Featured CED VideoDisc No. 18 - Fall 2000

The Man from Snowy River

Man From Snowy River CED At the beginning of the opening ceremony for the XXVII Olympiad the Australian setting of this movie was mentioned as the 120 horses in the ceremony performed to music from the movie's soundtrack. It was just about time to put up the Fall 2000 CED Feature, so this event prompted me to research all the CED titles that were filmed wholly or partially in Australia. A table of those titles appears further down this page.

The first thing I noticed when compiling this list was that many of these movies emphasize the natural settings of the continent. This is especially true of this title and The Earthling. Indeed, it seems true for Australian films in general with Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock being a couple of other notable examples that unfortunately didn't come out on CED (although they are both on DVD). And some movies were filmed (at least partially) in Australian locales, even though they are supposed to take place elsewhere, Jaws and The Pirate Movie for example.

The plot of The Man form Snowy River is derived from a classic Aussie poem of the same title written by Banjo Paterson. The movie is a coming of age tale set in the mountains of the Australian state of Victoria. Banjo Paterson also wrote the lyrics for the famous Waltzing Matilda, which figures prominently in another CED title On the Beach (watch Side 3 from 18:46 to 23:13 to see what I mean).

Australia is also notable in being the only country in the world besides the United States, Canada, and Great Britain where CED players and discs could be purchased when the system was on the market. Australia uses a PAL television standard somewhat similar to the UK PAL standard, so some enterprising Hitachi dealers imported discs and players from the United Kingdom. Marketing of the CED system in Australia was not officially condoned by RCA, but all that was needed to use the VIP201P and VIP202P players was a substitute power plug on the end of the AC cord. The RF modulator in these players was designed for UK UHF channels 32 and 40, so the baseband A/V outputs had to be used in Australia. There are a couple of PAL only CED titles listed in the table below that happened to also take place in Australia. I'm working on a complete list of PAL titles, numbering a little less than 300 in all. This is only a fraction of the 1,700 NTSC titles, and about a third of these PAL titles are exclusive to the PAL format.

CED Title Set in Australia	Location(s)	Notes
ABBA: The Movie (PAL)	Various	Chronicle of concert tour
Australia Now (PAL)	Various	Musical performances
Breaker Morant	Burra, South Australia	Prison scenes only (set in South Africa in movie)
Dot and Santa Claus	Fernleigh & Sydney, New South Wales; Ayer's Rock, Northern Territory
Dot and the Bunny	Various
Dot and the Kangaroo	Blue Mountains & Jenolan Caves, New South Wales
Earthling, The	Blue Mountains, New South Wales
Endless Summer, The	Perth, Western Australia; Melbourne, Victoria; Sydney, New South Wales
Getting of Wisdom, The	Melbourne, Victoria
Great Whales, The/Sharks, The	Great Barrier Reef, Queensland	Sharks feature only
Jaws	Seal Rocks, New South Wales	Some underwater shark scenes only (set on Long Island coast in movie)
Mad Max	Melbourne, Victoria
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome	Northern Territory; Coober Pedy, South Australia; Blue Mountains, New South Wales
Man from Snowy River, The	Merrijig, Victoria
Now and Forever	Sydney, New South Wales
On the Beach	Melbourne, Victoria
Pirate Movie, The	Port Campbell & Werribee Park & Melbourne, Victoria	Original G& S Opera set on the UK Cornwall coast
Road Games	Melbourne, Victoria
Service Alignment Disc (Icarus segment)	Bald Hill, Stanwell Park, Sydney, New South Wales	To test overall image quality during servicing
Service Test Disc (Icarus segment)	Bald Hill, Stanwell Park, Sydney, New South Wales	To test overall image quality during servicing
Road Warrior, The	Broken Hill, New South Wales
World of Wildlife, Vol. 2: Penguin Summer/Kangaroo	Various	Kangaroo feature only

The Man from Snowy River on Handhelds

Download snowy-river.zip for Windows host computers

Download snowy-river.prc for MacOS host computers (control-click file name)

After download, unzip the Windows file (the Mac file is ready to install as is), and use the handheld computer install program to prepare it for transfer. During the next sync operation the snowy-river.prc file will be placed on your Palm OS, Pocket PC, or Windows CE handheld, and the complete 1903 Erskine Childers book may be read on the device using a reader application like iSilo.

The Man from Snowy River

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