THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PUBLIC DOMAIN VHS (PART ONE)

PATREON: www.patreon.com/exploreoregon
INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/pdxfilmexplorer
FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/exploringportland


The time is finally here! I knew I was babbling about this one a lot and I really put a lot of time into this little two part project focused in specifically on the oddity of mainly 1980s public domain cartoon VHS releases: the companies that distributed them, the horrid quality of the content released and, mainly, the sketchiness of pretty much the whole entire enterprise. In this piece I take us back to the good old days where, if you wanted to appease your kid, you went to a store in town and picked them up a little half hour VHS tape with, usually, four cartoons on them. It was simple, but I doubt very highly that many of the parents purchasing this content knew what was really going on behind closed doors regarding the various distributors they may have been buying from.

This nearly hour piece is broken into multiple sections all going all in to the history of how these public domain companies came to be and why many of them went the direction of releasing old public domain cartoons. There's lots behind it and a lot of problematic behavior to be dissected in relation to these companies and their actions. It's a truly intriguing and bizarre, yet troubling at the same time, little piece of media history and nostalgia.

And this is only part one!

0:00 Intro
2:32 My Childhood with VHS
4:50 How the Public Domain Game Started
10:58 The Distributors
15:11 Good Quality Stuff
29:28 The Dark Side of Public Domain VHS
50:29 Ending?