Mike Vraney, collector of weird movies, weird movie memorabilia, and founder of Something Weird video, succumbed to cancer on January 2. He is survived by wife Lisa Petrucci and two children, Mark and Danielle. Vraney was 56.As a teenager, Vraney was exposed to exploitation and sexploitation films when he worked as a theater projectionist in Seattle. According to Something Weird's press release, he became active in the local punk rock music scene, being instrumental in the founding of the local music venue The Showbox, and going on to manage bands such as the Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Seattle's own The Accused. He founded Something Weird in 1990 as an outlet for his burgeoning collection of penny-arcade nudie loops, prints of exploitation and sexploitation films, trailers, short subjects and film ephemera. First marketing his films on VHS with covers based on original one-sheets and lobby cards, he went on to the DVD medium in 1999 when he entered a production deal with Image Video.
His unique approach to marketing video began with his VHS releases, the two-hour length of which he would typically pad out with two features (which we commonly an hour or less), along with as many trailers, loops, odds and ends, and supplementary material as he could fit. When he graduated to the DVD format, he could utilize the 220 minutes of a double-layered DVD to fit in even more of his seemingly endless collection of sleazy obscurities and bits and bobs. His endless quest to seek out and preserve these forgotten and half-remembered slices of history led him to befriend and collaborate with a number of figures from the exploitation film scene, in particular David F. Friedman, who boosted Vraney's collection with films from his own vault and who also appeared on some 25 commentary tracks with Vraney, and who paid him the best compliment when he dubbed Vraney "the forty-first thief" (a reference to the exploiteers' reference to themselves as "The Forty Thieves"), in recognition of his love for these films and his efforts to preserve them. He also got to know other exploitation and sexploitation filmmakers such as Joe Sarno, Doris Wishman and Herschel Gordon Lewis.
I own something like 25 or 30 DVD titles from Something Weird, and they occupy a place of honor in my home, not only because they are fun to watch and were great value for money, but also because they were put together with the right combination of love, humor, and respect. When SWV was getting off the ground in the nineties, it was a hey-day of alternative music, art and publishing, of photocopied zines, alternative newsstand magazines, comics and cassette music releases and even radio, and the Something Weird DVD collection carried the DIY spirit from the analog realm into the digital. Putting on a SWV DVD always manages to carry me back to that era of exploration and discovery.
Something Weird Video, in its announcement of Vraney's death, promises to carry on the mission further, and in addition to DVDs, the company also has an on-demand channel with Comcast and also some of its titles on Netflix.
For my part, I still intend to continue writing this blog, although I am also devoting considerable time to my sister blog, on atheism, on Wordpress. Again, the best way to keep abreast of my blogging is probably to use a blog aggregator, as I don't finish things quickly, though there are always works in progress.
This clip has opened SWV's video releases from the analog into the digital era and puts the weirdness, wildness, and coolness of the films (and Vraney's approach to them) into a two-minute nutshell.
Something Weird Video on Facebook
Something Weird Video on Wikipedia
Something Weird Video Official Site
