Phantasmatapes

Ever since my family got its first VCR in 1985 (later than I would have liked, but at least it was an advanced model) I've been interested in preserving TV broadcasts for the future. Having once wanted to work for a TV station, the medium now is far worse (programming and presentation-wise) than I ever could have imagined, and I'm glad that I decided to work in a different industry, but this makes complete off-air recordings all the more important to show what it used to be. Many VCR users would edit out commercials or anything else that wasn't part of the movie or show they wanted to keep, but I always left these in, as I figured rightfully so that the main material might be available later in a better format, but the tapes would still be worth saving, mainly for the commercials.

In recent years, I've found that others have shared similar sentiments. Bleeding Skull has put together this "Mixtape," which was intended mainly to be shown to a theatrical audience that might spend more time heckling the material than seriously watching it, and has released it on Blu-Ray for those of us who don't have venues daring enough to show something like this. It's meant to be a quick representation of all-night movies that used to be common on the few TV stations that stayed on the air 24 hours a day (nowadays all stations do, but the late-night hours are filled mainly with "paid programming," 30-minute commercials for dubious products but apparently stations make more money showing these than selling ad time during old movies). This would normally be a four-hour slot, but runs only 72 minutes, with the movies significantly cut down to run shorter, and some music and effects have been added to them.

The show starts out like a timer-recorded tape- a few low-budget local commercials for East Coast businesses are seen (one showing a date of 1987), a WOR station ID, and then our first movie The Revenge of Dr. X. Made sometime in the mid to late 1960s and seen under a number of different titles, this is your usual mad scientist story. "Dr. X" is really Dr. Bragan (James Craig), who takes a trip to Japan to study a new form of plant life. The plant soon grows into a human-like creature, obviously played by someone in a costume, which, of course, wants to eat and destroy everything. In addition to being heavily edited for time, a 1980s-style synth score by Taken by Savages is added along with a few video effects intended to simulate bad VHF TV reception (the quality of the master, included separately in its entirety, is already pretty bad).

There is one commercial break during this movie as well as something that might be worth the purchase price of this disc to some- a recording of the infamous "Max Headroom Incident" of 1987 in Chicago breaks into the movie as it did during an episode of "Doctor Who" on WTTW. A prankster was able to override the feed to the station's transmitter with their own video, featuring someone wearing a Max Headroom mask, and while there was extensive publicity and investigation afterwards, the perpetrator has never been found. Since "Doctor Who" had a large fanbase and also aired late at night, it was recorded by a decent number of people and has since appeared online in varying degrees of quality. I'm not sure of the source used here but it's decent enough, although still likely not of the quality I could have provided had I been in Chicago and recorded it myself.

After a commercial break, our second movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, is presented. This has appeared on a number of public-domain DVDs in the past, and the title is overly dramatic. It's another mad scientist story starring Jason Evers as Dr. Bill Cortner, who has saved a few lives by being willing to try new things. Tragedy strikes when he takes a car ride with his fiancée, Jan (Virginia Leith), and crashes. The doctor escapes unharmed, but Jan's head is severed- he grabs her head and takes it to a secluded house where he's been experimenting. He's able to keep the head alive for a few days, although when Jan comes back to consciousness, she immediately just wants to be put out of her misery. The doctor plans to find a new body to attach the head to and visit a "gentlemen's club" for candidates. Like the previous movie, this is cut down for time, and a synth score is added. This time, the video effects consist mainly of close-up shots of the movie playing on a CRT screen.

As someone who has dug through countless discarded blank tapes in search of old commercials and ephemera (I still have several boxes that I haven't even had time to check), I have to give Phantasmatapes a decent grade for effort, even if it doesn't quite match some of the best actual off-air tapes I've found. They seem to want to present a viewing of overnight TV in a shorter time period, with a bit of their own riffing in the form of added music and effects. I don't know what their criteria were for the commercials that were included; most of them are at least a bit amusing. Standouts include one for a video rental store and another for a computer software retailer. Including the complete "Max Headroom Incident" was a nice touch as well, given its history and how it fit in rather well, though it'll likely confuse anyone who hasn't heard of it.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-Ray
Phantasmatapes arrives on Blu-Ray in a clear case, with the front cover reproducing a promotional ad in a newspaper's TV listings. Of course, this kind of thing wasn't really promoted much at all, only found by those like me who took the time to look through all the listings for stuff to set the VCR timer for. There is no insert, but the back of the cover shows an abstract close-up of a video screen. The Blu-Ray's main menu is shown over a silent collage of clips from the program.

This isn't the first time that High-Def Digest has received a Blu-Ray that really doesn't seem to be intended for the site's target audience- if you're reading this, I assume you're mainly looking for discs that will truly show off your awesome A/V setup, and this is the exact opposite of that. All of the content here is taken from standard-def analog tape, consumer-level VHS, and Beta at that. While I've always strived to watch movies in the highest possible quality (getting into laserdisc in 1993 and basically swearing off VHS after that), I've never gotten rid of equipment or media either. I have practically every video format, from the past to the present, connected to my home theater system, and none of it looks any worse than it did on the CRTs of yesteryear. Meanwhile, there are plenty of others who "no longer have" their VCRs at all and might find watching them on modern displays a bit ridiculous- but this Blu-Ray disc will give you a good idea of what you're missing. I'd even dare to say most of the source material used here is worse than the average studio-released tape or even a really good off-air recording.

Phantasmatapes doesn't seem to use the very best recordings or digitization methods (the brightness and contrast on some of the commercials look a bit dark, for example), but at least they've mostly gotten the 60fps frame rate right, which I've seen severely botched on other releases. Videotaped commercials look like live TV just as they should, not with jerky motion seen in bad encodes and the average YouTube upload. The movies were sourced from commercial VHS releases. The Revenge of Dr. X was put out by a small label and looks particularly bad, but given how bad this movie is, the picture quality is just another thing to laugh at.

The only real advantage of this being on Blu-Ray rather than standard DVD is that all of the material likely would not have fit on one side. Still, as I've been quite frustrated with some recent material from major labels being made available only on standard DVD, this release shows that ANYTHING can be issued on Blu-Ray without being cost-prohibitive.

You definitely shouldn't expect great sound quality from this release, though it is encoded in 2-channel DTS-HD Master Audio. Since the broadcast is supposed to be from at least circa 1987, I'd say the sound quality here is worse than what I was taping off the air then; the commercials and such sound like they were recorded on linear mono VCRs. Hi-Fi stereo had been out and we had two such machines by then, and most TV stations were broadcasting in stereo as well. The added synth score is recorded in mono; doing that in stereo might have made it stand out a little too much from the original movies. There are a few instances where they try to copy the noise made on Hi-Fi VHS tapes when the tracking is bad or the tape is damaged, but this is also in mono.

The "Mixtape" wouldn't sell too many discs on its own, but the extras, including the unedited versions of the two movies, make it a bit more worthy:

• Commentary by Bleeding Skull's Annie Choi and Joseph A. Ziemba runs through the mixtape, giving viewers a better idea of what they were going for here. They felt the material here was worth showing to people for a laugh, but felt none of it held up on its own, so presenting it in this form allowed them to show the most unintentionally funny bits of the movies without letting them drag on, and also let them throw in their favorite commercials.

• The Brain That Wouldn't Die Uncut VHS preservation (82 minutes) presents the film in its complete form. The commentary mentions that the 1980s Rhino VHS release was used for this; the quality is adequate.

• The Revenge of Dr. X Uncut VHS preservation (94 minutes) is supposedly the most complete copy of this movie available, but it's still quite flawed. It's taken from a release by the short-lived Regal Video label, with its intro included. The opening credits are video-generated, and the video transfer is rather poo,r with color levels a bit too high and an overall fuzzier picture than you'd find on a better-quality VHS release. Audio is also played from the linear track in mono (most Hi-Fi machines only play the older linear tracks in mono, but I've sought out some of the few that can play it in stereo and digitize all tapes that way, with tapes like this retaining the tape hiss in brilliant stereo.)

• Short: The Max Headroom Pirate Incidents (7 minutes) isn't really a straightforward explanation of what happened, but rather a mash-up of news reports on the story. The quality is quite poor, with a low frame rate, possibly grabbed from YouTube uploads; whoever edited this seemed very amused by newscasters repeating "Max Headroom!" There are a few extensive YouTube videos on this incident, should you want to know more.

• Short: A Ghost (2 minutes). This is a quick series taken from Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons, where a character realizes that Casper is a ghost, freezes, shouts "A ghost!", then runs away, often with comical effects such as their faces splitting. I haven't watched these cartoons in large quantities, but apparently, this seems to happen in most of them.

• Short: I Want My D&D (8 minutes) doesn't really fit with the rest of the stuff here, but it's a few news clips from the early 1980s about the Dungeons & Dragons game being popular with kids, and about some parents' concerns that it might promote Satanism.

I have to give Phantasmatapes some credit for trying out this concept, even if it isn't quite how I would have done it personally. It's amusing to see them re-create a late-night airing of bad movies, but I would've rather just seen an authentic recording of that type presented as it originally aired. (With recordings of movies in particular, the commercials are far more entertaining now than the movies themselves, most of which can now be obtained in better quality.) The initial price of this release is a bit high for what it is, but I'd gladly pay that for something more authentic- in fact, in the past I've overpaid for old blank tapes just for what was on them. Since I don't believe in cutting movies, I appreciated that they included them as extras in uncut form, but perhaps they could have sourced film prints for HD transfers rather than the poor VHS sources used here. This, however, presents another twisted idea: perhaps someone could take more recent movies and re-create late-night TV airings of them, with commercial breaks and intentionally degraded transfers?

You definitely won't get any reference-level picture or sound quality here, but if you've never connected a VCR to your system, this might give you an idea of how it might look (though again, most of my results have looked and sounded better). This is Worth a Look for those who appreciate finding decades-old off-air recordings of late-night movies, even if it isn't quite the real thing. 

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