Some Disney executive (maybe Eisner) said a few years ago that it was just too problematic to be released in the US, even though they’d like to do it otherwise.
If I recall correctly, in the early days of the VHS era, Disney refused to sell any of their movies for home video, and had special, exceptionally expensive, bright red VHS tapes for the rental-only market.
Interestingly Pixar do not have this policy, and I’d be curious if John Lasseter (if he has influence over this) will retire it within Disney too. It does seem counter-productive considering it doesn’t happen almost anywhere else.
There are at least two simple ways to avoid that (Macrovision). Both work perfectly, and I have used both repeatedly.
You sure about that? Maybe that was the case in the later VHS era, but when I was a kid, I had a friend whose parents would dub rental movies all the time using the two-VCRs method. I would go over to his house sometimes to watch movies, including Disney cartoons like Pinocchio and Lady and the Tramp, and they always looked just fine. I mean, the picture quality wasn’t as good as the original of course, but they didn’t really seem to have any problems either. This was 1980s through early 1990s.
I did have the bright to dark problem when I bought my first DVD player - not because I was trying to dub movies. Rather, I had a TV/VCR combo at the time, and tried hooking up the DVD player to it. I guess some internal mechanism assumed I was trying to copy movies, and whenever I tried watching anything on it, the picture would go from bright to dark to bright again. Didn’t have that problem though, once I hooked the DVD player to a standalone TV.
Then you apparently missed your fortune making opportunity in the mid-90’s. All you need now is a TARDIS and a copy of The Little Mermaid…
Macrovision was introduced in the mid 80s, so VCRs built previously, and those manufacturers who just didn’t adhere to the recommended guidelines, could avoid that. I believe all DVD player manufacturers kept to the guidelines (though considering there are many that bypassed region coding, perhaps not).
There’s a more recent system for HDMI called HDCP, but that seems to be an unnecessary safeguard as nobody uses that route to rip BluRays anyway.
I saw Song of the South in a theater in Montreal when I was a kid. Probably around 1973 or so.