Have any wide-release movies been scrubbed from the public?

Cafe Society
1

Hey gang, long time no post.

This is a weird one, but bear with me. There’s a current “viral” false recollection going on, part of that silly Mandela Effect, where people think Sinbad the comedian starred in a movie as a genie in the mid 1990s called Shazaam. For all practical purposes, it’s apparent they are misremembering the film Kazaam, starring Shaq, down to their false memory of the cover (which is nearly identical to the Shaq cover only with Sinbad).

One of the theories is the movie did so poorly it was yanked from the public and all mentions of it scrubbed from the internet. Never mind Sinbad himself swears this movie never existed–maybe he’s ashamed of it, they say.

My question is: has that ever happened that can be confirmed?

Has a movie that was released and was at some point available on VHS to rent (as well as retail available for purchase) been “pulled” by the studio and destroyed?

Wouldn’t there still be residual copies in people’s houses or what not? Even if a movie is terrible and a studio wants to bury it, wouldn’t there still be some evidence it once existed? Even Wikipedia keeps a list of ‘banned’ films, and even really obscure, terrible movies have evidence of existence on the internet.

Can anyone confirm a movie–one that a lot of people have seen–was later banished from existence?

2

The closest I can think of is Disney’s Song of the South which has never been released for home video or the United Artists Censored Eleven shorts.

3

Song of the South hasn’t been released in North America, but it has been released on home video in Britain, Japan and Europe, as outlined in the wiki article.

4

Just when you think the Freemasons have settled down … [sigh] …

5

Probably not exactly what the OP is looking for, but how about movies starring Traci Lords pre-18 years old?

The problem the distributors had wasn’t just pulling her films, but was also pulling other films that had advertisement trailers of films starring her. This affected a lot of tapes.

I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind trying to sell a VHS that they knew had footage of her under 18 years old.

6

Another semi-related incident was Atari dumping a whole bunch of poorly selling and poorly reviewed game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill in 1983.

7

However, full-length versions can easily be found on the internet.

8

Would you count the original version of Star Wars, with model shots not CGI, where Han shot first, and Greedo didn’t shhot at all?

9

Where could I find such a thing for home use?

10

Sure, but that was merchandise that hadn’t been sold yet (and was deemed so worthless that Atari couldn’t be bothered to sell it). But Atari never sought to gather/destroy hardware that had already been sold, and never sought to pretend that the worthless games never existed in the first place.

As to the OP’s question…why would any studio want to take on the expense and hassle of trying to erase an artwork from history? Studios aren’t in the business of fostering personal pride; they exist to make money. stamping out shitty past work doesn’t make money; any resources one might expend on such an effort will provide far greater return if sunk into making new (good) movies.

When it comes to personal artistic embarrassment, directors can turn to (or rather, into) Alan Smithee. Easy enough to do, since their face doesn’t typically appear in the movie itself. But actors who appear in a crappy movie are just screwed. The studio owns the movie, so an actor can’t do anything make it disappear from the public eye.

11

I expect original versions of Star Wars do exist in private collections, and no one will deny that they exist. Wouldn’t surprise me to find them available on eBay for a pretty penny. Lucasfilms isn’t breaking into homes to steal them; they just aren’t selling any more of the original version.

12

I remember a fairly lengthy article about the rise and fall of Atari and what went wrong that explained this mass burial. Basically, along with complete mismanagement, Atari made the classic mistake of attributing ramp-up trends to on-going trends. Quite fascinating and detailed.

First, they hired game designers to program their games. The console was very limited and required extreme creative talent to make good-looking games. For example, it was very limited in how many moving elements it could display; in the Pac-Man game design, they could not show all the ghosts at once - so they would show each one in rotation - and the flickering “ghost” appearance actually helped the game.

Originally the CEO had been recruited from the textile industry, and demands by coders for bonuses were derided by him - “We had these guys where I used to work. they’re just towel designers”. So talented coders quit en masse to start independent game design companies. Atari tried to stop them from selling compatible cartridges but legal efforts failed.

Then they gave in and paid game designers and coders bonuses based on sales - which generated intense dissatisfaction over who got picked for which games; you know the guys working on Pac-Man were in for a windfall no matter how crappy they made the game, for example.

Meanwhile, the demand for consoles and games went nuts. Atari had trouble ramping up production and couldn’t ship popular game titles fast enough. Their manufacturing was as bad as their software department. Distributors and retailers figured out that product was allocated based on order size - order 100 and they might ship you 5; so if you want 50, order 1000. So the orders flooded in even faster. Once they got things under control and ramped up, they were finally able to fill all those orders, only to have huge amounts cancelled as the supply chain finally got the amounts they were looking for. Atari made millions of cartridges based on orders only to have the majority cancelled.

Their choice was to sell at fire-sale prices and still lose money and meanwhile destroy the price premium for games, or trash the whole lot. They chose “trash” and the dump burial was the result. It wasn’t that the games were terrible or poor sellers, they just massively overproduced them by not understanding the market.

I don’t think it is possible to totally scrub any references to a popular release; the news of the scrub effort, alone, would be all over the internet. News sites are not going to remove articles based on a distributors request, and neither would IMDB.

13

Actually, the original theatrical release of Star Wars (The original trilogy, obviously) is available on Amazon. These are used and aren’t exactly cheap, but for a SW fan who wants the original versions these are likely a good deal. I’m not sure this qualifies for the OP. Despite Lucas not liking the original releases and “tweaking” future releases, the original versions were obviously available for a long time—the above link has both VHS and DVD versions.

14

I was in video wholesale at the time, and we pulled a ton of cassettes out of circulation. Then the various employees argued over who got to keep which ones. :frowning:

15

This is an excellent point, not to mention the legwork of being certain they captured every errant copy of a video tape from every store.

One guy who worked at a rental store and is often cited as a credible source for the fake Shazaam movie swears he had 3 copies and constantly had to deal with rewinding, etc. If the execs scrubbed the film from the public, they’d have to have collected it from guys like him. That really would be an insane expense.

There were other reasons cited as to why the studio needed to destroy the film after it was home-released, such as copyright infringement. All I could think was “wait, has that even ever happened in any other case? Is there any precedent to this theory?”

Hence this post…

16

Not quite what you are talking about, but there have been releases of movies that were pulled and destroyed. For instance, the original DVD of Little Shop of Horrors had alternate endings that the director didn’t want released, and it was recalled from stores. And the original DVD of The Devil’s Advocate featured a sculpture that an artist sued them over use of, and that DVD and VHS was pulled from the market. (I still have copies of both of them.)

17

In a similar vein to Song of the South, is Birth of a Nation available to the mass-market?

18

Re: the whole Traci Lords thing: I knew a guy who worked at a video rental place when that, er, went down and he swore that every employee was questioned about if they or anyone they knew had kept any of her tapes. Does this sound like something that happened, campp, or was he pulling my leg?

19

You’ve basically got it: There would be posters sent out as marketing material to theaters, little trailers released on VHS tapes in video rental stores and private homes (remember when studios did that?), mentions in newspapers and magazines, and tapes of TV advertisements for the film and press junkets the stars and director went on to hype the film.

This would have been a mainstream film released by a major studio. They have marketing behind them, and marketing leaves remnants, even if you assume all traces of the film itself were somehow magically removed from existence. Hell, there likely would have been fast-food tie-ins and a toy line, which represent even more ephemera. And if there’s one thing the Internet is good for besides porn, it’s collecting ephemera. You can go on YouTube right now and watch hours upon hours of 1990s Nickelodeon commercials. Had this film existed, it would be in those kinds of videos, in addition to a Hell of a lot of other places, across the country if not around the world.

Finally, of course, if the film ever saw release, you’d be looking at reviews in print and on TV shows, even if, as I said, the film itself was magically erased from existence and never saw home video release. And, to be clear, neither of those things are even remotely plausible.

Not that long ago, someone leaked a copy of the original theatrical Star Wars onto the Internet, and when I mean original, I mean not “Episode IV” not “A New Hope”, the title screen just says Star Wars.

Chronos: The Birth of a Nation (1915) is on YouTube and, given that it’s public domain, it can’t be restricted anymore.

20

#1 reason for acquiring a Laser Disc player and burning your own DVD - The ORIGINAL Star Wars Trilogy received a great Box Set, as well as individual discs
(#2 - the Looney Tunes TGAOLT set 3 with a side (1991) labeled “Politically UnCorrect” - the best source of some of the now pulled and/or heavily censored Tunes.

The VHS tapes have by now turned to dust. Lasers can go bad, but mine are still good.

As noted, the Song of the South was released on VHS in the UK. When it was ordered pulled from the shelves, many copies flooded ebay. I have two.
They CANNOT be played on your NTSC-format player, They are VHS/PAL. There are bizarre multi-format VHS decks, or expensive dedicated video converters.
In Japan, the Laser has no subtitles, except, bizarrely, during Uncle Remus singing Zip-A-Do-Da.
How do you subtitle nonsense words?

But yeah, id you want Hans blowing the bounty hunter away, Laser is yourr pretty much sole option.

Unless you know somebody.

And: the original title of Coal Black (it still shows up on YouTube, but you need to know the secret words to search - YT has gotten good at nailing it as soon as it is posted) was “So White and de…”.
In fact, the sound had been recorded before the Disney lawyer did what Walt paid them to do…
While scrubbing endless tubs of wash, a very “Hot” young woman sings
“My names’ So White but my hair’s Coal Black”.

(So White, Prince Chawin Censored 11)

In the late 1990’s, I found 16mm and, in the case of “Pingo-Pongo”, a super-8 film and had them telecined onto VHS.
I was a VERY bad boy and used pro-grade VHS duplicators (the machines used by the factories, as in “Factory New” to duplicate the resulting Censored 11 tape. Ebay bounced my ass.
WB did not see the humor in the situation.

I never had children, but as late as 2011 that tape is still the noted source for those cartoons*

    • while they are “cartoons” in the generic, WB produced “Looney TUNES”. And “Merrie Melodies”. Other produced “Happy Harmony” and one I can’t recall.
      The names come from their original purpose - to sell sheet music. Before radio made music available in homes, if you wanted music, you made it - using sheet music.
      WB was a big player in the sheet music business. The original contrat called for the cartoon to include the singing of the song’s chorus at least twice. And, of course, the cartoon’s title had to be the name of the song being promoted.

And, Before TV (yeah, I know you can’t imagine it) the way you entertained your fanily was to go to the Movies. - Cartoon, Newsreel, and Feature for a nickle.