A Tale of Bizarre Home-Video Bedmates!

I’m always asked, “Where do you find all the cool colored tapes you use?” If you’re one of the many people who have asked me this over the years, you’re probably aware that this is a question that I very rarely answer. I don’t answer it for a lot of reasons... the main one being that the answer is long, complicated, and constantly changing. I will say that I don’t make them or paint them. I did try dying them once, but that’s a story for another time.No, I scan the pages of eBay and Etsy, make weekly trips to every thrift store around, and spend my Saturdays hopping from one yard-sale to another to find colorful tapes that I can repurpose the shells, flaps, and spools from.
Now, do I pretty much know every single color of tape, which tapes came in those colors, and the best places to find them?Of course! I’ve been tracking down colored tapes for long enough just to have a mental library of them; however, if I told everyone who asked where to find them... I would only be making finding them harder on myself.
That being said... I’m about to do just that for some of the hardest-to-find colored shells that I currently use. But, since this is going to be a lesson in the history of VHS... let’s start at the very beginning....

If you’re a kid from the 80s or 90s, I’m sure you remember the various adaptations of the pull-string helicopter toys.Honestly, they were just the worst concept for a toy ever imagined. The toy itself has one thing that it does... pull the string, and watch chaos ensue. I mean, if you were a kidwho was unfortunate enough to be gifted one of these things by a long-distance relative that you only saw once or twice a year, chances are that your parents took this accident waiting to happen away before you ever got it out of the packaging. If you ever ripped that cord and released hell indoors, you were just asking for something to get broken. And not just a random household item... No, this thing went for the items placed up on high shelves! This thing went after the family heirlooms, fancy dish-ware, and framed wall hangings.
Now, if you took one of these god-awful toys outside to play, well... you probably lost it to a tree, gutter spout, or a neighbor’s rooftop seconds after beginning to play with it.
But... that’s just the thing... these toys just weren’t fun to play with!Pull-string...anything... is just a terrible toy. It has a “wow” factor the first time you’re exposed to one that works similar to how seeing a magic trick for the first time works. You see someone playing with one of these things in a mall or flea market and immediately want to A) see how this thing works, and B) try it once for yourself. That’s it! Never once does it cross into your imaginative world of play, leaving you wondering how you can incorporate it into the world of your action figures or what types of storylines you could develop for the toy itself.

Sky Dancers, at least as my memory serves, was the first branded and marketed toy line, not just featuring... but entirely consisting of these awful pull-string flying toys.They were the creation of the toy company, Galoob™, and released in 1994, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. They would also later release a similar toy line aimed towards boys marketed as Dragon Flyz.
Now, it is important to note that while Sky Dancers and Dragon Flyz were some of the worst toys ever made... Galoob™, overall as a toy company, did bring us some of the coolest products of the 90s!
See, without Galoob™, we would never have had such greatness as Micro-Machines, Treasure Trolls, and oh... I dunno... the Game Genie!!!
Galoob™ also brought us toy lines from such franchises as: Aliens, the A-Team, Babylon 5, Biker Mice from Mars, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Mutant League, Married with Children, Spice Girls, Starship Troopers, and the WCW.
Oh… and if you’ve ever seen that vintage-looking stuffed monkey with the cymbals... the one that usually marks a trap in the Fallout games... well, that was Galoob’s first-ever toy back in the 1960s.

Now that we’ve covered shitty pull-string toys and Galoob™, it’s time we got around to the point of this whole post.
That’s right, the point that has absolutely nothing to do with anything I’ve mentioned thus far. You see, Galoob™, just like every toymaker of the 80s and 90s, decided to use an animated series to market their Sky Dancers toy line
If you’re too young to remember, in the early 1980s, Regan became president and one of the very first things he did in office was to use an executive order to scrap a law prohibiting companies from marketing directly to children. Once this law was no longer holding back companies from marketing to children, Mattel shot for the stars and didn’t just produce commercials geared towards kids.. no, they created entire animated series for no other purpose than to sell toys to children. Masters of the Universe was the first major toy line to get a series and within two years was bringing in record-setting sales numbers for Mattel and it didn’t take long for every toy company to follow suit. If you remember any kid's animated series from the '80s or '90s, odds are that you remember them being poorly thought out, oversaturated with characters, weapons, and vehicles, and in most cases... only lasting a single season. Well, the reason is that they were never intended to be a compelling series to begin with. Running single-season series would allow toy manufacturers to develop new series within the same franchise every year or two to show off some new toy line variation.Most of these animated series would be completely developed, animated, and produced by a third party not at all linked to the manufacturer. This was an entire industry all to itself complete with a rich and interesting history. For example, if it wasn’t for Hasbro deciding to go with an up-and-coming Marvel to be in charge of the series for their new Transformers line, everyone would have been playing with Go-Bots in the ‘90s!

When it came to Sky Dancers, Galoob went with Gaumont Multimedia, who had just that year added an animation studio to their film production company. If you’ve never heard of Gaumont, it’s probably because they are a French company and are most well known for their French and/or UK films and series; however, they were the studio behind the Netflix animated series, F stands for Family. That’s the only well-known example of them in the US market that I could find.As for the Sky Dancers series itself? Well, it’s a series built around. essentially, human helicopters!? Yeah, it’s probably one of the worst series ever made in my opinion. But again... this isn’t about Gaumont Multimedia either... This whole, long-winded ass article has been about the distributor of the Sky Dancers animated series. ...and, more specifically, the VHS distribution of the Sky Dancers animated series.
…And that distributor was none other than Razz-Ma-Tazz Entertainment, a subsidiary of Cabin Fever Home Entertainment.

The Sky Dancers animated series only aired on French TV channel France 2 for a single season comprised of 26 episodes.The series was pretty terrible and I can’t imagine any kids wanting to know the lore behind their cheap pull-string flying toy... however, a lot was working against the series as well.
In September of 1997, under the Clinton presidency, the FCC ordered all commercial TV stations must air at least three hours of core educational programming per week. The need for stations to acquire and make airtime for educational kids shows took funding and space away from “non-educational” kids series, more commonly just designed as toy ads.
This, along with the The actual toy line not doing well, and the generic crap-fest of a series all came together to bring a quick death to the Sky Dancers on broadcast TV; however, their time on VHS was just beginning!
So… in steps Razz-Ma-Tazz Entertainment to take over the US home-video distribution of the Sky Dancers series.!Razz-Ma-Tazz did a nice job as far as the marketing and distribution of the series went. The VHS tapes were released with three episodes each and the different types, or “volumes,” were distinguished by their unique color.

Such volumes were: Rose, Yellow, Blue, Pink, and Mint to name a few. The tapes not only came in a variety of colors never before seen in the VHS world, but they used the colors of their tapes as a form of branding for the series. In fact, when it comes down to history… it’s really a toss-up between Sky Dancers and Barney as to who had the idea of color branding their VHS tapes first.
The Sky Dancer tapes also all came with random Sky Dancers-related trinkets including: keychains, jewelry, and hair accessories in each package. However, the most innovative marketing Razz-Ma-Tazz pulled off with their Sky Dancers series releases was to have them sold in the toy department of stores alongside the Sky Dancers toys. By doing so, the brightly colored VHS tapes, complete with bonus toy, were displayed right in front of kid’s faces!
Still…, despite their creative marketing for the tapes... the series itself just didn’t seem to resonate with kids and thus was bound for failure. The full series was never even finished on home-video before being pulled. There was a reboot of the Sky Dancers toy line in 2005 and with the reboot, DVD releases of the series were produced... Still, even after a reboot on digital, the series managed to drop off and die before ever finishing a full home video release. Ultimately, I would have to imagine that the latter episodes are just chalked up to lost media these days.

Now, like every other company I’ve mentioned here, you may very well have never heard of Cabin Fever or Razz-Ma-Tazz, and there’s good reason for that...
See, Cabin Fever Entertainment, Inc. was purchased in 1998 by Hallmark Home Entertainment and predominately used for their TV movies from that point on.
Razz-Ma-Tazz was Cabin Fever’s subsidiary created to release all of their children’s content; however, it was only created two years before the entire company changed hands over to Hallmark who would immediately scrap the subsidiary.
That being the case, there was never really much released under the Razz-Ma-Tazz Entertainment moniker. For the most part, they put out a re-release of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre, Ms. Bear, PappyLand, and the Sky Dancers series.It’s the pure lack of, not only quality content, but any content at all that makes me wonder why Cabin Fever felt the need to have a specific kids line of distribution.I mean, Cabin Fever, itself, barely had any content as a parent company with re-releases of Lonesome Dove being their biggest title. So, with so little content... why spend the money and time to start a whole subsidiary distribution company!?

Well, to get to the bottom of all this... I guess we need to first look at Cabin Fever Entertainment, Inc.Cabin Fever Ent. was formed in 1987. Initially, Cabin Fever mostly distributed western b-films, live country music performances, rodeo bloopers, NASCAR videos, and random “how-to” types of videos. They would also do low-quality docs on things like planes, space travel, and monster trucks. Not just a small collection of content, but absolutely nothing of any substance either.
It wasn’t until the company purchased Hal Roach Studios in the mid-90s that they would acquire the rights to the Little Rascals tv series, which would prove to be Cabin Fever’s highest-grossing home video releases they would have. 

So, again... I can’t help but wonder as to why a home video distribution company with only a small catalog of old TV series and infotainment videos under their belt, would want to start a subsidiary company solely to release content geared towards kids???
It just seems like spreading an already minimal existence, even thinner. Not to mention, while their library of videos seems pretty damn random... there is a sort of theme to it all. Maybe not a common theme in the content, but I could see there being a lot of crossover in the viewing audience.
So, where do videos for children come into all of this?

How are children somehow a similar target audience to rodeo, NASCAR, and old country music performance audiences?
* (Before the conclusion of this article... I just want to emphasize that a good rule to go by is to never just assume there’s a
conspiracy or some nefarious intent behind things. Especially when factors such as human error, poor training, or ignorance
could very well be the cause. Conspiracies, for the most part, are seldom the case.)

I’ve been talking about how Razz-Ma-Tazz Entertainment is a subsidiary of Cabin Fever Entertainment, Inc.; however, Cabin Fever Entertainment also has a parent company, and its parent company is the UST, Co. (United States Tobacco Co.).

Now, when you hear United States Tobacco Co., you probably think of cigarettes!?
On the contrary, the United States Tobacco Co. is the manufacturer of just about every tobacco product other than cigarettes. All of your major chewing tobacco, snuff, snus, packet, and pouch brands are pretty much owned by these guys. I should also mention that these guys are a mega company!!!
To backtrack into history once more... in the US, until 1911 there was just one enormous tobacco company called the American Tobacco Company and they were richer than god, dominating the entire tobacco market. They were one of those mega-companies that just bought out every single competing company standing in the way of total world dominance. The type of company that ultimately creates a cybernetic cigarette terminator in the future who ends up coming back to modern-day to alter time.... yeah, those types of assholes!I mean, the American Tobacco Company was one of the initial 12 companies making up the NASDAQ!
So, in 1907, the DOJ filed federal anti-trust charges against the American Tobacco Co. and in 1911... the company was officially busted up. Or... well, they became three separate companies that are still the same huge company, but it all looks better on paper.
Ok.. so the previously mentioned United States Tobacco Co. was one of the three companies created when the supreme court busted up the American Tobacco Co.

Now, back to the present day. Or... the mid-90s at least...

CONCLUSION:

Ok, so let’s rethink this whole thing now that we know the parent company at the top of the pyramid is the United States Tobacco Company...Cabin Fever Entertainment only ever distributed Western movies, rodeo videos, country music performances, NASCAR and WCW collectors sets of tapes, how-to videos, and other random generic stuff like that; however, those things, in general, are all target markets for products sold by a smokeless tobacco company!

Could the UST Co. have created a whole home video entertainment branch just to reach target marketing audiences???

Well, while it’s tough to see how this works to their advantage looking back on it; however, I think it’s important to remember that when they started Cabin Fever Entertainment, the home video was just really hitting its stride. VCRs were becoming commonplace in households across America, video rental stores were kings of the modern family’s weekend, “movie night” with microwave popcorn, and the family on the couch was becoming as American as apple pie. I’m saying... as a large company, it would always be wise to at least have a presence in any new form of entertainment.
Just like advertisers on YouTube and during podcasts today... advertising on new media sources could turn out to be worthless, but it’s important to at least have a foot into that marketing door just in case. This could have very well been the case with UST Co. wanting to get a small foothold in the home video door!? Considering the generic crap they were releasing, it wasn’t like they had tons of money in the venture.If that is the case though... if Cabin Fever Entertainment is nothing more than a marketing branch of the UST Co., then what of Razz-Ma-Tazz Entertainment? What about the Sky Dancers??? If Cabin Fever is nothing more than a big tobacco marketing tool, then Razz-Ma-Tazz would have had to have been as well. I guess that would make more sense as to why the company gave up after the laws changed prohibiting advertising straight to kids anymore...

One more possibility as to how this form of marketing could have been effective for the UST Co. though... a lot of the stuff they released under both Cabin Fever and Razz-Ma-Tazz, were the types of videos that could be sold as a subscription to a video club!
In case you’re too young to remember, video and music clubs were huge in the 80s and 90s. You signed up and got the initial video or two for free, then you would get a new video every month along with a subscription fee. A lot of the kid's video clubs would ask for, not only the child’s name, info, likes, and dislikes... but they would even request a photo of the child!
Well, it turns out that a lot of these video clubs were subsidiaries of child modeling agencies that would use the data from the video club to target potential child models and then be able to easily reach out to them. Now, for the times, this type of stuff was pretty normal and I’m not saying it was some child trafficking ring... but goddamn! It’s still creepy as shit!

You know what else I noticed as I put this whole thing together...The logo for Cabin Fever Ent. kind of looks like there’s a lit cigarette making up the chimney for the little cabin. I doubt that’s the case, especially since they were a smokeless tobacco company, but it’s still kind of interesting, right?