Found Footage Festival: absurd, odd and amusing tapes from the video era

Found Footage Festival: absurd, odd and amusing tapes from the video era

12 March, 2013
by: Emma

Found Footage Festival creators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher select some of their favourite vintage VHS covers for Spoonfed. 

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher began collecting old videotapes in 1991; after stumbling across an amusing training video for McDonalds cleaning staff – entitled Inside and Outside Custodial Duties – in their home state of Wisconsin. Since then, they have been combing thrift stores and garage sales across North America and Europe to amass a collection of as many strange, outrageous and amusingly stupid videos as they can in order to preserve this unique piece of VHS history. These include found classroom films from the ‘60s and ‘70s, a home movie from a drunken spring break trip to Florida in 1985 and the highlights from a 1996 video about how to care for your ferret. 

This month, Pickett, who writes for the satirical newspaper The Onion, and Prueher, a former researcher on The Late Show with David Letterman, will be showing off their latest and greatest VHS finds in London, at the Found Footage Festival. Created especially for audiences in the UK and Ireland, the all new FFF show will feature VHS training videos, home movies, instructional tapes, exercise videos, public access footage, and several corkers the pair dug up in England last year. 

To give us a taste of the sort of comedy gems we can expect at the festival, we asked Pickett and Prueher to select some of their favourite VHS covers for us. Take a look! 

       

We found this one in Ireland last           We know the U.S.A. gets a bad rap
summer and have managed to jig          in Europe but you have to admit,
off some of the stubborn belly fat           we've got some of the best ninja
we gained in Ireland last summer.         phantom heroes in the world!        

      

America is really the land of excess.      We found this in Leeds last year
At a charity shop in Iowa, we found        and the video begs the question:
not one but two copies of this video        is it the tits and arses that are
in which a man and his chimpanzee       famous or the people connected
puppet teach children about Christ,        to the tits and arses? We've
and we bought them both.                     watched the video and we're still
                                                           not sure.

   

Our favorite part of this cover is         Graphic designer to Charlotte
the coyote dressed up as a              Diamond: "What about an orange
middle-aged man. Convincing           drop shadow?" Charlotte Diamond 
costume.                                        (with a mouthful of carrot): "I love it!"

Found Footage Festival is at the Soho Theatre from Wednesday 27th-Saturday 30th March at 9:30pm.

Tickets

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Emma