WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Three short stories about race, power, and belief make up this HBO anthology, starting with a group of aliens who offer America a deal in exchange for its Black citizens.

WHY IT’S GONE

Before Tales from the Hood, there was Cosmic Slop. Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, the brothers behind House Party, built this anthology for HBO and named it after the Funkadelic song. Reginald directed the opening story, “Space Traders,” which adapts Derrick Bell’s famous tale about visitors from space who promise the country riches and amazing new technology if it hands over every Black person. Warrington directed the second story, and Kevin Rodney Sullivan closed things out with a couple who discover who their real enemy is on the edge of a revolution. Critics at the time compared it to The Twilight Zone, and it picked up CableACE awards.

So why can’t you buy it? After its premiere, HBO put it out on VHS and laserdisc, and that was the end of the line. No DVD. No Blu-ray. Nothing. The film is only 83 minutes long, so it doesn’t fit the usual movie shelf, and it doesn’t fit neatly into a TV season either. Shorts and TV movies get lost in the cracks all the time. That excuse doesn’t hold up, though, when HBO has the money and the library to do something with it. There’s also a hometown angle here: Warrington Hudlin was born in East St. Louis, right across the river from us. One of the boldest Black science fiction projects of the ’90s came from our own backyard, and the only way to see it is to dig up a tape.