Went to local fleamarket yesterday, found a copy of the WCI Home Video release of SUPERMAN THE MOVIE. WCI would later evolve into Warner Home Video....this is the first home video release of the flick (from 1979...a thirty-five year old VHS cassette.......weird). Kinda rare (finding VHS cassettes prior to 1983 these days is getting harder and harder), and infamous amongst fans of the film because of the cuts made to runtime... I bought it for a dollar.....
In 1979, WCI Home Video (now Warner Home Video) issued Superman on VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc. However, only for the VHS and Betamax releases, the film was truncated to a length of 127 minutes by way of time compression (from an original theatrical runtime of 143 mins.), as most scenes without dialogue were sped up, and a majority of the film's closing credits were deleted, instead replacing them with a truncated version consisting of the copyright notice, and a chyron of the credits taken from an 8mm release of selected scenes from the film. This time compression was necessary because of the technological limitations of videocassettes at the time and the unavailability of long-playing cassettes. The film would not be available in an uncompressed form until 1983, when Warner Bros. finally issued such a version on home video. This version was re-released to video in 1986. Another Laserdisc set of the film was released in 1990, which was color-corrected and in widescreen format, and in its original theatrical version.
