Dead Video Format: RCA Selectavision CED Videodisc

As a bit of a nostalgiaholic, I am more than a little obsessed with dead audio and visual formats. I have in my lifetime lived in a household with a Betamax (my Dad purchased an early model when he was working at an Electronics store), VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-Ray players. A dream of mine is to one day have my own little room/portion of my house set up to play every format. In my last post I mentioned the RCA Selectavision CED player (Capacitane Electronic Disc) which appropriately was introduced to the marketplace in the year 1981, a friend of mine actually has a working player (he also has several working eight tracks!) and it got me thinking about the long deceased format.

The CED is a record like disc in a hard LP sized protective case, to play the film; you insert the entire case into the player which would then extract the disc before you then remove the case, an analog stylus similar to a audio record would then play the film. Like DVDs the CED allowed you to skip to chapters and like LPs and Laserdiscs, the player required flipping mid-way through the film.

What I like about the presentation is that the size allows for larger artwork displays versus the smaller and box shaped VHS and Beta tapes. We never had a Selectavision player, but I have a very specific memory of watching The Karate Kid in the format once at a facility while my mother was doing something (funny I can’t remember why I was there, but I remember the film and that it was a CED). I also recall that the Pettys, the parents of friends of my brother who some time would watch us, had a player and a lot of Disney cartoon collections for it.

Though the technology existed since the 1960's CED players and discs were not commercially produced until the year 1981 and were extinct by 1986.

Here are some fun related videos I found on YouTube

A commercial from the early 1980s—I like how the Dad in the first clip is kind of a dick, “Let’s just say I’m watching a great movie and you, you’re watching me”

And some demonstrations people made recently showing the intricacies of the player itself.

Anyone here ever own one of these? I am curious if the video quality was superior or on par with VHS. It doesn't look all that bad from the Saturday Night Fever clips, but the Blade Runner scenes look really fuzzy and full of ghosting.

YouTube Find of the Moment: Fear on Film (1982)

If you have thirty minutes to spare, I highly recommend watching the entirety of this episode of Take One hosted by future filmmaker and Horror genre Zelig, Mick Garris, during his days as a journalist. The focus of the 1982 episode is the horror genre and the three guests are directors John Landis, whose American Werewolf in London was already in release, John Carpenter, as The Thing is just about to open, and David Cronenberg, whose Videodrome is referred to as opening in the summer, but would not actually be released until February 1983.

The discussion is respectful and displays the wits and intellects of all three men in the prime of their career (at one point a reference is made to a secret project of Landis', which is probably the Twilight Zone Movie, meaning this was truly the end of innocence for him).

Topics discussed: Violence in film, the ratings board, special effects and test previews.

Part One:



Part Two:



Part Three:

YouTube Find of the Moment: Hitch's Cameos

I have spent a good amount of time and energy here complaining about modern theatrical exhibition practices and trends in Los Angeles (and have another screed in me, schedule permitting) but there are not a lot of places left in America where one can catch a showing of Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur at 9:45 on a Thursday night, and for that I am thankful.

If you've seen the underrated comparatively against his oeuvre Saboteur, you may remember it having one of the more difficult Hitchcock cameos to spot, thankfully someone took the time to lodge all of Hitch's cameos into one video compilation on YouTube.

Enjoy!

YouTube Find of the Week: There's Gremlins in your DVD!

Gremlins, which combined director Joe Dante’s love of 1950’s monster movies with a subversive take on the small-town kid comes in contact with an otherworldly creature plot mechanics of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (Spielberg probably wasn’t too bothered, he was an executive producer of the film) became along with Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Karate Kid, one of the big financial successes of the 1984 summer movie season aka the best summer ever to be an eight year old filmgoer. Naturally, Warner Brothers was desperate for a sequel. So desperate in fact that it eventually gave Dante free reign to create whatever he fancied just to continue the franchise.

The resulting film, Gremlins 2: The New Batch was an anarchistic, satirically comedic riff on the first film focusing more on the increasingly Looney Tunes inspired antics of the ever evolving Gremlins over both the human characters and the loveable (and more marketable) Mogwai, Gizmo. The studio was, of course, stunned. They enacted revenge upon the director by giving the sequel a kamikaze release date in the summer of 1990 opposite that year’s big tentpole release, Dick Tracy, sacrificing its earning potential to insure that the Warren Beatty project failed to have an opening weekend exceeding that of the Warner Brothers’ produced blockbuster of 1989, Batman.



For the few that actually saw and enjoyed The New Batch theatrically (I proudly count myself in that camp) one of the highlights was when the film “burns out” mid-scene. The film appears to bubble and burn and after a few moments of a blank white screen (apparently this prompted enough people to leave the theatre in complaint that many exhibitors gave viewers advanced warning), silhouetted Gremlins take command of the film creating hand puppets and various other havoc until urged to return the movie back to it’s normal state by none other than Hulk Hogan! For home video viewers, Dante recreated the scene with VHS fuzz and a warning from a dubbed John Wayne. On the DVD release, the theatrical version is featured with the VHS version included as a special feature.

Some clever person on YouTube has updated the gag, but for the DVD age. The maker of the video, Sacha Feiner, displays a creativity that Dante himself could appreciate, inserting Gremlins into movies including Batman, The Exorcist and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The video does go on a little too long (I haven’t performed an exact comparison, but it feels twice as long as the official gags) and it’s restricted by not having the actual puppets thus forcing the filmmaker to mash up footage from the two films. But the right spirit is there.

Enjoy:



A week ago I commented that I have become hardened by the remake-mania proliferating Hollywood to the point of indifference. But I have to admit when the inevitable Gremlins remake using all CGI creatures and told straight-faced comes out, I will feel mighty depressed.

Terror in the YouTubes

Terror in the Aisles (1984, Andrew J. Kuehn), a rare example of a studio distributed, theatrically released documentary that consists almost entirely of clips and scenes of other films, think along the lines of Celluloid Closet or Los Angeles Plays Itself only less academic, whose main function is to serve as an advertising tool for the home video sales and rentals unit of it's parent company, Universal Pictures (at the time a subsidary of MCA). To that extent we get scenes from the classic Universal monsters but most notably heavy use of scenes from recent (in 1984) Universal released product such as Jaws II (which gets as much play in Terror as the far far superior original), Halloween II (ditto) and in the most obvious example of corporate cross pollination, the Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Nighthawks, which may feature a great psycho turn by Rutger Hauer, but, and this has rubbed me the wrong way since I saw Terror as a kid, is in no way a "horror" film, but rather an action film with suspenseful moments and a good villain.

In the pre-internet days (set wayback machine to mid-late 1980s), Terror served as a reference guide for this budding horror genre fan. I would often compile lists while watching it which I would take with me to the video store (remember those things, kids?) as a tool for my rental activity, so job well done on that front after all Universal.

Terror intercuts film sequences ranging from the classic, modern and bizarre (I really need to see Alone in the Dark, featuring Martin Landau as an escaped lunatic in the disguise of a milkman) with a discussion lead by co-hosts, Halloween star Donald Pleasence and Carrie's Nancy Allen into the psychology that drives viewers to pay money to get their scare on.

Due to the legal entanglements in clearing the rights of the many featured films and it's relative obscurity, Terror has not, and probably never will be, released on DVD. Although apparently it shows up from time to time on the all-Horror network, Chiller, which I guess is allowed clearance rights since no one actually gets the channel.

Fortunately, some kind soul put Terror in the Aisle on YouTube. Unfortunately, said kind soul decided that instead of cutting it up into approximately eight increments of the maximum allowed 10 minutes intervals to split the film into about 24 three to five minute increments. Further unfortune, of the 24 segments, there are about five missing that were either never embedded or removed from YouTube (those would be segments 19-21 and 23-24).

Here are the first few minutes of Terror, if you enjoy please go here to view the rest of it (or more specifically, most of the rest of it)