Sunday, February 26, 2023

Promotional Consideration

My friend John Scoleri (who was one half of the legendary We Are Controlling Transmission team... that's right, the ORIGINAL Outer Limits blog) found himself in possession of an interesting video item:















It's a promotional tape that MGM/UA sent to video retailers, pushing the 50th anniversary edition of The Wizard of Oz and the six Outer Limits episodes slated to be released in December 1989. John digitized the entire tape, and I excised the relevant portion. Check it out:

The episodes being advertised ("Corpus Earthling," "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "Tourist Attraction," "The Bellero Shield," "A Feasibility Study" and "Don't Open Till Doomsday") brought the total number of released episodes (at that point) to 24, exactly half of the entire run. Coincidentally, these were the final six tapes I bought. As I detailed in my article in the Spring 2021 issue of bare•bones (published by the aforementioned John Scoleri's Cimarron Street Books), I was 20 years old at the time, newly living sans parents and struggling to pay the bills... so pre-recorded videotapes really couldn't compete with necessities like food and electricity. So while I did eventually acquire most of the later 24 volumes through, ahem, unsavory means (mostly copying rented tapes, but I did snag some episodes from the TNT MonsterVision marathons too), these six mark the point at which my official licensed collection ended. Of course, I later amassed a complete collection with lots of duplicates (after starting this blog, in fact).

This video is actually quite similar to the one found on the VHS editions of "Demon with a Glass Hand," "The Zanti Misfits" and "Keeper of the Purple Twilight," which I posted as part of my "Demon" spotlight way back in October 2014 (!). I tried like hell to put a direct link to it here, but evidently my computer Kung Fu ain't what it used to be, so use either "Demon"-specific links earlier in this paragraph to check it out (you'll find it in the Home Video Releases rundown).

Thanks for the video, John!

4 comments:

  1. Is there any information in bare.bones that is not stated in your blog? Thanks.

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  2. The bare-bones article is a deep-dive comprehensive examination of the history of the show on home video. This blog is a Cliff's Notes skim by comparison.

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  3. I ordered the back issue. I hope they combine all the video commentaries for the 60th anniversary (if they decide to do it), if fact, I wish there were commentaries for every episode.

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  4. You are correct, the account in barebones is much more in depth. Still hoping they do something for the 60th anniversary, like adding more commentaries and maybe a new overall look at the series.

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