Okay kids let me tell you about a time before you were born. In those days there was no DVD or Blu Ray disks. In fact there was no VHS machines like the one you saw at your grandparent's place.
In those days if you wanted to see a movie you went to a movie theater or saw whatever came on the Television. And what they had on TV was often cut up to remove nudity, gore and four letter words. Also they would cut a two hour film down to fit a 90 time slot and still have room to show a bunch of used car commercials.
If you wanted to collect movies you had to buy a 16mm or an 8mm projector and buy a print of your own to play on it.
Well prints of 16mm and even 8mm features costed a lot. So what the movie dealers started to do was to make and sell condensed versions of feature motion pictures. A feature of 90 minutes to 2 hours would be chopped down to about 9 minutes.
Castle Films was the most popular seller of these short prints. And they did a pretty good job of editing the movies. their print of FRANKENSTEIN is cut to 9 minutes and it still flows well story wise and has all the major scenes.
Castle Films and many of the other home movie sellers had sound prints of the movies but they also sold silent prints for a cheaper price to people with silent projectors.
The infamous PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE was sold as a 8 minute movie by some company in the United Kingdom. They sold both a sound and silent version. The silent version is the sound version without audio. Most of the home movie companies would add subtitles to their silent version but this company did not and it was just as well since there is very little talking in this version which has mostly action scenes.
This 8 minute version of PLAN 9 opens with the saucers flying over Hollywood and then there is the scene in which Mrs Trent is chased in the graveyard by both Bela Lugosi and Dr Tom Mason. The scene of Tor Johnson rising from the grave as a zombie also plays and Vampira appears in a few shots wandering around the graveyard. The police then show and and fight with the aliens and the spaceship blows up after take off. Criswell then appears for a few seconds as a dark out line with THE END superimposed over him.You can see this 8mm print of PLAN 9 on You Tube with this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUSrvavBZ0I and you can find other 8mm digest prints there by typing Castle Films 8mm in the browser.
