Oddities Beyond Belief (The Walter Futter's Curiosities Collection)

Walter Futter (1900-1958) inauspiciously began his long career in the film industry as an editor working at William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures. After leaving Hearst, Futter and his brother Fred formed Walter Futter Productions, the centerpiece of which was an enormous stock footage library called WAFilms. The Futter brothers were not so much producers as they were collectors, garnering them the nickname "the junkmen of filmdom." They amassed a massive amount of cast-offs from not only the major Hollywood studios, but also from amateur filmmakers and France's Gaumont Pictures. With such a cornucopia of material at hand, it wasn't long before the brothers struck upon the idea of editing the most unusual footage into a series of one-reelers called Walter Futter's Curiosities. Inspired by the nationally-syndicated newspaper feature Ripley's Believe It or Not, they were billed as "bits of life that are hard to believe gathered from here, there, and everywhere." Subjects included the wonders of the animal world, bizarre natural phenomena, people in odd jobs, and the "strange" customs of foreign lands, accompanied by an often off-color commentary by an unidentified narrator. The Curiosities shorts were a huge hit with movie audiences, their success made even more advantageous since they were assembled completely from the Futters' film library, meaning it cost little to no money for distributors like Educational or Columbia to finance them. After hitting the big time turning footage from Paul L. Hoefler's 1928 Serengeti expedition into the smash hit exploitation picture Africa Speaks (1930), Futter lost interest in the Curiosities series, letting them be distributed by Nu-Art Films for the 16mm home movie market as Oddities Beyond Belief or other variations on the 'Oddities' name. Often included as bonuses on Alpha Video releases, this is the first such collection of these unique short subjects.

BONUS: Desert Demons (1932): Brothers Stacy and Horace Woodward were innovators in the use of microscopic camera filming technology. Their trademark camera was a huge piece of equipment set up in a Santa Monica garage, perfect for miniature photography. Not only did they work on King Kong (1933) and Pare Lorentz's The River (1938), the Woodward brothers also made award-winning short subjects examining the insect world. Desert Demons shows the creepy, crawly denizens of the American desert coming to life after the sun sets.