I had just purchased a 50 movie pack collection "Tales of Terror" released by Mill Creek Entertainment. Every single movie in it was destroyed by logos on top of the movies.

Now granted, the movies aren't the greatest, but nowhere on the packaging was any warning that the movies where destroyed by logos.

If this distributor is doing it now, who is next?

It was only one channel on TV that was putting logos on the screens and now everyone is doing it.

Gone are the days of logo free viewing of anything.

To me, one of the reasons of buying DVDs was to see logo free movies and shows.

What's worse, becuase I opened this DVD, I can't return it. The store says logos aren't damage.

Since most movies in those 50-film packs are generally public domain, they probably did that to protect their transfers. That way no one could easily copy the discs and resell them as their own public domain disc. It's just a guess and it sucks that they did such a thing. They coulda just thrown on a new notice in the opening/closing credits.

Alpha? Madacy?

This is some crappy company distributing bad copies of public domain films. I wouldn't worry about Fox or Warners following suit.

That's pretty common practice now for most public domain companies. Mill Creek, Passport, Alpha, Delta, etc. are all putting logo bugs on their stuff to one degree or another.

Annoying? Yes. But, they're also basically giving these films away, so they feel the need to mark their prints to prevent other companies from simply burning off copies. If a major studio starts doing this, I'll complain. When I'm buying 50 public domain horror movies for $19.99? I'll cut them some more slack.

And, I have to disagree that these movies are "destroyed" as you put it. I certainly haven't seen every film in that collection, but I have seen a few... and as I recall, the logo only shows up every 10 minutes or so, and leaves the screen after less than a minute. Again, not an ideal situation... but with cheapo public domain prints of Terror Creatures from the Grave and Vampires Night Orgy, you take your chances.

Umm, you get what you pay for.

If the retailer won't take it back, send it back to the company. Even if they don't give you your money back, you'll at least have told them this practice is unacceptable. It's disturbing that this is coming up, someone ought to start a list of discs with bugs on them. The worst one I have is Fun With The Fab Four from Goodtimes; it has "GT" stamped on the screen through the whole thing. I've also got the Something Weird trailer disc which I find completely unwatchable with the blocky "SWV" letters on it, but still can't bring myself to get rid of it. It's certainly affected the number of discs I've bought from that company though- they don't put anything on the actual movies but they include a lot of trailers and short films as extras with it, and I hate to support a company that does this. There is a special place in hell reserved for the people who put constant logos on TV and video. Of course, a lot of the public is also to blame since they continue to subscribe to cable and still watch enough network TV.

Oddly the more common form of "bugging" I've found on DVDs is player-generated- some discs use the subtitle function, yet somehow author it so even if you set subtitles to OFF they'll still stay on. Blushing Bloopers from Passport does this (otherwise a great disc, you can get rid of the bug by reverse-scanning when it comes on though), also the New Zoo Revue box set for whatever reason has a "BCI" logo that comes up for a few minutes during each show (I don't think that's even public-domain), lucky I only paid $6.99 for it. Again you can make it go away by hitting reverse-scan, and you can use computer DVD software to get rid of it completely.

did everyone forget about Rocky & Bullwinkle....that had some people major pissed

You can probably download half that stuff from archive.org just like the distributor did.

The logos are probably of the UHF channels they videotaped the movies from to begin with. I'm surprised the commercials for the Ronco Pocket Fisherman aren't still on there.

Now THAT'S something I'd buy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AEBRgg7iAg

I'd buy that for a dollar!

That was the first thing I thought of.