnels and weird child trafficking shit related happening in that preschool
I'm assuming the hyper religious 80s Christian parents just didn't know really how to explain the weird trafficking shit they were witnessing beyond satanic, I guess
Again, I know VERY off topic, but it's really weird seeing people refer to it as pure satanic panic after the FBI has since then kinda confirmed the guy was apart of a trafficking ring (if you want more info I suggest looking at the finders, a guy named mister metokur does a whole stream on it)
I remember seeing the same Baby Huey VHS tape at a Thrift Store that I worked at, in Summer 2022
The earliest home video distributor that I would think of was The Nostalgia Merchant and Media Home Entertainment (MEDA) where they put out cartoons from Public Domain on VHS back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Ah Meda, that was ol Charles Bands company before Full Moon entertainment but after Wizard Video
One bit of context you forgot to mention and its a particularly big context for these releases. Is that the prints used for these tapes are from multiple old TV packages from 50s to the 70s at the latest. You mention NTA who was the largest distributor but you didnt mention how they had multiple cartoon tv packages prior.
A core memory of mine I’d completely forgotten was watching one of those public domain tapes and being frustrated because the tape was such poor quality.
This reminded me, I can’t for the life of me remember what tape this was but at some point in a ‘00s I had a tape that I was certain was a legit retail tape - and at the end after a bit of blank space there was a stop icon on the screen and it caught a few seconds of a dvd screensaver. I figured I must have gotten ahold of a bootleg but even for a bootleg dubbing from DVD to VHS is a weird method of choice.
That's one hell of a VHS tape room 😮
Public Domain VHS Bad Experiences: I remember getting a 3g tape from Goodwill and Power Rangers was recorded over it. A kid pics 3-tape set I bought from eBay was not the best: One tape refused to work in my perfectly fine Toshiba Vcr, one tape did, and one was recorded over with an episode of American Bandstand from 1994 from KYW-TV.
I have an Elmer Fudd Tape with a similar issue. The entirety has I think the news recorded over it. That’s what happens when these companies don’t pop the lil record stopper off.
Were they at least good Power Rangers episodes
@@dexstewart862 it was only at the start of the tape for a minute
Definitely gives these tapes a haunting aura. I think I might have one of these, a Daffy Duck tape. I’ll have to check myself…
It says alot about New Jersey that being a shady public domain vhs tape distributor is one of the less suspicious things someone could be doing.
I would love to see a video about all the 3 stooges related public domain vhs tapes.
I was looking through old VHS tapes my family had in a garage and only like 2 were PD tapes and they were all loose and only one was a UAV tape that being a Elmer Fudd one I might look through more tapes maybe one day.
I remembered watching 50 of the greatest cartoons on vhs 😊
I have in my DVD collection a single UAV title, the sci-fi B movie Invaders From Mars. The content itself is in decent quality and I was surprised to see that UAV lasted long enough to put out DVDs.
Maybe next time you do this… Switch the aspect to 4:3….?
Hi! Just found out in the 80’s Audiofidelity put out bootleg records by the Beatles on Picture Disc and Frank Sinatra on Cassette tape. For some reason they don’t use the same address from Amvest Video, but use different addresses, but are all in Rahway.
That’s a very cool, and informative video of a niche of American home entertainment gone by
I’m not sure how much this relates to this video, but you brought up cartoons r fun, I’m not sure if you know but there’s a video called the 1995 sonic bootleg tape that involves that company putting out a malicious sonic episode. The story is fake, but it’s extremely well done and worth a watch.
I remember staying in a caravan around 1993/94, and amongst the videos that were there were several different cartoon tapes... only despite having different boxes, they all had the exact same public domain compilation on (which didn't match what was on any of the boxes). Though the only cartoon I can specifically remember from those tapes was A Tale Of Two Kitties.
Oh, and that porno thing happened to my cousin with a pirated VHS copy of the 2002 scooby doo movie (so the very end of the VHS era), she left her son watching the movie while she went into the kitchen, then came back to find a porno that came on at the end of the film (and realised he'd been watching it for about 10 minutes).
@@2001JamesTV A VHS Tape (Well a bootleg one) of Scooby Doo (2002) OF ALL THINGS had that type of stuff in it?
@@JaxCoolKartunes As I said it was a pirate copy, not a genuine one!
@@2001JamesTV I wonder what the son thought did it effect him?
@@JaxCoolKartunes When we mentioned it to him, he couldn't even remember it happening.
a cobweb hotel of PD tapes. my favorite was Porky's Preview, i haven't seen it anywhere else than on a PD tape
with a lot of these tapes it seems like they haven't been erasing them but recorded over them and then strung that mess together. a lot of these seem to have a red tint which is a dead giveaway that these tapes have indeed been reused and re-recorded over.
A red tint on old cartoons has nothing to do with the tape. its a result of the films dyes fading.
@@marktheteddyruxpinguy5780 yeah with cartoons its probably film dye more than re-recordings. but i heard somewhere it can result from frequently recording over it. NBC was guilty of this and as a result a lot of pilots were lost to time.
@@angelinacamacho8575 BBC did this with a lot of shows, notably Doctor Who. In that case they struck film prints for international distribution, though... and then threw those in the trash when they were done.
@@professorhaystacks6606 i heard about that NBC thing which is why the tonight show pilot is considered lost.
Wow this took a dark turn quickly. The grooming kids for pictures and addresses, information? That’s creepy af. Wowwww. I hope the scum bags behind that operation got whatever was coming to them.
The picture rolling is on a lot of early early 1980s vhses from Magnetic Video, and MCA Home Video
There were some PD cartoon collections on DVD, too, which I recall owning two of them.
I actually don't find it at all unlikely that somebody who owned the tape would have put a different tape with a Herman cartoon in a different box for a Herman cartoon. My uncle had a collection of VHS tapes once, and he had placed a "Beatrix Potter Triple Feature" VHS in his box for "Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Mr. Jeremy Fisher." When I asked him about this, he said he had misplaced the actual tape, so he put that one in there instead because one of the shows on it was the one listed on the box anyway, so he didn't necessarily consider it incorrect. I can see somebody utilizing the same logic here: "I misplaced the Herman tape that goes in this box, so I'll just put this one in there."
If that explanation isn't enough, it's equally possible somebody had multiple tapes out of their boxes while sorting through them, popped this one into the VCR to see what it was (since the label doesn't say), and saw the Herman cartoon that matched on both tapes play on it (qued up to that point due to not being rewound, made the wrong assumption, and popped it into the box he thought it went into.
It's funny because my grandma bought me some of these tapes at the grocery store and pharmacy as cheap gifts when i was a kid and i laughed when you said u had the same experience. It must have seemed like a bargain compared to disney tapes running like 60 to 80 bucks back then. Which seems even more extreme when you consider inflation. Imagine paying $200 for a movie. A $15 vhs tape made a lot of sense when it gets played on a loop all day for the kids lol
3:18 Hey! That's the same model of VCR I had when I was a kid!
wow, this was a journey! I should've figured the places putting out these things were at least some level of sketchy... between the stuff kid pics was doing and then the whole *toothpaste* thing... I'm sure I've seen my fair share of these in grocery stores, but admittedly never gave much thought to the actual operations that went on, but all this sounds about what I'd expect from these shady companies.
That damn hamster, I never trusted that thing.
Dibidi ba didi dou dou 🎵
from an ESL perspective these public domain cassettes were like reverse russian roulette
amateur voice over? actual dub? actual dub with quality known voice actors? could be anything 😭 and god forbid these quality dubs came in a usuable condition... skips, horrible loud hiss and all that 😢
Keep up the great work.
I have the Bugs tape at 13:00. I had no idea it was a cheap public domain tape until I actually played it. The artwork looked quite real and convincing to me 😂😂
I have alot of those vhs tapes in my collection.
Pretty much all SLP/EP Rugrats tapes I've had before had that white screen of death, it's weird.
Also, there was some Japanese or two tape I've had where the it had a specific screen with some sort of message saying it was a test tone and intentional.
As for a stranger tape I have known as Charlotte Holmes which is a mid 90s release of a weird lost anime dub with a live action framing device (dub adaptation) from 79/80, it has a completely mismatched M&E track on the left side channel and the original tinny audio on the right side and sometime it flickers before settling. The weirder thing is the logo at the start of that tape, and company mentioned on the crappy paper "outer case" are all different, and at the end of the tape it has a recorded quick rewind with high pitched audio and then goes to a gray screen. But the weirder thing about THAT is that I could only capture it once, on the first run as I bought the misfit vhs set new. Every following time I've tried to the tape itself stops playing a little into the rewinding.
God, I need to find the original UK release(s, there were 2 tapes/episodes) of Charlotte Holmes lmao that audio is not an easy thing to fix
“The Red House” starring that man who’s always standing up and walking around!!! 35:42
New sub for the intro and channel name
Ahh walmart spin rack vhs tapes...such memories.
43:06 Yay, it’s the Washington Post March by Paul Eakins! From Audio Fedelity
Rahway. Damn. I grew up an hour from there.
I would not be so quick to dismiss the previous owner of the Herman Tape being the cause for the mixup instead of the distributor. Some half-senile grandparent cleaning up after the grandkids have gone through the whole shelf of tapes without putting anything back? They're not going to pay attention to things like what company put the tape out. Tape says Herman, case says Herman, that's a match. Then later, the mismatched tape enters the used market and you buy it like that. The only improbable thing here is the grandparent having Herman tapes from two different distributors, but maybe they either had an extensive collection of public domain tapes, or they were a fan of the character and sought out those tapes specifically.
To me that seems like a much more likely scenario than 3G somehow getting their hands on TAV's cases, which would have been printed up specifically as a print job ordered by TAV. While we've established that none of these companies had quality control, I don't see TAV ordering more cases be printed than they expected to make and sell tapes themselves, because that goes against the whole notion of "do it as cheaply as possible" that they clearly operated by. It's not like they'd be like "Oops, that's all the Herman Cassettes we recorded, and we still have 200 more cases, let's see if any of our competitors will buy those extras with our branding on them off our hands so we can recoup some operating costs."
I don't remember if these were both companies from that cluster that was operating within 5 miles of each other, but if they were, I suppose that the local print shop could have misdelivered an order of TAV cases to 3G, or if somehow TAV did have leftovers, there could have been some dumpster diving, but even those are stretches.
I just feel your most likely source of mixup is the consumer, from my own personal experience of working at a Blockbuster from 1995-2000. I couldn't tell you how many times we had to call someone who had dropped off tapes in our return box to tell them that while we appreciated them bringing back the rental case, it had to have the tape we'd given them, and not some other random tape inside before we could check it back in for them. At least one or two a day (which considering our rental turnover, was actually probably a small percentage but it felt common enough), and most of the time it was kids tapes, because as you observed, parents were using the VCR as a babysitter, and weren't really paying any attention to what tapes their kids were actually watching.
(Edit: OK, the obvious hole in my theory is that the 3G tape in this instance doesn't have anything written on its label, but that just means it got popped back in the VCR long enough to see "Oh, that's the Herman tape" before getting put back in the first Herman case that was found. Or the TAV Herman tape, which *was* labeled. got put back in the 3G case first, and after the other tapes had been cleaned up, you had the unlabeled 3G tape and the TAV case left so obviously those go together too.)
I used to have bunches of these. Got them from the dollar stores or Woolworths
You're in Portland? On purpose?
8:50 I got one the oldest VCRs ever a U-matic VO-1600.
thank youuuuuu ❤
1:44
Wow! Great episode!
Wake up new public domain is coming
I remember getting tapes that said they were woody woodpecker tapes and they either had no woody woodpecker on them or only 1 show...pantry panic and it was always just that one
Yeah they could be so hit and miss like I’ve got a few tapes where the focal character is in every cartoon and then I’ve got my Cartoons R Fun Elmer Fudd tapes where the one cartoon he’s featured in he’s barely in at all.
That was Woody's only PD cartoon. I think Lantz didn't renew the trademark because he remade it in 1946 with the more iconic, stubbier design, which that version still IS copyrighted.
The copyrighted wasn't renewed by Lantz which is why it entered the Public Domain like some other few Lantz cartoons like "Beachcombers" "House of Magic" "Silly Superstition" "Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat" and all the 1931-1932 Disney Oswald Sound-Reissues (Except the one of All Wet) that were made due to the Studio losing money due to the Great Depression being developed.
Despite that, the (Non-Public Domain) “Ski for Two” turned up on some PD tapes, and it’s not known why (and that’s just one of many non-PD shorts that often turned up on PD tapes)
38:02 Drugs Bunny!
Troy Gold sounds like some kind of knockoff hero. If someone made a ripoff of Indiana Jones or Allan Quatermain, he would be named Troy Gold.
Maybe the problem was making the tapes was *too* easy.
Fantastic video!
He has the 4:3 image stretched to 16:9
First swear word in the video dropped at 17:18
I grew up during the years of VHS amd reruns of old cartoons pre VHS and couldn't stand Baby Huey. I couldn't stand anything coming out of that same cartoon studio. Not even as a last resort when nothing else was on.
I prefered the japanese cartoons more that imported to the USA.
stretching to 16:9 is pain. set your tv to 4:3
They aren't filming the screen, it's a direct feed from composite into a cheap upscaler to make it compatible with modern displays.
In order to change the aspect ratio they would need to do that in software and re-render the image.
The trouble with that is that the signal is noisy and in order to shrink the image you will need to find the average of a given range of pixels so that they can be reduced to a fewer number of distinct pixels. The noise is going to create artefacts in the footage by throwing off the values of pixels across the entire image, with the data changing on every frame.
The majority of video compression algorithms do not do that task well, especially if they're working with a source that was up scaled using a cable instead of a bespoke unit that can be calibrated to suit the occasion.
The cable doesn't output 4:3 and trying to get that fixed with editing software is very labour intensive and time consuming for results that can end up being much worse with noisy video sources like these.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 i know my stuff. I was just saying that he could have set his TV to 4:3. legit every TV ive worked with lets you do that
2:10 to get on with the video
1:09:56 what show is that from?
It is a 1946 TerryToons cartoon called "The Talking Magpies"
@@JaxCoolKartunes i mean the one that interpunct the talking magpies
@@robproductions2599 Not sure...
jem I think
i have a lot a public domain cartoon tapes i did a rip of some of them
1:25:52 "Celebrity Biographys"
I had this same tape
Great❤