Post by @ajroach42@retro.social

I am subscribed to a patreon for a dude who writes about old movies, and about once every two months he mails out a box of bootleg copies of rare or obscure VHS tapes.

So I have several reproduction copies of fairly rare tapes from his collection.

By and large these are movies that are either actually in the public domain, or who's rightsholders no longer exist or care. Often they are probably technically infringing, but in a way that no one will ever give a shit about (and with several applicable fair use defenses available if they did, which won't matter because they won't.)

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Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

I've really enjoyed this, although I'm likely to unsub soon because I tend to let seven or eight of these build up unwatched and I'm only ever interested in actually watching two or three in seven or eight anyway.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

But I really love the way he's done his thing, I love the thought and care that goes into it, and it's so close to a thing I've long wanted to do, but have been afraid to try.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

See, there's a whole library of never commercially released or long out of print or otherwise obscure media that I adore. Fan edits and fan films and fan translations, straight to video releases, international films, and just generally forgotten films.

When I was in highschool and for many years thereafter I'd put together DVDs or AVCHD DVDs (720p blu rays on dual layer DVD-Rs) of this kind of weird bullshit and give them away. I used printable discs and had a disc printer. I'd run off covers at staples or office max (because I couldn't do 11x17 at home.)

I'd design my own art and menus and sometimes do booklets.

And yeah, it was technically bootlegging! But I was bootlegging shit that was either entirely commercially unavailable, in any format, or non-commerical in it's existence at all. I was creating the physical releases these things would never get.

Sargoth

@sargoth@mastodon.social 3 hr. ago

@ajroach42 and, as the old saying goes: at some point, things transition from "bootlegs" to "the only surviving copies"

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Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

I would occasionally treat them like mixtapes, putting together a variety of short films or a multi-picture set on one or two or even three DL DVD-Rs. Those were usually made for a specific person or a specific purpose. Parties, holidays, birthday's.

I have a handful of DVDs kicking around the makerspace from when I was doing this. Some of them are 20 years old. All of them are, surprisingly, still readable. But that was never the point! These weren't the archive, they were the transport mechanism.

I've long thought it would be exceptionally neat to do something like that with an accompanying zine or newsletter. Maybe move to flash drives, like I do for our usb video releases, but otherwise keep the concept and content pretty similar.

It seems unlikely that I'll ever do it, because I fear I would exhaust my library of public domain material pretty quickly, and most of the work I'd be most interested in sharing Belongs to someoone, or some corporation, probably (or, addition to belonging to someone, it features things that belong to some corporation, worst of all worlds from a release standpoint!)

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Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

And so I continue to produce my USB video discs of public domain material, and to develop the programming for New Ellijay Television, and I mostly do not make weird physical releases for obscure and hard to find movies.

But I wanna.

Franceska Mann

@FranceskaMann@freeradical.zone 3 hr. ago

@ajroach42

you're not gonna stockpile for your bunker? 🙄

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

@FranceskaMann my stockpile is mostly spinning rust