Daily post 07 Jul 2007 09:18 am
Stuff & Film Forum shorts
– I’ve had an attraction to those junk videos you’d find in bins in Walmart or supermarkets or Woolworths (remember Woolworths – five & dime stores?). You know the type I mean, the badly drawn Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig. Mickey Mouse’s Bizarro twin. The drawing was always so bad you’d wonder what high school art student did this job? Sometimes, once you bought the video for a buck, you got what you paid for; a bad copy of the cartoon you wanted. However, sometimes you got gems.
Well, two of my films have shown up in those bins. At least it looks it. The covers are so pathetic that you have to wonder. Wonderbags. That’s why they call it that. You wonder who drew these replicants that look like bad rip-offs of my films. It’s a long story how they got there, but I found two of my films in horrible packaging in Chinatown. No one dollar package; they cost $10 each. You can buy the real dvd’s on line for nine dollars, and the real ones come with another film and a documentary.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
Let’s take a look at what the dvd cases look like inside those bags.
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These two dvd’s are available in Wonderbag packaging for a
higher price than the real dvd costs from my distributor, First Run Features.
Obviously, those packages were produced in some alternate universe. My draw dropped when I first saw them. I mean, look at that frogs fingers and toes! But, you know, the video transfer is a good one. The packaging is UGLY, and they cost $10!
So why would you buy these things? Is it for the other surprise gifts? Let’s look at what else comes in the Wonderbag.
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There’s a bunch of fish stickers and a rubber frog.
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There’s another rubber thing, what is it a spider? I don’t know. And a rubber band.
I think you get better gifts in Cracker Jack boxes!
I’m hoping you won’t find these collector’s items. But, if you do, all I can say is don’t waste your $10.
By the way, if you want to see some of those public domain video packages you can go to Tom Stathes’ Cartoons on Film site. They showcase a number of them.
– Coming soon to the Film Forum in NYC will premiere the German film, Summer ’04. It’s a film with echoes of Roman Polanski’s masterpiece, KNIFE IN THE WATER. This contemporary German drama sketches a love triangle that plays out, in part, on a sailboat.
On the same bill, they’re including the short film, NEVER LIKE THE FIRST TIME!, a Swedish animation in which four disparate people tell the story of their first sexual encounter. Documentary sound tracks lead us into separate stories, all visually different, The film has played at a number of
animation festivals and has won quite a few awards. You can see a short clip from this short here.
I like knowing that this theater continues their excellent programming, including animation in its schedule. However, I do hope they’ll soon put together another complete program of progressive shorts.
Here’s the schedule for the double bill: SUMMER ’04 and NEVER LIKE THE FIRST TIME!
August 1-14, at Film Forum, W. Houston St. (W. of 6th Ave.)
with screenings daily at 1, 3:15, 5:45, 8, and 10:10.
on 07 Jul 2007 at 3:57 pm 1.Ken Priebe said …
I also love finding those cheap videos or DVDs in dollar stores, thrift shops, drug stores and the like. I’ve found some wonderful stuff that way, and definitely lots of bad cover art. The cover art for actual Disney releases is usually not much better…the characters are always off-model and creepy looking. It’s almost as if they pay off somebody to let the un-talented distant relative of some Disney employee do the art-work for a cheap labor solution or something!
An interesting thing about many of these cheap public domain video distributors is that they often have no knowledge at all about what they’re releasing. Sometimes you find really racist cartoons included in these seemingly-innocent products marketed to children! A DVD set from Cascade Entertainment here in Canada put ‘Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat’ on one of their sets…I was shocked! Imagine Mommy & Daddy’s reaction when little Johnny takes his cute little animation video home to watch!
Some of my better finds included a “Donald Duck” video which had ‘Spirit of 43′ on it (also a parental shocker!) along with some great Famous Studios Sing-a-Long toons. Most recently I found a $2 DVD in my local dollar store with a fantastic Russian short entitled ‘Film! Film! Film!’ and an animated Norwegian folk tale which appears to be from Japan.
You never know what you’ll find!
on 07 Jul 2007 at 5:48 pm 2.mark mayerson said …
Hubley’s Tender Game and Moonbird are on cheap DVDs. I wonder how these companies determine what’s legal to release and what isn’t? However they’re doing it, they’re wrong.