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Roadshow Entertainment

Australian production company

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ7339664
Source-derived summary

Roadshow Entertainment (formerly known as Roadshow Home Video from 1982–1993) is an Australian home video, production and distribution company that is a division of Village Roadshow that distributes films in Australia and New Zealand. Their first release was Mad Max.

History

In 1982, Village Roadshow Entertainment Limited was founded as Roadshow Home Video as a subsidiary of Roadshow Distributors. Their first batch of movie titles, released on both VHS and Betamax format, were:

Sex World (1978)

The Never Dead (aka: Phantasm, 1979)

Mad Max (1979, with blue cover art)

Insatiable (1980)

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980)

A Change of Seasons (1980)

Atlantic City (1980)

Scanners (1981)

King of the Mountain (1981)

Montenegro (1981)

Endless Love (1981)

Around the same time, the company launched a label, Vibrant Video, which was dedicated to primarily R-rated adult fare and horror films, but the label itself did not last very long, as some of the titles have been moved to Palace.

1984: Palace Films was started as a home video distributor between Roadshow, Blake Films and private investor Antony Veccola, with Roadshow handling home video distribution of its titles.

In 1985, Roadshow Home Video became Village Roadshow Home Video and Premiere Home Entertainment was established. Veccola bought out the other company's stock of Palace and it ventured out into the film distribution business and opened a small number of art-house cinemas around Australia's main cities and became an independent company. Its home video release were still handled by Village Roadshow until the late 1990s. That year, the company began picking up titles from Walt Disney Home Video in the Australian market, taking over from home video distributor Syme Home Video.

1989: Applause Home Video was established as a Village Roadshow label, with Babette's Feast being the first title under the label.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Roadshow Entertainment” as australian production company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Roadshow, Entertainment and Australian.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1982, 1993, 1978, 1979—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1982. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Roadshow, Entertainment and Australian providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Roadshow Entertainment”, the useful work is to connect “australian production company” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7339664. VIAF identifies the subject as 152942822. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1993, 1978 and 1979.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Roadshow Entertainment”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Roadshow Entertainment primary sources, Roadshow Entertainment archive and Roadshow research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Roadshow Entertainment”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Roadshow Entertainment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.