Spike & Mike’s Cutting Edge Classics.

Pasadena City College holds a swap meet the first Sunday of every month. Among the booths in the music section, a half-dozen dealers stand behind tables covered in videos with homemade art, famous names and no bar codes. Shopping for bootlegs is a tricky business. On one hand, chances are no one will ever legitimately re-release Sparks playing "I Predict" on Saturday Night Live, so if you want to see this witty 1982 pop performance you're getting it through a tape trader or not at all. On the other hand, that bootleg is a dub of Bob's VHS dub of Rodney's VHS dub of Veronica's VHS dub of Tyrone's VHS dub of Pamela's VHS dub of Justin's VHS dub.

Only a few years ago those tables were ruled by VHS tapes in big plastic clamshells; they were bulky and expensive and they looked like crap. Then the videotapes were swept away in a home-burning brushfire, and now the tables are full of DVD-Rs. They're slim, they're cheap to produce and they look like crap. They still look bad, by and large, because they're still dubs of dubs of dubs. The medium has improved but the source material hasn't.

There's a dirty little secret on display, here in Pirate's Corner at the Big Home Video Bazaar, and it holds true for everyone from UMG to you and me: DVD doesn't make moving pictures look better. Old film and video is like bubblegum on the sidewalk — you can't expect it to turn pink again just because you're taking a digital snapshot.

I'm very annoyed by the new omnibus DVD Spike & Mike's Cutting Edge Classics. Mainly I'm peeved because, in all honesty, I unhesitatingly recommend you buy it for what it is — a reference copy for a slew of important animated shorts — despite the fact that it is also covered in blackened bubblegum. There is a wealth of great material here. Zohar Shahar's An Old Story turns obvious potty humor into a somehow poignant tale of an old man's final exit down a bathroom drain. Mariko Hoshi's Hello, Dolly! riffs on cloning through the laboratory adventures of a bug-eyed mad scientist and his hapless sheep. Jakub Pistecky's Maly Milos (Little Milosh) looks at the story of a man-boy, a goat and a domineering wife through a decidedly Grimms-esque lens.

There are great transfers of The Pigeon and the Onion Pie, a fairy tale in verse so offbeat it's virtually a delirium tremens; the dryly hilarious One Day a Man Bought a House and its predecessor Katten Mons (Mons the Cat) from Russian-born stop-motion animator Pjotr Sapegin; and caveman humiliation in the form of Stubble Trouble from Calabash Animation. Also included are animated shorts from popular successes we know from other media, including four Maakies shorts based on the weekly strip by Tony Millionaire, the early audience favorite Iddy Biddy Beat from Sheep in the Big City creator Mo Willems, and former MTV animation director Patrick Smith's Drink, a mind-altering peek at the nation of millions teeming inside us all.

For the DVD, Cane Toad has some snips from its original cut. © Andrew Silke and David Clayton 2002.

Cane Toad is also included (see January's Fresh from the Festivals). Hopefully you were lucky enough to see this crass, hilarious short screened at a festival, because this is where Spike & Mike's Cutting Edge Classics starts to scrape the sidewalk. If you haven't seen Cane Toad, whatever you do, don't let this be your first time — the aspect ratio is wrong, the color saturation is weak, and, on top of that, it's been censored. (Snipped is a one-second reaction shot where beleaguered toad Baz mouths the word "fuck" silently to camera as he is confronted with a lawnmower the size of a 747.) For a video series that apparently has no trouble with full frontal nudity, it's odd that this unrated DVD should duck the f-word.

The real crime, here, though, is Seiltnzer (Rope Dancer), a 1986 short from German animator Raimund Krumme. You may recall this charmer from any of a number of Tournees from the 1980s and '90s: a tragi-comic meditation on perspective and negative space featuring two men, a length of rope, and a multi-purpose rectangle. What's on this DVD isn't just a bad transfer; it's the platonic ideal of bad transfer. Blurry, scratchy, trembling with gate weave and pierced with rolling white lines, it looks like it was telecined directly from workprint to a recycled VHS tape.