Pocahontas 1995 Greek Audio
Calvin Beauchamps
Visuals: The 1986 Walt Disney Home Video logo is seen animating as normal, but as the logo is almost completed, it shifts down largely as one of the below clip-ons fades in above the logo before it shines:
Audio: Same as the 1986 Walt Disney Home Video logo jingle, but the music is often high pitched, due to it being converted in the PAL format. Sometimes the music is shortened and/or in the NTSC format.
Availability: Seen mostly on British and Irish Disney VHS tapes available for sale and rental from the time. The two variants, though, were seen on some tapes from the same era. This also appears on non-Disney tapes, such as the rental release of Sister Act.
Audio Variant: The third variant features a male announcer saying, "Now you can own these great hits from Touchstone Home Video!" before the audio segues into the first trailer, or there isn't any music at all.
Visuals: On a black background, we see the image of Sorcerer Mickey, and the red Walt Disney Home Video logo next to him. The words "ALSO AVAILABLE FROM" appear above the Disney logo. The titles that scroll from right to left is shown below the logo:
Availability: Supposedly can be found on UK and Irish VHS releases from the era, though the "ALSO AVAILABLE FROM" green text variant has been spotted on the 1993 UK and Irish retail VHS releases of The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Availability: An extremely rare oddity. The only tape to have the "Coming Soon" variant is the retail release of Aladdin and the "Now Showing" variant is on the retail release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Visuals: On a black background with bright rays in the middle of the screen, the words "COMING SOON", "NOW AVAILABLE" or "FEATURE PRESENTATION" zoom out and two white lines appear above and below it. After a few seconds, a flash appears and brightens the whole screen, before cutting to black.
Availability: Appears on some Australian and New Zealand VHS releases of the time, such as the first two Toy Story films and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These bumpers are commonly associated with the previous bumper.
Visuals: We see Mickey putting on the sorcerer hat (from Fantasia) on a TV screen. The scene then cuts to a young boy and girl enjoying the film, then to a shot of them looking at the television with the 1995 Disney Videos logo playing on the screen, as the screen zooms in slowly.
Visuals: On a black background, we see a small Philosopher Mickey on the bottom right, and a spark flies out of his hand. The spark reveals yellow text, which Mickey looks up at. Some of these clip-ons include:
Availability: Appears on Dutch, Belgian and Swiss Buena Vista VHS tapes. In the following variants that opens with the trailers from the original Belgian VHS release, including the animated versions of the clip-ons, in DVD quality.
Visuals: A black background flashes to a black-pink-black gradient background. In front of the background, the following clip-on text in English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish or Icelandic zooms and jumps in towards the viewer:
Availability: Seen on Russian Disney VHS releases. Strangely, this also appears on Russian VHS tapes of Sony Pictures films, which is because Videoservice distributed titles from both companies during this period.
Availability: Seen on Greek Disney VHS releases from the 2000s, which were distributed by Audio Visual Enterprises. This was found on a Greek VHS release of Around the World with Timon & Pumbaa.
Later Variant: On post-2001 tapes, the background is a different purple gradient of Mickey Mouse logos, and the Disney Videos logo is placed on the lower-left corner (except on the "PROXIMAMENTE EN CINE" clip-on, where no logo is shown).
Visuals: We start out with a flash that reveals a theater, and the camera flies down the aisle. We then see a view of the curtains opening from below. The next shots focus on the projection booth flashing a blue light to the screen. Finally, we see the curtains opening up.
Visuals: On a starry background, we see the 2001-08 Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo in prone. Just as the logo zooms back a little further, one of the following clip-ons fades in fast and shines:
Technique: Most clip-ons are digital graphics with fading effects. Others use 2D computer effects superimposed onto archived footage, which uses traditional animation from Walt Disney Animation Studios.
I would hope it goes without saying that I consider myself deeply indebted to translators, without whom I would never have gotten the chance to read many of the books I now consider among my personal favourites. That being said, I am at best, an admirer of translation but not in any position to be speaking on the subject with academic authority. In these circumstances, I find in best to draw from the words of the professionals. This is Woods speaking with Kathryn Toolan in an interview for Dalkey Archive on his experience of translating Schmidt:
"Think. Don't be content with belief: go further. Once more through the circles of knowledge, friends ! And foes. Don't interpret: learn and describe. Don't futurize: be. And die without ambitions: At best full of curiosity. Eternity is not ours."
This ending with the death of the dissenting narrator and the conclusion of the story by the dominant class could be mapped onto what Schmidt was witnessing under Nazism. The erasure of submissive perspectives under the growing metastasis of a totalitarian regime.
This is where I see Schmidt and Eco in conversation with one another. Eco wrote his 14 tenets in response to a return to a troubling series of political movements in his country, while Schmidt was quite literally drafted into the movement in his. These two could only use their writing as a means to combat the regressive backstep into the errors of history. What better place than the theatre of the past to let these ideas let loose?
I give Wallace a hard time on this show but I do admire him for a number of things, not least of all his perspectives on loneliness. In 2003 he sat for an interview with the German TV station ZDF where he talked about the inherent loneliness involved with reading.
What\u2019s this? Two episodes back to back, without a four-month delay between them? Unheard of! Who\u2019s to say what spurred on this sudden industriousness in my YouTube output. Maybe my meds have finally kicked in, maybe the coffee is just that good. Or maybe it\u2019s the fact that my obsessive-compulsive personality has found a new literary fixation toward which I\u2019ve directed way too much of my attentional bandwidth. I\u2019d like to think my loss of sleep will also benefit your reading. Don\u2019t mistake this project as a strictly altruistic venture though. I live for the dopamine hits that come in the way of likes, comments, and shares \u2013 I\u2019m a millennial, it\u2019s in my bloodstream.
Oh yes \u2013 Welcome to W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List Episode Eight (Nine if you count my Schmidt Intro, but let\u2019s be real, the numbering is fairly arbitrary, isn\u2019t it?). As always, I\u2019m your host Seth, and today I\u2019m bringing you the first volume of my deep dive into the fiction of the phenomenal German experimentalist, Arno Otto Schmidt.
Before we jump in, let me give you a lay of the land. This series is my attempt to combat the paucity of contemporary online discussion surrounding this author, and to help readers navigate the extremely disorienting world of letters that comprises his fiction. If you\u2019re new to Schmidt and not really sure where to start or what to make of him, I\u2019d encourage you to go back and watch my previous episode \u2013 the Primer \u2013 which was conceived to help contextualize his work for unfamiliar readers. This episode however, is intended to act as a critical supplement to the first volume of his collected early fiction, and would be best suited to those who are reading, have read, or are about to read his Novellas.
Today\u2019s video poses a unique challenge to me in comparison to my usual material I cover. When looking at the fiction market on an international scale, the audience for literature is a fraction of a fraction. The attention economy being what it is \u2013 let\u2019s not turn this into a techno-social polemic if we can help it \u2013 reading as a pastime has been decimated in recent decades. Of those who continue to do so (and we love you for it) you then need to slice that readership down even further when you consider that this isn\u2019t just literary fiction: this is experimental literary fiction\u2026 in translation\u2026 that\u2019s out of print (At least for now \u2013 I addressed that in the last video.) Compound that further with the fact that we\u2019re not even talking what people would consider a \u201Cmajor work\u201D here. These are novellas from the author\u2019s catalogue of early fiction. The kind of thing that well-established Schmidt fans would be amenable to, but new readers might not be as attracted to. Not many people choose to start with Sylvia Plath\u2019s WINTER TREES before THE BELL JAR or ARIEL yeah? Same idea here. The COLLECTED NOVELLAS are, to put it reductively, a niche of a niche of a niche. What we have then by default, is a collective of readers that is vanishingly small. But I want to widen that concentric circle a little bit here with a pitch.
What if I told you that these novellas aren\u2019t minor works; they aren\u2019t scraps left over from dusty notebooks with half-baked ideas from an author still finding his voice. These are fully formed, exquisitely crafted thought-experiments that German literary scholars consider among the best works of fiction from the post-war era. I couldn\u2019t agree more. I don\u2019t recall the last time I encountered a collection of short works that was this accomplished, despite being so early in its author\u2019s career. I urge you to set aside any preconceived notions you have about short stories or novellas and give this first Volume of Schmidt\u2019s work a go. I\u2019m here to try and help you make sense of it.
b1e95dc632