Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Ugly PD cartoon video covers in the UK

Many of you guys would have seen quite a lot of American Public Domain cartoon covers, and like me, you view most of them are pretty darn ugly. But over here in the UK, we do seem to get our share of ugly PD covers too. In this post, I will show you a selection of what I consider downlight ugly covers. I apologise in advance if some of you become temporarily blind after seeing these.
The first two are covers from a trio of 4-hour cartoon compilation videos released by Braveworld (later released by Polygram/Universial) in the early 90's. Some of you Brits may remember seeing some of the other "artist"'s covers on NTV's and Virgin Vision's own PD videos:



Ugly cartoon artwork has started to creep in on our DVD covers too. Here are two that are released by a German company called Planet Media Entertainment (under the name Planet Song):


Going back to VHS, perhaps the most famous PD cartoon video company here in Blighty was "Screen Originals". Each title had two different covers, one released by both Movie Makers and Diamond Films, and one by an unknown company (probably Screen Originals themseves). The latter had quite tasteful covers, but the MM/DF editions had some fairly awful artwork. Here is one example:
And if you think that one was quite bad, wait till you see the next one. In my view, this is the most scariest cartoon video cover ever (in the UK, at least)! No wonder I never see this title fly off the shelves:

Screen Originals also had the ugliest-looking UK PD video logo ever (no prizes for guessing who that character is supposed to be):


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It looks like someone drew Woody Woodpecker, then handed it over to be coloured in by someone who thought it was supposed to be Daffy Duck.

I don't have those first two (videos? DVDs?) but some of those bad drawings have cropped up on the covers of some of the videos I do have, with the titles "Bugs Bunny and friends" and "Daffy Duck and friends" (with these friends being... who exactly? Their co-stars are usually their enemies...)