Baby Snakes
Encyclopedia
Baby Snakes is a movie which includes footage from Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...

's 1977 Halloween concert at New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

's Palladium Theater, backstage antics from the crew, and stop motion
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

 clay animation from award-winning animator Bruce Bickford.

Initially, the film had particular difficulty finding a distributor. Frank Zappa tried to interest United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....

, the company that released 200 Motels
200 Motels
200 Motels is a 1971 American-British musical surrealist film cowritten and directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer and starring The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel and Ringo Starr. The film covers a loose storyline about The Mothers of Invention going crazy in the small town Centerville...

, but they declined. Other studios followed United Artists' lead, fearing that Zappa's trademark "cinematic style" had lost considerable appeal in post-'70s pop culture, and also declined to distribute the film.

Several European distributors told Zappa that there might be interest if the running time was cut from its original 168-minute length. The film was cut to 90 minutes, but still, there were no takers.

Even after Bruce Bickford's sequences won first prize at a French animated film competition, there was no interest. Eventually Zappa took it upon himself to distribute the film independently, via his own production company, Intercontinental Absurdities. The film ran 24 hours a day at the Victoria Theater in New York City and made a handsome profit .

The film, in its original version, was released on VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

 tape via mail-order directly from Zappa until the mid-90s when the double-tape set eventually "sold out" and further replication runs were not fulfilled. The 90 minute-version was briefly made available on home video
Home video
Home video is a blanket term used for pre-recorded media that is either sold or rented/hired for home cinema entertainment. The term originates from the VHS/Betamax era but has carried over into current optical disc formats like DVD and Blu-ray Disc and, to a lesser extent, into methods of digital...

 in the 1980s also. Finally, after many years of being "out of print" Baby Snakes was released on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 on December 9, 2003 by Eagle Vision United States with a new 5.1 Surround mix. This was the first time that the film was made commercially available to the public at large rather than through limited mailorder directly from Zappa.
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