VHS Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored

BET Pictures released "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored" on VHS in 1996, adapting Clifton Taulbert's memoir of the same name about Black life in the segregated Mississippi Delta. The film was directed by Tim Reid and starred Al Freeman Jr. and Phylicia Rashad. It was one of BET's earliest theatrical productions, and the VHS followed the theatrical release as the film found its widest audience on home video.

The film arrived at a moment when Black American stories rooted in the South's pre-civil-rights decades were getting serious theatrical treatment. 1996 placed this release in the same home-video landscape as "Rosewood" (1997, John Singleton) and "Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored" had already drawn the kind of critical attention that stuck: Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up, Michael Medved awarded four stars. Tim Reid had built a reputation as a producer and director invested in telling underrepresented stories with care, and the Taulbert memoir gave him source material grounded in a real childhood in Glen Allan, Mississippi, during the 1940s and 1950s. The Delta setting, the tight-knit community that held itself together inside Jim Crow's boundaries, the texture of the everyday: the film treated it with documentary seriousness. The VHS case carries both critic endorsements printed on the sleeve, which was a real commercial signal in the mid-90s rental market.

This copy is pre-owned and carries the expected wear of a cassette that has been in circulation. The amber-toned cover art is intact, with the BET Pictures branding visible and the Siskel and Ebert quote running across the sleeve. Check the spine of the cassette housing for any stress fractures, and run your thumb across the tape window: the ribbon should sit flat with no visible slack or bunching before you hit play.

OWNER VERIFY: Confirm the 1996 BET Pictures VHS production date against the label printed on the cassette spine.