Over the past couple of years, we've seen more and more openings to French-Canadian Disney VHS releases hit the interwebs...
As I've found, they have their own differences to our releases. Differences outside of the expected ones, such as anti-piracy warning cards and - obviously - the different language...
What's more fascinating is that the early 90s Classics releases differ in many ways from ours, and are also similar...
Let's take a look at the 1992 releases. In 1992, Walt Disney Home Video released four titles to videocassette under the Classics moniker: One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rescuers, and Beauty and the Beast.
In the United States and Canada, the spring 1992 101 Dalmatians release introduced two things: The lilac blue "Feature Presentation" title card and all its associated title cards, and the third variant of the "Sorcerer Mickey" Walt Disney Classics logo.
The early fall release of The Rescuers introduced a variant of the variant that had bass heavy-sounding music. (Some argue it's distorted or muffled, but over the years I've surmised that it's an amped version of the intro music.)
Yet none of the French-Canadian Classics releases from 1992 used these.
All of the 1992 releases open with, unusually, the very first and rarely-used variant of the Classics logo... And it's the off-centered version, no less...
Missing from here is a high-quality upload of The Rescuers French-Canadian VHS opening, but the gradient logo is on there as well, with no previews preceding it as well.
The Great Mouse Detective, for whatever reason, uses the older French-Canadian anti-piracy screens and not the then-new green ones. (Corresponding with our releases.)
Even the spring 1993 French-Canadian release of Pinocchio uses the gradient logo.
The Aladdin release from fall 1993 broke things up a bit...
The VHS oddly opens with the 1989 variant of the Classics logo, before a preview of The Fox and the Hound. No Classics release in America had a Fox and the Hound trailer on it, not even our Aladdin release. The trailer is from the film's late 1980s theatrical re-release, and it hasn't been re-adjusted for a 4:3 aspect ratio. A "letterboxed" preview, you could say...
The title card preceding the Fox and the Hound trailer is also interesting. It's inspired by the black-background cards you saw on all the 1992 English-language releases...
... but with a full, shrunken WDHV logo on the bottom, and a completely different font for the other text. Strange, when they used the Laser font for a similar title card that appears at the end of the French-Canadian 101 Dalmatians VHS...
Dalmatians' French-Canadian release doesn't have the editing errors our editions had. While a distribution title card does appear at the end of the movie, there's no WDHV logo music or an announcer. The following title card has an announcer, but no jingle.
Finally, the 1994 release of The Fox and the Hound uses our bass-heavy Classics logo variant. Without a Feature Presentation logo preceding it, the music fade-in is much smoother than it was on all our releases...
Have you ever noticed that?
On all English-language releases containing the bass-heavy variant of the Classics logo, there's always some kind of weird audio edit between the Feature Presentation bumper and this intro...
On the Rescuers VHS, you hear the original Classics jingle fade in for like a split-second. Actually, right as the FP bumper is fading out. Then the bass-heavy version starts abruptly, playing on top of it.
On Beauty and the Beast, this awkward transition is softened a bit. You can hear the regular jingle, faintly.
On Pinocchio, the bass-heavy track takes over the regular one before Sorcerer Mickey even fades in.
On Aladdin, for like a nanosecond you can hear the original jingle, then it cuts off. The bass-heavy one cuts in. This also happens on the Fox and the Hound VHS.
These are things I never quite picked up on before the days of YouTube. Likely because most TVs back then? You probably couldn't detect the edits. On YouTube, since you can meticulously dissect these things for fun? Yeah, you can hear it.
For the first and only time, on the Rox et Rouky VHS, the logo fades in nicely. Because it fades in so nicely, I decided to check the other releases, because they never sounded like that. And sure enough, the edits were a little clunky! I detected this when I was making my made-up VHS openings a year ago.
It's crazy cause on my Mini Classics VHS of The Reluctant Dragon like just as the 1986 WDHV logo fades you can faintly hear the Video Dealer Announcement. But when viewing the whole tape the sound basically sounds like it was recorded over from a previous release.
ReplyDeleteIt most likely was. There was a 1987 release that included the Video Dealer Announcement bumper before the Walt Disney Home Video logo (the release also had those odd, scary looking warning screens from 1986). On the Mini Classics release, it's replaced by the regular 1984 warning screens (by that time, WDHV went back to using those screens)
DeleteIt's a bit odd how, on the French "Aladdin" VHS release, the 1989 WDC logo is placed BEFORE the previews. Usually for releases containing previews, it's placed after the previews.
ReplyDelete