Betamax

[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

£399! That was a month's wages back in the day!

[platostotal]

Nice piece of kit, that's the good news, but the bad news is the A/V outputs are going to be a real pain, so the TV will have to have an analogue tuner to tune it into, in the pic below I've put a white square around the aerial socket that would connect to a TV, an old but quality CRT tube TV would be the best bet nowadays (and add a real retro feel to it)



In typical tech fashion Sony fit a non-standard A/V output,

[platostotal]

Originally Posted by The Reaper Man@Cult Labs

£399! That was a month's wages back in the day!

In 1982 my wages working in a electrical shop were around the awe inspiring £190-220 per month so that £700 Sony Betamax could f**k off

And when we got the first Sony CD player in it was priced at £499 in 1983/4, nice, isn't technology great...

[iluvdvds@Cult Labs]

The good news - I got it working! Thank you Plato

The bad news - Oh dear god what have I bought?!

Set it up and quickly looked through the tapes (they look home recorded). Started off nicely with I Spit On Your Grave, Oliver Twist, Barbarella, some TGI episode from the TV and then popped in another tape to see what appeared to be some sort of Lassie movie. Suddenly it cuts to 'Lassie' shagging a woman!

WHAT THE HELL?! We fast forward - hit play - and some woman was wanking of a pig! NOT EXPECTING THAT! Turned it off - so gross!

Tried another tap and some porno film called 'Getting Lucky' played, with a rather catchy theme tune. It even had some swedish subtitles

We're thinking that maybe they were some sort of under-the-counter tapes. Some of the tapes in the box are proper ones (not home recordings) and have one of those rental stickers on 'This tape is the property of VIDEO MANIA) so I'm guessing that they're all from a 'mom and pop' rental store possibly. That would explain I Spit - I can imagine that being an under-the-counter tape after the whole video nasty thing.

Anyone got any thoughts on what they could be? SOOOOO GROSS! Thank godness it wasn't something worse though - although I have a bunch of tapes I havent checked yet :/

[iank]

lol Wow...

[MuckyFunster]

Are they for sale/trade?

[nosferatu42]

When i was young there was a story of a video going around called Animal Farm that supposedly had animal shagging humans etc in it, i never saw it, thankfully. ( i can live without seeing that stuff)
Maybe that's what you've got a copy of ?

[iluvdvds@Cult Labs]

Maybe that is it! On the tape 'Animals' is written on it, so that might be it. I dare not watch to double check

This guy must have been into some weird stuff...

EDIT: A quick search on Cult Labs and online and it looks like you may be right, Nos! It sounds like I have and betamax bootleg of a notorious underground under-the-counter film. I'll need to read up on that some more now.

There's a couple of tapes with labels from video stores - I'm planning on trying to do a little research into those and maybe find out a little more about where these come from.

[Susan Foreman]

There never was a pornographic film entitled 'Animal Farm' - although the title was used as an umbrella title

Sometime during the early 80's, a video (possibly from Denmark) began to appear in underground circles that became known as 'Animal Farm'. It contained a plotless series of extremely graphic scenes of zoophilia, including acts of intercourse and fellatio performed with pigs, horses and even chickens, as well as a scene in which a woman inserts live eels into her vagina. To this day, 'Animal Farm' remains one of the most notorious and controversial videotapes ever to find its way to British shores

The material that constitutes this 'Animal Farm' bootleg was apparently smuggled through British Customs in the Spring of 1981, and it found its way under the counters of various Soho stockists. Eventually it was prosecuted following a series of police raids — but not before countless bootlegs had gone into circulation.

It was discovered that the video actually comprised several short X-rated films from the Danish company Color Climax Corporation, which had been producing a steady stream of extreme pornography (including bestiality and child porn) since the Danish government made all pornography legal in 1969.

To keep up with the growing demand for video titles, Color Climax had taken to transferring their stocks of 8mm and 16mm 'animal films' onto cassette, and it was these films — mostly starring Bodil Joensen — that composed the Animal Farm video, hence its generic title (which at no point appears on the screen) and shadowy origins.

It is possible that some of the material was taken from Alex de Renzy's 1971 cash-in feature Animal Lover, which actually managed a brief cinema run in the liberal atmosphere of San Francisco, and whose entire second half consists of the "distinctively amateurish, shaky, clumsily-shot lurid colour footage" familiar to anyone who has seen Animal Farm.

Animal Lover (1971) - IMDb

Animal Farm (Video 1981) - IMDb

Bodil Joensen - en sommerdag juli 1970 (1970) - IMDb

*NOTE - I have not seen any of the above films, but I used to work with someone who had an unhealthy obsession with porn films. There was also an extremely interesting documentary made by Channel 4 in the mid 2000's, under the series name 'The Darker Side Of Porn', and one episode concerned this film

[MuckyFunster]

Well I've went out with a few pigs in my day