The information presented here has been built up & pieced together through years of talking to people, forum posts, PMs, emails, articles, etc. bits may well be wrong, some details might be educated guesses, and some names have been deliberately left out. Do not take this information as hard fact!
How were the shorts first released/leaked?
The story behind the Within The Woods bootleg, which became widely available & traded first on VHS then later on DVD, is that Tom Sullivan lent his super 8 shorts tape to Scott Spiegel. Scott was having a party and showed it to some friends but used Sullivan's original copy, which his VCR started to eat. The chewed tape had three screen 'drop-outs' all during Within The Woods; at the beginning, then when Bruce is found dead in the woods and when Ellen is searching for a weapon to attack zombie-Bruce.
Around 2000-2001, three forum users in the USA, went on a hunt to find a copy of Within The Woods. One of them got in touch with Scott Spiegel's assistant Patrick, and he made a copy from Tom Sullivan's tape behind his back for his help in re-connecting Patrick with Ellen Sandweiss. It was around 2-1/2 hours long and was of good enough quality that you could see the super 8 film grain, but by that copy it was 3rd/4th generation, it still looked good.
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This is the contents & likely order of that VHS tape:
Attack Of The Helping Hand! (00:06:02)
The Sappy Sap (00:04:26)
WNIC Radio TV Spot (00:00:30)
XYZ Murders Trailer (00:02:14)
Thou Shall Not Kill, Except... Trailer (00:02:03)
Nightcrew B.T.S. Camcorder Footage (00:06:31)
Stryker's War (00:48:08)
PM Detroit TV Spot On Renaissance Pictures (00:03:41)
Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter (00:09:14)
Torro, Torro, Torro! (00:06:48)
The Blind Waiter (00:17:17)
Evil Dead Trailer (00:02:05)
Book Of The Dead Trailer (00:03:37)
Within The Woods (00:30:29)
Six Months To Live (00:13:46)
(Running time = 2hrs 36mins 46secs)
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The Within The Woods' & 'Book Of The Dead' trailer DVD menu
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One of them used this copy to make VCDs of the shorts which he traded out, along with VHS copies, and a Within The Woods & 'Book Of The Dead' trailer DVD later on, although the quality of this DVD is not he best generally available. He also uploaded & shared the Within The Woods MPEG VCD version which has since flooded P2P networks.
Another one of the group apparently sent a copy of his tape to Anchor Bay at some point as there was talk of it (or some of it) appearing on an Evil Dead DVD release, obviously this never happened.
Ok, so which versions are out there & how do they compare?
Here is a quick line up of the bootleg Within The Woods versions that I have come across. Below are seven screenshots of the same frame from each version to compare. They have all been reduced in size, click on them for 1:1 images, which haven't been compressed, so any artifacting was present on the original picture. They are listed in order of quality, 1 being the worst, and 6 being the best. There are more than just these 6 named versions of Within The Woods out there, but basically anything else will you'll find will likely be the same as one of the following transfers.
1 - Within The Woods &
'Book Of The Dead' Trailer DVD
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2 - Peer To Peer 368.27mb
AVI internet version
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3 - Peer To Peer 308.41mb
MPEG VCD internet version
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4 - Sam Raimi Short Films DVD
(standard widespread version)
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5 - Sam Raimi Short Films DVD
(bought at New York comic fair)
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6 - Evil Dead - Treasures Collection
DVD (taken from the source tape)
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7 - Tansferred to DVD personally
from an NTSC VHS tape
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The best quality version is number 7, which was personally transferred to DVD in 2009, from one of a pair of incedibly rare NTSC VHS tapes borrowed from an american forum user, which also contained a number of other previously unavailable Super-8 shorts, additional material, footage & interviews, including William Shakespeare - The Movie, Shemp Eats The Moon, and Holding It. These tapes are an entirely separate compilation from the various generations of the standard Sam Raimi Super-8 Shorts VHS tape/DVD. While the ultimate source/leak of these tapes is known, I have chosen not to disclose it here as it is not general knowledge. All the screenshots on the 'Stills' page are taken from this new transfer. The only better copy of Within The Woods I know is out there to be found would be the Anchor Bay restored copy, should that ever be released or leaked.
Wasn't it released on a German DVD at some point?
The German distributor T.U.T. (The Union Television) released Evil Dead with a poor quality version of the short as an extra, in 2004. The transfer was virtually identical to screenshot number 4 above. Many of the other extras are the same as the Anchor Bay Evil Dead trilogy UK boxset. This version has been re-packaged a number of times since then with various covers, but the actual disc content is the same.
T.U.T. is one of a handful of German distributors notorious for releasing official-looking bootlegs of films they haven’t actually licensed, and its highly unlikely they would have been given permission to include the short, if Anchor Bay couldn't in the USA or UK, giving this release a semi-bootleg status even though it can be legally bought online and in stores.
I remember seeing some high quality stills posted on a forum somewhere?
Don May Jr (the president of the DVD company synapse) posted these 24 stills from his copy of Within The Woods on the MHVF forum on 1st January 2002. When contacted he said he'd made a promise to the renaissance guys that when he got the copy, that he would never give it to anyone else. He still works with the guys on and off and considers them good friends and wouldn't betray that promise.
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