In-depth interview about the Evil Dead 1 Book of The Dead Edition DVDs

[MCT28]

So here's something that slipped under everyone's radar last year, and a very entertaining watch/listen for the hardcore collectors. A podcast dedicated to Anchor Bay (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone since every subject under the sun has a podcast about it) did an almost 2-hour interview with former Anchor Bay employees Mike Ortiz and Michael Felsher discussing the legendary Evil Dead 1 "Book of The Dead" DVD from 2002. Like, this covers EVERYTHING: going from Anchor Bay getting the license to ED1 and the early home video releases (Ortiz was the guy who wrote the history booklet that came with the BOTD DVD) all the way to when they were getting the license for Army of Darkness (though they completely skip over ED2 unfortunately).

HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• Anchor Bay intentionally passed on getting the DVD/Laserdisk license for ED1 because “they didn’t value DVDs at that time”, so Elite Entertainment got those rights while Anchor Bay was stuck with VHS for a bit.
• Tom Sullivan did not like Anchor Bay using the “Beloved” painting for an ED1 VHS variant cover because it’s not officially part of Evil Dead production material and was somehow slipped in with the ED1 assets Renaissance Pictures provided Anchor Bay. The BOTD edition spiraled out of them trying to mend bridges with Tom about the VHS debacle.
• Michael Felsher is currently the owner of several of the original BOTD edition prototypes (and shows them off throughout the video)
• The BOTD edition was originally going to have two disks (which maybe would have been the film’s soundtrack).
• Now the story is that Within The Woods was removed because Sam Raimi didn’t know it would be put on there to begin with. Sam personally called the head of Anchor Bay to have it pulled.
• THEY ACTUALLY ADDRESS THE “STOLEN” TONY MOORE/ROBERT KIRKMAN COMIC ART.
• The Anchor Bay crew were getting high from the chemicals of the finalized books during the final quality check because the books had been sealed so tight in China.
• Someone at Universal didn’t know the true home media sales for Army of Darkness and gave Anchor Bay the license for next to nothing, only for the Universal rep to nervously come back and ask for more money when they realized the “mistake.”

Here's the section discussing Within The Woods as a separate video.

 

[Kain]

Fun fact: we made it onto the pages of the first BOTD DVD under our old site name Deadites Online.