In the last week of 2009 I started buying up some back issues on eBay of Tim Lucas' Video Watchdog magazine, something I've been meaning to do for a while now. After a regular appearance as a column in Fangoria's sister magazine Gorezone, Video Watchdog made its fully fledged publishing debut in June 1990, and has been going strong ever since. The magazine quickly became required reading among fans of fantasy cinema for its trailblazing articles on European horror (
How To Read a Franco Film, Issue #1), rare director's cuts (
Manhunter, Issue #13), missing scenes (
Fire Walk With Me, Issue #16) and alternative versions (
Blade Runner, Issue #20). I managed to pick up a good spread of issues between #4 to #112 (and more to come I hope), but sadly #1, #2, #3 slipped thru my fingers when a rival bidder used eBay's automatic bidding ! What a snake !
Postscript: I chanced upon this post some years after I published it and I did manage to put together a complete run of Video Watchdogs - issues 1,2,and 3 were relatively easy to source - but issue 26 January/February 1995 proved to be the trickiest to find - in the end I grabbed a copy from a record store in Sweden of all places...
I am torn on Tim Lucas - I worked my way through his entire run of Video WatchBlog - and while the man is talented, I tend to like people when they are a little more self deprecating.
ReplyDeleteCraig, I know what you mean, I really do, but I think Lucas has done so much to raise the bar on the standards of home video, that I feel he's entitled to blow his trumpet every once in a while...
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