Childhood Memories: Locked Away

First published here.

Everyone has at least one story they remember from their childhood, maybe from a picture or comic book, a television series or a movie. In later life we look back fondly on those stories, thinking "Wow! I remember that!" as we see them sitting on the shelves of a bookshop or a video store or increasingly online, where we suddenly find there are thousands of other people who remember those stories and who congregate in message boards or newsites dedicated solely to keeping them alive.

My little ball of childhood glee is Wind In The Willows, made by the legendary British studio Cosgrove Hall.

Continuing on from their 1983 movie of Kenneth Grahame's classic childrens book, Cosgrove Hall developed Wind In The Willows into a highly successful and award winning stop motion series (stop motion animation? Think Wallace & Gromit). In fact they made, five 13-episode series out of it, plus another full length movie. Cosgrove Hall managed to do the seemingly impossible: take a much loved classic and do a screen version that was faithful to the book. It won awards. It was lauded in the press. Princess Margaret turned up for the premiere.

I remember my mother liking it too because it was one of the few shows on television that was guaranteed to contain absolutely no swearing, violence, dangerous stunts or anything else that might influence a young mind for the worse.

She (illegally) made compilation tapes of the series as they aired on TV and I'd watch them over and over again. Over the years, those old VHS tapes degraded or were accidentally taped over and now I only have four and a half barely watchable episodes out of the sixty five that were made.

Now, after more than 20 years, thousands of production hours and millions of happy children, you'd think you'd be able to buy Wind In The Willows on DVD, wouldn't you?

Well, you can't. The original movie was released in 2004 by A&E Home Video. Series 1 was only released on DVD less than a year ago. Series 2 made it a few months later. A&E plan on releasing the second movie in a few weeks time but, get this, don't really feel like releasing series 3, 4 or 5. Oh, and any/all DVDs released will be Region 1 encoded, with no plans to even distribute them outside of North America and Canada.

This is why I hate media producers with a passion. To a Wind In The Willows fan like myself, this is akin to only releasing the first two Lord of the Rings movies on DVD, or George Lucas deciding that he's not going to release The Empire Strikes Back in a Collector's Edition Star Wars boxed set. Over the years various companies have taken Wind In The Willows and done the usual release-three-random-episodes-and-forget-about-it routine, but this is the first time anyone has released entire seasons at a time. Now they don't think the "demand" will remain steady.

Well, considering the fact you can convert anything from analogue to digital with less than $500 worth of equipment and software, what is the damned problem here? Hell, give the master tapes to me and I'll do it for free. If you can't be bothered making pretty packaging and sending out stock to hundreds of shops, why not make an .iso file and release the content via BitTorrent? I gather there are a number of torrent sites around who'd just love to distribute legal content, even if few people in the media business actually care about it.

Content producers are so blasé about their damned important intellectual property it never fails to astound me.

Take the BBC as a prime example.

During the 60s and 70s they managed to wipe thousands of programmes by taping over them. Tape was expensive and, well, nobody really wanted to watch this stuff again, did they?

To this day, there are huge holes in the BBC archives where episodes Dr Who, Z-Cars and Dad's Army should be, but aren't because nobody could be bothered storing them. Well guess what? People do want to watch this stuff again.

People buy boxed sets of TV shows. People buy boxed sets of old TV shows. People dedicate hours and hours of their free time trying to track down missing episodes of progammes like The Goon Show in some strange kind of modern day media treasure hunt.

We don't need great catastrophies like nuclear war or global warming to destroy our culture. All we need to do is let the media companies store it for us and everything will be gone in a few decades.