Public Domain Highlights: Meta Video

It's time to take a look at another public domain company.  This time it's Meta Video.  Here is a company that was so cheap it's unthinkable what they did to these cartoons with a little extra effort to ruin them.

Meta started out as Nippon Industries in the 80's.  In 1987, a line of tapes known as Superstar Cartoon Video came out.  These tapes usually only showed about 4 public domain cartoons.  And they are the usual suspects like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Popeye, and The Three Stooges.  The artwork for the VHS covers varied really badly.  Many times there are parts they forgot to color in.  This Bugs Bunny tape forgot to even color Bugs at all.  Sometimes they will refer to official art such as the Harveytoons characters, but again, the colors are all messed up (especially on Baby Huey).

Have a look at one of them.  This Daffy Duck tape shows the cartoons in wrong pitch and incorrect titles (probably to remove all references to the Looney Tunes name and replaced them with Merrie Melodies or no titles at all). https://archive.org/details/20190203165828
But that's not the worst they can do as you will see.

Around 1991, the company either changed hands, renamed, or it was just another company with a similar purpose (I don't it though).  Nonetheless, it is now Meta Video.  Instead of them being Superstar Cartoon Video, it's now All Star Cartoon Video.  The number of tape volumes had been cut, but it's some of the same cartoons.  This is where things start to go bad.  Yes, the quality still varied, but some were ok looking.  However, some of the cartoons (if not most) would end with this:

What is this title card?  Where did it come from, and why was it there?  The why I can't answer.  The what and where I figured out thanks to some help from Cartoon Research.  A Walter Lantz cartoon with Sugarfoot had this background as their opening and closing titles.  This is the end title of this cartoon.  See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2mTRlPiYM

It's just so random as to why they would use that cartoon (which isn't even in the public domain).  But there is another thing this tape did, and that's paste a bug on the corner for an unknown reason with their initials on it.

I was nice enough to circle and point it out to you if you can't see it.  These tapes were very cheap.  You could get them for like a dollar a piece I think.  My cousins when they were kids had 3 of these tapes.  A Felix the Cat one, a Betty Boop one, and a Porky Pig one.  I think one of their relatives gave these tapes to them as a gift.  My aunt was nice enough to let me rummage their VHS collection over the years, and at times let me transfer these tapes to DVD (and now digital).  The one tape specifically is the Porky Pig one,  That is our attention draws now.

 The Porky Pig tape I was able to transfer to digital so that I can show off some of it on Youtube.  The quality on each cartoon, again, varied from print to print, but what you are about to witness is a mess.  The only editing I did was made it so you can see the intros and outros of each cartoon.  Everything else that may seem like an edit on my part....well....it's NOT. ALL the cartoons are time compressed.  Porky Pig's Feat had it bad.  Really really bad.  The original intros were stripped from the cartoons except for Porky Pig's Feat (minus the WB shield).  The "The End" title card can be seen throughout.  And here's the best, you'll love this one, in between each cartoon, you'll see an extra "The End" title card and even music going into the next cartoon  before it sounds like it changes it's mind and goes to another cartoon.  My guess is that they changed the order of these cartoons at the last minute that master tape was made, so they basically did some recording over.

I've guess I've stalled long enough.  Ladies and gentlemen, here is the All Star Cartoon Video starring Porky Pig.....the oddball tape that it is.  Again, the only edit was going from intro to outro, not the speed of the cartoons and the in-between mess.

The company has since folded.  Why am I not surprised?