Best Film & Video Anime Company
A bit of info about Best Film & Video.
Company Overview
Best Film & Video was a low-budget home video distributor from the '80s through around the mid-90s. While they had a large collection of specialty videos (from dance instruction to pro wrestling), they're probably best remembered (by the few who remember them at all) for their hilariously awful dubs of a variety of foreign films. Anime-wise, they're sort of symbolic of the abominable treatment anime usually got before its rise to the mainstream--kid-"friendly" hack-jobs with bad dubbing and random edits. They are, however, usually good for a laugh, a la MST3K.
They faded out of existence some time during the '90s, though it's remarkably hard to find information about them outside of their legal fight with Fred Astaire's widow; if anyone has more specific details, please let us know.
Their Catalog
Best licensed a few action-oriented sci-fi OAVs, which they maimed to produce such dubious "classics" as Space Warriors Baldios, Locke The Superman, and Dallos. In terms of memorable titels, they released an almost unrecognizable dubbed edit of Dagger of Kamui under the title Blade of Kamui.
What Their Releases Are Like
Calling what they did to anime an embarrassing hack-job is kind--while some of the source material was of questionable quality to begin with, Best added arbitrary script changes, massive edits, horrible writing, and almost uniformly bad acting to their cheap-and-dirty straight-to-VHS dubs, which were aimed at the kids market. The old VHS tapes are usually pretty easy to find, though, and worth a laugh if you run across one.