Baby Snakes
Baby Snakes is a film which includes footage from Frank Zappa's 1977 Halloween concert at New York City's Palladium Theater, backstage antics from the crew, and stop motion clay animation from award-winning animator Bruce Bickford. Release. Initially, the film had particular difficulty finding a distributor. Zappa tried to interest United Artists, the company that released "200 Motels", but they declined. Other studios followed United Artists' lead, fearing that Zappa's "cinematic style" had lost considerable appeal in 1970s 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. (This can be seen in the opening credits to the film, "Eaten Alive", partly filmed in New York at the time  Baby Snakes was playing.) The film was first released on videocassette in 1983 in two forms. The complete edition was priced at $200 and was aimed at rental stores. A 90-minute edited version was available to the general public at a more reasonable "sell-through" price of $59.98. Both editions sold out quickly. Finally, after many years of being "out of print" "Baby Snakes" was released on DVD on December 9, 2003, by Eagle Vision United States with a new 5.1 Surround mix added and in its complete, unedited form. This was the first time that the  film was made commercially available to the public at large rather than through limited mail order directly from Zappa. Soundtrack. The soundtrack album was first released on vinyl in 1983 as a picture disc, and subsequently on compact disc with different artwork. An expanded iTunes edition entitled "Baby Snakes: The Compleat Soundtrack" was released on December 21, 2012. Reception. The New York Times called it "a shapeless, inexcusably long concert film made of, by and about Frank Zappa"