"Dick" is a 1999 Columbia Pictures release, a Watergate spoof built around the premise that two oblivious teenage girls from Washington D.C. are the real Deep Throat. Directed by Andrew Fleming and written by Fleming and Sheryl Longyear, the film ran 94 minutes in theaters before Columbia moved it to home video. This is that tape. The sleeve art went with a bubblegum pink palette and bold block lettering that played the whole thing as teen comedy, which is accurate but undersells how sharp the political writing underneath actually is.

1999 was a loaded year for political satire. "Wag the Dog" had come out in late 1997 and the Clinton-Lewinsky story broke weeks later, so by the time "Dick" hit theaters in August 1999, audiences were already primed to laugh at the gap between official Washington and what was actually happening behind closed doors. Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams play Betsy and Arlene with the kind of committed deadpan that made the film a cult favorite despite a muted theatrical run. Dan Hedaya played Nixon as physically hunched and chronically suspicious. Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch played Woodward and Bernstein as competing egos who get all the credit while two teenagers do the actual work. The joke still holds up. Columbia pushed the film in August, a graveyard slot for serious releases, which is part of why it got overlooked theatrically and then found its real audience on exactly this format. Home video gave it a second life that the theatrical run never delivered.

The copy here is the standard Columbia Pictures clamshell release, the version that most people actually saw the film on. VHS was still the dominant home format in 1999 and Columbia pressed these in volume, so the tape itself is not scarce, but a clean copy with the original sleeve intact and the spine label unpeeled is worth stopping on. The clamshell corners on copies this age can show stress cracking from shelf stacking, so run a finger along the hinge edge before you commit. Check the tape window before you play it: the ribbon should sit flat with no slack or bunching, which tells you whether the tape has been rewound correctly or left mid-wind after its last use.

OWNER VERIFY: Columbia Pictures home video release year and catalog number on spine label.