Your Littlest Gauge

Long before the advent of DVD, and way before the days of VHS and Beta, the very idea of collecting feature films for home viewing was impractical, cumbersome and horribly expensive. Sure, some worthy and enterprising souls collected 35mm and 16mm prints of their favorite movies, but normally these collectors were theater owners or had access to the hardware needed to project these reels. For those of lesser means who still wished to keep at least a small taste of a memorable film experience, alternatives might include recording an audio cassette off the late, late show, commercials carefully edited out (as I had done, many years ago, when local TV used to broadcast movies instead of infomercials in the wee hours), or, for the more adventurous, film favorite scenes directly off the television with a Super 8 camera (which I also tried, although with not much success). Or you can do what most reasonable people did: buy edited highlights of their favorite feature in a 100 to 400 ft Super 8 reel. These would usually run from 7 to 25 minutes, and would sort of synopsize the movie's story in that allotted time. Some were sound, but most were silent. Sketchy intertitles would not only function to show dialogue, but also to completely do away with exposition and provide the merest wisp of context with the previous scene. Thus, the 30 minutes of plot, gags and happenings between two scenes in, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein can be reduced to a simple title: "After escaping Dracula, the boys find themselves in Frankenstein's lair".

These were highlight reels of your favorite movies, pure and simple. Cinema ESPN, if you like. An interesting question to pose, though: who were the editors of these expurgated editions? They were usually the employees of companies such as Castle Films (here's a nice history of Castle Films here), who bought a movie's rights from a studio, chopped them down to size, and then printed them in 8mm or Super 8 reels, often packaged in garishly designed boxes (here's a nice collection of images of these boxes). But these editors, how did they work? Did they study the full feature backwards and forwards in order to find the perfect abridgment? Or did they put in the exciting stuff, with no care at all to any semblance of narrative order? Did they follow a certain aesthetic?

Possibly the closest analogue to these truncated films are trailers, if only in the way a film can be distilled into an impossibly short length. Other than that, these little editions are quite unique, and, aside of a few collectors, pretty much forgotten. If one were so inclined, one could do an interesting study.