Look Who's Advertising
The Look Who's Talking video, out April 11, will feature ads for
Look Who's Talking T-shirts and sweatshirts at the beginning and end
of the cassette. When sex, lies and videotape is released on April
25, it too will be preceded by an ad, this one for Premiere magazine.
The two-minute, black-and-white commercial features a young actress
going out for a casting call. Says a spokesman from RCA/Columbia:
''It's very contemporary, very MTV.''
Adventures in Translating
When the Gallup Organization asked Muscovites which Western videos
they've been watching, Rain Man, The Godfather, and Coming to Americawere the three most popular. The survey, commissioned by Stolichnaya
vodka, revealed other movies getting heavy play, but by the time the
titles had been translated into Russian and back to English, they
sounded only vaguely familiar to us: Overridden Horses Have to be
Shot, Haven't They? and Married With Mafia.
Sign for the Beast
Helper's Network, a Fullerton, Calif., group devoted to reviving
Beauty and the Beast, has begun petitioning the show's producer, Witt
Thomas Productions, to release unaired episodes on video. The group
is urging fans to pledge $20 per tape if the company will release the
shows on video and then produue new episodes on a subscription basis.
It will be ''a while'' before they are released on tape, says Republic
Pictures, the show's distributor, because reruns may go into
syndication. As for new episodes: ''It's very unlikely.''
A VCR in Every Spot
By the end of 1989, 96 percent of the homes in Salisbury, Md.
(pop. 17,260) had a VCR, giving it the the highest VCR penetration
rate of all American cities. ''There's not an excessive amount of
wealth here,'' says Dawn West, manager of Eastern Shore Viddo, one of
eight video stores in town, ''but there's not a whole lot else to do
either.'' North Platte, Neb., has the lowest rate, at 51 percent.
Arbitron says VCRs are in almost 7 out of 10 U.S. homes (that's
63,170,100 households), up 11 percent from the year before.
