There’s a movie from 1983 called Get Crazy. It was released on VHS only, no DVD or BLU RAY. Kind of juvenile and getting dated by the moment, but I liked it. It was a parody version of goings-on at the Fillmore East under Bill Graham. There’s a half-decent version someone uploaded to youtube.
I recently purchased the first(and only) season of Jay Mohr’s, “Action!” series, because it wasn’t available anywhere, not even vial shall we say, ‘alternative’ channels. Ahead of it’s time. Illeana Douglas was brilliant in it, though she halfway through the season she decided she didn’t like playing a prostitute. Should’ve read that script. . .
The first season of Crime Story was excellent. I was never that riveted to a TV series again until I found The Sopranos.
The second season really sucked, though. I couldn’t believe how such a great series could crater so quickly. “Abysmal” is a good way to describe it.
I felt the same way about Miami Vice when it started going downhill in the middle of the third season. But watching even first season episodes nowadays has me going “Why did I ever like this crap?”
I wonder if anyone remembers another Michael Mann series called Private Eye. It was set in the 1950s and pretty good, but it was given an awful time slot behind the aforesaid second season edition of Crime Story. I think it was cancelled mid-series due to bad ratings. (I remember the dick’s secretary was pretty cute, though.)
It was released last year on BluRay by Kino Lorder. The picture quality is great and there are a ton of extras, including very recent interviews, done during COVD lockdown, from the looks of it. Apparently Times Square, another late-70s New York rock cult film, is getting the BluRay treatment by the end of the summer as well.
Pretty sure it’s on Prime, at least here in Canada. But stuff vanishes from Prime without warning from time to time. Crime Story was still in my bookmarks list last I looked, but who knows for how long.
Not sure if it’s easy to watch on YT or if there’s annoying ads and stuff, but this has been posted on Archive.org since 2018 if you want to check it out there.
A show that appears to have disappeared from reality was on Showtime in the early 2000s called Leap Years. It told three parallel stories about a group of friends in three time frames (the past, the present and the near future) and as best as I can tell has not been seen since it first aired.
Not a great movie, but more fun than one might think. It does have some very good scenes. I have a VHS copy, but I don’t believe it’s ever been released on DVD and I’ve never seen it scheduled on any cable/TV channel.
Huh. I was going to post Surf II, an incredibly stupid 80s teen-comedy in which I was an extra. Bombed hard when it played in theaters for about a week. I think my fellow extras and I were the only people in the audience at our screening. It got a VHS release, but never a DVD release and still hasn’t popped up on any streaming service. I checked Amazon for to see what used VHS copies were going for, and discovered it got a Blu-Ray release last summer (July 2021) from a company that specializes in cult movies.
Let It Be has still never been released on any major home media format or streaming. I was sure that the success of Get Back would lead to a re-release of the original film, but so far, nothing.
Troma Studios (Surf Nazis Must Die, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, etc.)
“In 2012, the company officially released many of its films on YouTube. However, their YouTube channel was eventually terminated for not meeting community standards.”
I watched the first couple of episodes of Ameяika when it originally aired. I couldn’t take any more after that. Don’t waste your time trying to find it.
(On the other hand, it figured prominently in a term paper I wrote for a Poli Sci seminar. I got an A, so it was worthwhile in that sense.)
people say Jenna Elfman and Thomas Gibson owe their r careers to tea Leoni &co as dharma and Greg show was basically the plot of their show the only difference was the husband’s family were traditional Jews and tea was the hippie free spirit type trying to fit in
Thank you for the info, ESPECIALLY the Get Crazy release. Both are out on BluRay right now. I wasn’t a fan of Times Square, but I didn’t see it for the first time until I was in my 50’s. I think it would be better received had I seen it when it came out, or shortly thereafter.
I went looking for Get Crazy. . .must have been 12-15 years ago, and of course it wasn’t available (other than the VHS copy I bought from Ebay in 2002). I ended up somewhere that said, “Get Crazy is not available on DVD at this time. Sign up to be notified when it becomes available.” I signed up. Where’s my damned notification, people!?
I remember this one as well. Thought about it just a few months ago, and because that’s the sort of thing I do, I went looking at the time. There’s at least one whole episode on Youtube. There are other clips, maybe more episodes. The bad news is, it didn’t age well. “Neil” has a lot of bad Woody Allen in his delivery. The good news is. . .well, Tea.
You can find The Young Indiana Jones on DVD, but those are slightly modified. The original versions were somewhat released on VHS, but only a few. You can’t find the the original bookends with old Indy on the DVDs and I think a few other things have been changed too.
The 1994 movie Backbeat, about the Beatles’ time in Hamburg before they made it big. This was when Pete Best was still their drummer (though we briefly meet Ringo Starr, drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes) and, more to the point, Stu Sutcliffe was still their bassist. The movie focuses mainly on Stu, his friendship with John, his romance with Astrid Kirchherr, and his untimely death. There are no Lennon/McCartney songs in it, only covers of other artists’ songs (as the Beatles did plenty of at the time). It ends with a rousing version of “Twist and Shout” in the Cavern Club.
The cast is top-notch. Stephen Dorff plays Stu, Gary Bakewell plays Paul McCartney, and Ian Hart (best known as Professor Quirrell) is John. Both Hart and Bakewell played John and Paul in other productions–Hart in The Hours and Times, a movie which speculated about John’s vacation with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and Bakewell in the very good TV-movie The Linda McCartney Story.
All in all, it’s an underrated gem. But it’s not available for streaming ANYWHERE. You can get it on an out-of-print DVD. I think the Blu-Ray is in print, though.
