Under Further Consideration: I Am Straight-To-Video Movies, and So Can You!

Yes, I do remember that I have a blog. I'm one month into a new job and this is the first chance I've had to really write much of anything in a long time. And whadaya know, it's another movie post!

To the surprise of no one, I come from a family of avid film watchers. And of course, the big names can only sustain the film watcher's appetite for so long, especially the child film watcher. So I thought I'd take you on a little tour of some of the lesser-known (or completely unknown) film gems Amber and I enjoyed as kids. And before you are tempted to complain, please note the absence of such adjectives as "quality", "engaging", "good" and suchlike.
As an aside: some of the samples from YouTube are going to be the first 10 minutes of the film. Most of them aren't popular enough for YouTubers to be all "Here's the big musical number!" or "Here's the scary part!" There's only "Movie Name: Part 1" or "Entire Dadgum Movie." Sorry about that.

1. The Jungle King
A teeny tiny straight-to-video little number that recycles an old chestnut about twins..."They look the same, but they are different! I wonder if they will learn something from each other?" It's hilarious to watch this snippet as an adult and to notice just how heavily the layouts, set designs and characterizations borrow pretty heavily from other popular releases of the time - the Sultan's palace from Aladdin, the interiors reminiscent of the pretty parts of the Beast's castle, and of course, some pretty blatant borrowing from Lion King, which, shocker of shockers, came out the same year. Kinda reminds you of the recent swarm of mediocre vampire entertainments that have cropped up in response to the popularity of Twilight.

2. Little Nemo - Adventures in Slumberland
A Japanese film that, for lots of kids my age who weren't counter-culture enough to be into comics and graphic novels and not old enough to watch the grown-up stuff being offered on MTV, was an introduction to anime. And if you have a look at the credits, you'll notice that Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, which lots of us had to read in high school, and All Summer In A Day, which I'm beginning to think only I ever read) contributed to the film.

3. Happily Ever After
Happily Ever After pioneered the use of big-name celebrities as voice actors to bring some buzz to a film. In want of the big funding and marketing that the bigger companies had, the fine folks at Filmation stacked their cast with stars from lots of different media - Ed Asner, Carol Channing, Irene Cara, Phyllis Diller (whose big musical number you may remember from my movie musicals essential soundtrack) et al. Didn't help much, seeing as how Filmation filed bankruptcy and folded shortly thereafter. Happily Ever After is an unofficial sequel to Snow White, featuring seven dwarfelles who are endowed with supernatural power over different elements. Little Thunderella (Tracey Ullman), though, is in a bind over hers...

4. The Magic Voyage
Another foreign film that got re-vamped and released stateside, this time from our friends in Germany. It uses a fictionalized version of Christopher Columbus's journey to "India" (until that whole other continent got in the way) as a frame story alongside which a little woodworm named Pico goes to save his lady love, a fairy named Marilyn. Hilariously enough, this one also cast a bunch of big names, including Irene Cara. I suppose she thought this was her film niche! In this clip, we find Columbus trying to stave off a mutiny by inciting accordion merriment. (If it works for Weird Al...) Have a listen to these words and tell me whether you think that the studio blew all their money on the voice cast and as a result got the cheapest lyricist available...

5. Rumpelstilzkin as presented by Timeless Tales from Hallmark
This is what the Hallmark movie people were doing before they were making the Hallmark movies we know so well today...taking the gloriously public domain Grimm fairy tales and animating them with the help of Hanna-Barbera (the fine folks behind the Flintstones, Jetsons, Smurfs and other such television gems.) And heeey, Sandy from Grease is telling us all about what we'll be watching today! Enjoy the first few minutes, and also have a good laugh at the clothing on the live-action frame story actors...are you surprised to know that this was made in 1990?

6. Beauty and the Beast (1981 Bosustow Entertainment version)
Ladies and germs, I have stumped the internet. Aside from that IMDB link and a link to a site that looks less than reliable (some weird little cartoon database), I can't find a blessed thing about this movie anywhere. No stills, no cover art, no nothing. And I went through a whole bunch of digging, because you can imagine what I am inundated with when I Google anything close to that title... I looked through all of IMDB's listings for "Beauty and the Beast" (of which there were roughly eight zillion) and this is my best guess for the right one; I can't confirm at the moment because the videotape is at my mother's house. And y'all, I was REALLY wanting to share this one with you, because it is singularly freaky. On the upside, if I've got the right title, IMDB tells me that it's only 12 minutes long, a length of time easily recorded on small electronic devices. This may call for a trip to Mom's tomorrow for a ~~Copyright Infringement~~ Kooky Film Recovery Mission!

7. Daffy Duck's Quackbusters
This is probably the most well-known of my collection here, largely because it used an already-famous group of characters. It even got re-released on DVD. As a child, I noted with some confusion the fact that the backgrounds, animation style, and character voices changed so frequently in this film; it's because much of the film is pulled from different Looney Tunes cartoons, with the only newly animated sequences being those that feature Daffy as a paranormalist. Fun fact: Mel Blanc served as the voice of most of the Looney Tunes characters for decades. This film was his last one in the Tunes canon - he died a year later. Between Blanc voicing the characters for the new animation that served as the frame story and Blanc having voiced the 1950s and 1960s cartoons they pulled for filler, he comes close to being the exclusive voice actor for the entire movie. Very interesting to watch the parts where the newer animation segues into the old cartoons and hear his 80-year-old voice change into his 50-something voice, most noticeably on Porky. But I can't show you any of that, because the Powers That Be have kept a close eye on the YouTubes for stray copyrighted material. As far as Quackbusters goes, I can only offer you this:

8. A Variety Of Films That Were Basically Books-On-Tape
Because these examples come from popular franchises, you may question why I include them in a post on obscure movies. But one look at the "animation" style ("Let's just point the camera at the book, pan around and then mess with a few of the cels to make some stuff wiggle or disappear!") and you'll see why I don't really consider these proper movies. The first example in particular makes my mother all misty-eyed because I watched it and talked with her about it as a toddler.