Rankin and Bass Return of the King shows up in dollar DVD rack:

The 1980 made for television animation makes its untitled debut at the 99 Cent Only store with very little in the way of studio identification surviving at either end of the film. There is no listing of Rankin and Bass anywhere on the film or packaging.

It leaves me to wonder about the state of the copyright of this work. It shouldn`t be in public domain since it was created a good 2 years after the new copyright laws came into effect and the creaters are still with us.

If this new cheapo version was produced under license then why were the titles and credits cropped so shamelessly? Was it a matter of disk space?

If it was disk space then why wasn`t the names of the creators placed on the packaging? That doesn`t take disk memory space.

Is it some strange fallout of the Peter Jackson film? Or the cock up with the original Tolkien book copyright lasping in the U.S. with too many books being imported that lead to that green box on the back of the original books stating that this book and no other is the only authorized publication?

Anybody with info on this mystery would be helpful.

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Comment from my good friend and sometimes video editor Eric Graf:

Hi, Larry.

What mystery? It's a fly-by-night company that has decided it needn't concern itself with copyrights. As with their unauthorized compilations of small-studio theatrical shorts and student films,they are doing it because they figure they can get away with it. They've also released "The Hobbit", as well as several other films that are way too recent, particularly anime owned by Central Park Media.

Regarding the cropped credits -- It certainly wasn't disc space. DVD playing time is entirely dependent on the bitrate of the encoding. You can get 6 hours or more on a single-layer disc if you REALLY don't care about the quality. Single-layer dollar DVDs with two full-length movies on them are quite common. The credits were lobbed off so they can tell the judge "Gee, we had nooooo idea."

I've decided to avoid East-West. They're obviously flaunting copyright laws, every title I've ever obtained from them I've been able to find in better quality elsewhere, and the kicker was that one shorts compilation where they created "widescreen" for the entire disc by covering up a third of the original 4x3 picture with black bars. 'Twas lovely seeing "Crac!" butchered that way. (And I used
to own the RCA SelectaVision disc they were using as their source on that one. They didn't even bother changing the order of the films.)

AFAIK, the only Rankin-Bass production that really is in public domain is "Jack Frost." There is an authorized release of Return of the King, BTW: http://www.amazon.com/Return-King-Orson-Bean/dp/B00005MP5D/
I'm sure Warner Bros. will be thrilled when they find out about East-West's version. Maybe we should send them a copy.

Eric