VHS Opening: Matilda (1997, Columbia TriStar, British) · 1:01am Nov 21st, 2016
Danny DeVito's fascinating 1996 effort is about a young genius named Matilda, who uses telekinesis to deal with her parents, who do not value education, and the confrontation she and her teacher Miss Honey have with Agatha Trunchbull, the oppressive principal of Crunchem Hall Elementary School. The film was a huge hit outside the United States and was highly appraised worldwide. DeVito got his big break via the TV series Taxi and began his career as a filmmaker with The War of The Roses. Interestingly enough, DeVito managed to cast himself and his wife Rhea Perlman in the roles of Matilda's parents in the film.
You are about to witness two different openings to the UK VHS of this. And by that we mean DRASTICALLY different openings.
The sell-through version opens with the CTHV logo and warning screen plus the now-internationally-famous "Beware of Illegal Video Cassettes" screen. Trailers are for Men In Black (
), Fly Away Home, and The Swan Princess and The Secret of the Castle. Then it has Closed Captions info and the 1993 TriStar logo.
Following the first three items as seen on the sell-through tape is a bumper explaining its PG rating (the same rating it got in the US, actually) and an anti-piracy promo; this one (which takes place in a low-rent marketplace) was on many a UK tape from around 1996 until around late 2002. Has previews for Fly Away Home, The Baby-Sitters Club, Magic in the Water, and Michael. And that's not all! In the UK, rental tapes typically followed a practice known as cross-trailering, or, in my eyes, promoting the competition. This has trailers for the 20th Century-Fox film That Thing You Do! and the Walt Disney Pictures film D3: The Mighty Ducks. Commercials also tended to be the norm for rental tapes in England; this has ads for a board game called Let's Buy Hollywood, a food product known as Little Chef (which I have never heard of before) and Cheerios, strangely from Nestle (I assume General Mills didn't exist in England back then.)
