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The Empire Strikes Back, VHS, MAYCO A/S, Norway 1985

The Empire Strikes Back premiered on rental VHS in Norway in 1985. The film is presented in cropped "Fullscreen", with Norwegian subtitles. The scroll and credits remain in English. The Norwegian rental tapes came in big clamshell boxes, much like the UK. The 80's rental tapes from Norwegian distributor MAYCO are extremely rare. The company enforced a strict rule of having every tape returned after the rental store's lease ended. Every copy had an individual serial number that was tracked. Therefore, almost no tapes from the company were available on the open market. The last few years they have started appearing on enthusiast Facebook groups, and that's where I was finally able to acquire one back in 2019. Up until then I only had the covers, as I had sourced them back in the late 80's, but I didn't have the actual cassettes. The Star Wars tapes tend to be amongst the priciest second hand tapes around, but I just had to have them. These are tapes I thought I'd never get my hands on, and now remain some of the jewels in my collection. The distribution rights to the Star Wars films were acquired by local distributor SF Norge sometime in the 90's, and as far as I know the Star Wars movies weren't available to buy in Norway until SF released the THX remasters in 1995.

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