What was the longest wait between a movie’s release and its home video debut?
These days, a movie not having a physical release isn’t much of a problem, because all you have to do is find it online, legally or otherwise, but what about those heady days without Netflix, or even the days before movies were regularly shown on TV?
You probably couldn’t rewatch movies very often back then, and if you missed them the first time around at the cinema, then you might have been out of luck for a long time. Then the glorious invention of the VHS came about in the 1970s, resulting in a newfound way to access movies at home, although it of course took a while for films to make their way onto physical tapes, and who knew how well this new medium was going to take off.
VHS ended up being the dominant mode of home movie-watching for around two decades, but by the 2000s, they were swiftly overtaken by DVDs, although not before LaserDiscs tried (and failed) to compete, as they were simply just too big. VHS tapes might have been pretty large, too, but renting became the most popular and affordable way of using them, with Blockbuster first emerging in 1985.
Video rental shops were pretty revolutionary, allowing audiences to discover titles they might not have otherwise seen, or perhaps rediscover beloved classics for the first time in years, but there was sometimes a bit of a wait, not just because the title you wanted might have already been taken out for rental, rather because some movies took ages to actually make it onto home video.
The longest wait for a home video debut…
Released in 1940, Disney’s Fantasia saw various magical animations set to classical pieces by Leopold Stokowski, and while it remained an acclaimed piece of filmmaking for many years, many audiences had no way of seeing it. It was shown sporadically in cinemas over the coming decades, capitalising on the psychedelic era of the late ‘60s by advertising its brightly-coloured animations and unique audio-visual experience.
But if you couldn’t catch it at the cinema, how could you watch it? Despite VHS blowing up in the ‘80s, Fantasia wasn’t released on home video until 1991, meaning there was a 51-year gap between its theatrical release and its availability to watch it on the couch, but when it finally hit the market, people loved it, so much that Disney decided to make a sequel, Fantasia 2000, which wouldn’t fully emerge until 1999.
Fantasia was released on several formats, including Betamax and LaserDisc, as well as VHS, coinciding with the boom in popularity experienced by Disney during the decade; whether it was new releases like Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas or re-releases like Fantasia, which was evidently worth the five-decade-long wait, as people went crazy for the animated studio.
Disney actually made a few changes to the film when they re-released it, editing out the problematic parts, including the character of Sunflower, a Black female centaur who is depicted as a servant to another white female centaur. Clearly, with 50 years of time between the initial release and its home video circulation, Disney had enough time to edit out their past mistakes.
