Oddity Archive: Episode 270 - VHS (& Betamax) Public Domain Oddities (Silent Movie Day 2023)

[@michaelcarpenter2498]

The cabinet of Caligari is a film every silent film lover should see at least once. madacy and all the other budget video distributers may have been halfbaked in their presentation, but they kept them out there. Thanks Ben for a great vid and the recommendation of The Freshman.

[@plushifoxed]

i literally cackled out "SHUT UP!" at the screen when you came out with that "sound investment" line. awful, just awful. great work lol

[@OddityArchive]

I think I'm old enough to be throwing in the odd Dad joke at this point.

[@jasonhaman4670]

That one gave me a good chuckle. Keep 'em coming, I like 'em.

[@printo316]

Gosh, I remember watching Metropolis when I was eight years old on a Madacy VHS tape. There's a reason why it's notorious.

[@GenoCuddy]

A great episode, Ben. Glad to have helped with this one. I have both of those Chaplin box sets and I probably should transfer them and share them just so people can experience how otherworldly they are. The Hollywood Home Theatre version of NOSFERATU is awesome with Ichikawa's creepy, synth score. It works beautifully with the old, battered print they used. I also loved how outfits like GoodTimes would supply you the film, but you had to supply the music yourself, not unlike what Jason said below. This episode encapsulates what a wonderfully wild time the eighties and nineties were in terms of video collecting. We should team up with David and do one on public domain cartoons next.

[@OddityArchive]

PD cartoons are pretty well out of my wheelhouse. Not enough of a cartoon connoisseur in the first place.

[@jasonhaman4670]

I got into silent movies when I stumbled across Viking Video Classics tapes at KMart in the late 80s. No soundtracks... not surprising, considering they didn't even bother to print the contents of the tape on the label - just "Viking Video Classics" and lines on the label, notebook paper-style for you to write it on yourself. At least they were LP-mode, and no 10-tapes-for-9-hrs sets. I had no idea silents originally had music until years later. But I think no music is much better than badly-chosen music.

[@brianhebert6152]

Ah yes, "Viking Video Classics - NWO 4 LIFE TOO SWEET" is my favorite Charlie Chaplin short.

[@mightyfilm]

Metropolis: Another fine mess you gotten us into. Totally should have been the movie's tagline. I probably mentioned it on this channel on another silent movie video, but I once bought this incredibly cheap dollar section at Target copy of Hunchback of Notre Dame. I'm talking so cheap it came in a thin cardboard box with not so much as a plastic sleeve, so it was rattling around waiting to be scratched up. It did not have any soundtrack outside of a dull buzzing sound you'd get from a bad VHS transfer. I tried watching it on several occasions, but I couldn't get past the dead silence because it made it unnerving. Something I have a problem with in general since I have always had the low buzzing of tinnitus to the point I couldn't sleep for years unless I had the radio on. And I couldn't find a good enough soundtrack to listen beside it because, well, a collection of Muppet and Weird Al CD's kinda doesn't work with a classic style horror film.

[@nobodyyouknow1065]

I watched a version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with this new jazzy soundtrack and it really made a huge positive difference even for a movie I already liked.

[@Scotfre]

I remember the first pre-recorded VHS I ever bought was a GOODTIMES VIDEO copy of Metropolis. Picture quality and soundtrack were awful as I recall but I didn't care. I'd been obsessed with seeing that film ever since I read Uncle Forry's hyperbolic description in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Star Wars Special my mom bought me after we saw it in the theater in 1977. Our local library had a Super 8 version of Metropolis but I didn't know anyone who owned a projector so I would check it out and try to look at the frames by holding it up to my bedroom light. So getting it on VHS was awesome even if that early PD version was viewable.

[@orangenineties6423]

Great topic, Ben. A few public domain tape oddities come to mind. JEF Films, one of those bootleg companies that changed its name repeatedly, released a VHS of Our Gang silents during the 1990s. Rather than using ragtime 78s, they pulled music from what sounds like the Weather Channel. Lots of smooth late-'80s jazz. An odd combination, but I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I vaguely recall a collection of solo Laurel & Hardy comedies (ones they made before teaming up) had a music-less silent short on it... and the sound of people talking in the background might have been heard if the volume was cranked up enough. But I could be misremembering that. Then there's A-1 Video, which had some pretty rare items. But some of these were produced by way of pointing a video camera at a projection screen. On a few occasions, the silhouette of what I assume is A-1's founder would block part of the screen. Another early VHS company that went to the trouble of hiring a musician was the NY-based Video Dimensions. I've got a silent comedy tape of theirs with some pretty solid piano scoring.

[@robmclean4352]

5:00 That's $247.75 in today's money...!

[@OddityArchive]

Ain't inflation wonderful?

[@hordakalpha]

I remember first time I watched Metropolis on TCM( when I was a strange teenager in the mid 90s who had to set the vcr for EVERY silent movie broadcast on TCM and AMC) the film had this ultra way out of place soundtrack with the horn section on overload in spots that sounded like it was pieced together during the mid 60’s and had Brigette Helm dancing around to this utterly ridiculous music during the night club scene. I bet you know which Metropolis soundtrack I am talking about Ben, lol. Another great episode, silent movie day is becoming one of those episodes I look forward to each September.

[@Cole.....]

7:10 Hammond organ music fit for Arnold Rimmer.

[@EddieMillerStudios]

As someone who loves organ music, I'm gonna have to track down one of those copies of "The Gold Rush".

[@SnepperStepTV]

Heh, i should do a video about the public domain series (plan 9 from outer space so far) that i've started printing over high-volume used tapes (like forrest gump and late disney clamshells) and use 90s rubber stamping techniques to create the box on an inside out sleeve from the tape its printed over, and same for the label with typewriter lettering.

[@sampoernaquatrain1710]

That was a VERY fast 22 minutes, as with anytime you talk about public domain VHS or VHS in general! Thanks for the info on Hollywood Home Theatre. I was recently told by a former video store owner from back in that era (dawn of the 80's) that HHT was a supplier to those early stores, and that their wares were made available to store owners via a catalog. Do you or anyone know if those HHT tapes were ever sold in retail stores? It's my understanding that they weren't.

[@mjrleaguesweetie]

Rosa Rio! Awesome. I’m from the Tampa Bay area, there’s a movie palace in downtown Tampa called the Tampa Theatre, opened in the 1920s and is still open and thriving today. Rosa moved here and began playing the organ there in the mid 90s, accompanying a regularly scheduled silent film program, plus she’d play music before all the other movies they screened, silent or otherwise. She kept it up until she died. I saw her play many, many times. It was cool to have had first-hand experience with a figure of the silent film era.

[@gspendlove]

So sad that so many silent films have been lost forever, because the only prints that existed were on flammable nitrate film stock.

[@belstar1128]

Or the only surviving company was dubbed on low quality vhs in the 80s and has jean Michelle jarre music in the backgournd .

[@Dsun4456]

TCM's Silent Fest starts at 6:00am and ends at 8:00pm tomorrow.

[@basshorseman998]

Thanks Ben...the very end piece sounds like stuff I recorded in my studio on the bands (they paid for, fools) Moog syn units when I was up waay to long, and very very H+gh...I've been good 30 years since then for the record...

[@mariteaux]

"Nobody ever said it would be a SOUND investment." That's because they're silent films. Heyo!

[@j0hnf_uk]

The one with the, 'running commentary', reminded me a lot of a series based on Harold Lloyd shorts that had a form of, 'narration', to them, broadcast some 40+ years ago by the BBC. I don't think it was ever repeated or ever mentioned again after it's initial run.

[@OddityArchive]

I think it was called “Hooray for Harold Lloyd”. It ran here in the States as well.

[@iainlaurence]

17:35 The voice actor here sounds like an NPC from a 90’s PC Strategy game

[@suedenim]

It might be fun to take some even more inappropriate music and create an ad for a "Charlie Chaplin: Master of Horror" VHS tape.

[@KronoGarrett]

I'm surprised that you didn't do an episode entirely in intertitles...

[@luisreyes1963]

Time for that wacky show, "Benny's Fractured Flickers!" 😂

[@matthewhood7844]

I think it was a box set from Hollywood Classics I had of Bogart, Carney, etc. where each cassette was recorded in ep so there was very little tape used. The box took up a lot of space but they could have put it all on one tape. I remember Video Yesteryear. I used to get their catalog. It used to be the only place to get some old and weird videos. The quality wasn't great but it was all we had.

[@betteryearentertainment4004]

Regarding that last clip, WHOA. Not since "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn" has any film been so inappropriately soundtracked by synths.

[@JoachimAV]

At least eight other Charlie Chaplin Comedy Theatre versions of shorts did make it to home video via a 1981 two tape set in the UK, although like many smaller VHS releases of that era it's near-impossible to track down. The show's version of Work seems to have travelled elsewhere though, turning up on a UK DVD from Stonevision, which going by the music selections on some of the shorts might've partially been ripped from one of Madacy's own releases. Never encountered the newsreel on any other public domain compilations, but more recently it's turned up in restored form as a bonus feature on the BFI's collection of Mutual shorts and Criterion's blu-ray release of The Kid. As for other unusual PD short variants, there's a cheapo DVD featuring The New Janitor that had a print version of a vintage anti-littering courtesy slide inexplicably spliced into the ending, and while not sourced from retail video I've found a version of A Jitney Elopement used as interstitial filler on a dubious European satellite channel in the early 90s, which was your standard scratched-up TV print played overspeed but with music sourced from the Bruton library album Loony Tunes (in comparison to other PD print music sources, an album then just 11-12 years old - some decent enough stabs at comedy accompaniment, but not as three tracks looped ad nauseam).

[@OddityArchive]

Geez. Now I wanna see that '81 Chaplin set. Had no idea that series ever made it out of the U.S.

[@brianhebert6152]

12:17 Perhaps someone at Crown Movie Classics had a fever dream where they visited an alternate timeline where Metropolis was released in the US with new footage featuring Laurel and Hardy (a la the original Godzilla film and Power Rangers) and decided to make a soundtrack choice based on that bizarre vision

[@shmikex]

Godfrey Ho style!

[@brianhebert6152]

​@@shmikex "NINJA ENGLISHMAN AND SOUTHENER! COMING SOON TO THIS CINEMA!"

[@ZXRulezzz]

hehe, sound investment

[@devinsmith4790]

For me the score I was introduced to when I saw Metropolis is by The New Pollutants on the more recent (silent film restoration-wise) Complete Metropolis, it has since been my preferred version.

[@zltoonslc2000rj]

Rosa Rio, I think, also performed soundtracks - which, remember, were copyrighted by Yesteryear - for 1920s Aesop’s Fables cartoons, many prints of which can be found on the Public Domain DVD set “Giant 600 Cartoon Collection”. Now ain’t that irony?

[@MegaPianoplayer1]

I'm a year late on this, but in the soundtrack fail department, I have to mention the soundtrack to the copy of Nosferatu put out by Digiview on those cheap DVDs in the early 00s. The copy I had, probably the only one they made, had a soundtrack by some horrible heavy metal band that didn't fit the movie at all. I had to watch it with the TV muted because it was so bad.

[@pacmancdi]

I miss Media play. I still have the complete series box set of the legend of Zelda cartoon I bought right before they closed.

[@delusionnnnn]

My favourite "silent movie soundtrack" is KTL's ( Sunn O))) ) soundtrack for the Criterion release of The Phantom Carriage (1921). Obviously, this is a recent release, and the soundtrack isn't in the public domain.

[@peanutbutterjeff5364]

What are your thoughts on that version Nosferatu that I think was put out by Kartes and used some stock music from the 50s? You used a few clips, but didn’t comment on them, so I thought I’d ask.

[@OddityArchive]

It's actually the 1973 Thunderbird Films issue just slapped on VHS. The music choices are serviceable enough.

[@jackatkinson3682]

12:46 At least it's not as bad as the use of David Kane's Them Jazzbeards' album "Dirty White Shoes" whenever Off Beat Cinema plays this movie. It's as if the show's producers just opted to play the album straight through without bothering to match any of the songs with the action on screen.

[@BaccarWozat]

They seem very happy over in Metropolis. Guess they don't need FEMA to help with all that flooding.

[@imrustyokay]

I don't think it's a good idea to record someone playing a synthesizer with a power saw for a Charlie Chaplin tape. Oh, speaking of good old Charlie, in 1978, there was a Greek singer named Tania Tsanaklidou who performed a song about him...in Greek. Even more bizarrely, it was the Greek entry for the 1978 Eurovision Song Contest. Hey, it got 8th place!

[@princeofcupspoc9073]

Is it just me, or is Ben more stoned than usual?

[@obscuramask7435]

I have Chaplin the collection on VHS

[@shmikex]

I suppose some people saw the film quality and was like, "meh, whatever" for the sound. It's jarring when there are songs with vocals backing the film. Perhaps you could say they are the earliest of music videos. Growing up in the 90s with Looney Tunes, these soundtracks have the same vibe. Any silent film from Warner Bros given this treatment should end with Porky Pig saying "That's all folks"

[@cpnscarlet]

"Sound Investment!!!!" That's rich!! Ha Ha Ha!!! What laughs....ZZzZZzzzzzzz....zzzzzz...zzzz

[@belstar1128]

9:00 while i love synth music from that era it sounds a little bit out of place on such old movies when this kind of music didn't exist yet. its like putting dubstep in the original jaws it makes no sense. it can also give people a wrong view of the past.

[@KarlWitsman]

OK, I am finally giving up... who is the woman in the intro at :34 seconds in? She's gorgeous, even if she's about to scream. And ohhhh, that last pun.

[@JoachimAV]

Diane Adelson/Diane Mahree, in a scene from Manos: The Hands of Fate.

[@KarlWitsman]

@@JoachimAV Thank you! I've only seen Manos from the MST3K version. I'll have to look into that.

[@robfriedrich2822]

18:44 The screen should show something - nothing else.

[@Bucky749]

My first ever silent film day special is now up to 44 views just thought you’d like to know. What is your favorite silent cartoon that can be found here on KZbin?

[@craigmurphy2046]

Any one out there know a good source for silent movies?