The worst offender in these departments was Amvest Video.Īmvest Video's owner was Dante J. Even the public in late 80s however breifly knew about incorrectly erased porn breaking through on the tapes, usually between cartoons or at the beginning and end. Reports of PD video tape company's 'Video Clubs' or 'Fan Clubs' landing you on a child pageant or child 'model' mailing list are pretty well known, at least in the pretty small PD video communtiy. Additionally, many of these companies share the same names as bootlegging companies from the same eras, so it's very likely the PD Video business was a front for why they were ordering and selling so many video cassettes. In fact, payments by child beauty pageant operators and recruiters, or earnings through money laundering were probably at least triple the earnings a lot of these companies made actually selling tapes. Now, you would occasionally get the company that was just somewhat innocently in it for a quick buck (or at least did a good enough job hiding their alterior motives), but no one was making a significant amount of money selling their tapes for 50 cents to Family Dollar who in turn sold them for a buck. Mixed with re-used tapes (usually porn because that was the cheapest overstock to buy), horrible editing using a couple VCRs, and a 25 minute tape recorded in EP mode to save money, and you have horrifying products for 'children'.ĭue to the fact this was perfectly legal and cheap, about 33 of these companies popped up from the mid 80s to mid 90s. A few VHS copies between hands later and you get a 5th or 6th Gen color-faded, scratchy print. Copies of these reels were picked up from various places by Public Domain companies.

These distributors sold reels to various places in the 80s. 16mm reels that had been used by TV stations or movie theaters and been in storage for decades had been scrounged up over the years by sketchy distributors who made copies of them. The WB Censored 11, Baby Huey, Little Audrey, Casper and George Pal Puppetoons were staples. Rarely an old B-movie or 30's slapstick short would fall into the public domain and end up on a tape by one of these companies, but one thing dominated the public domain tapes of the 80s and 90s: Cartoons.Ĭartoons and live action shorts from the 20s-50s that had (often by fluke) fallen into the public domain ended up on these. To avoid costs, no royalties were payed to anyome because all the content on tapes produced by these companies was in the public domain. This made it easier for literally anyone to stick a quasi-legal tape onto the shelves and blend in. Since the dawn of the VCR anyone with 2 VCRS and some garbage tapes could make a bootleg (the infamous 1977 Fantasia bootleg tape comes to mind.) By the mid 80s however, the equipment was much cheaper, tapes longer, and legitmate VHS companies were everywhere. For anyone who collects VHS, every thrift store shelf or garage sale bin of VHS you scan likely contains some cartoon VHS with a vauge name like 'Christmas Favourites' or 'Big Bad Wolf.' These aren't Rankin-Bass or Charlie Brown christmas favourites, and these aren't Disney's Three Little Pigs.

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