I’ve been trying to find the best way to approach talking about “You Can Read!” (The 1988 Orbis Video released Edutainment series) for a long time now. In fact since I first found out the series I’d watched as a kid was called “You Can Read” I’ve always wanted to cover it on this channel. But I wanted to make sure I did it right (Or at least as right as possible given the spotty information thats available online about it) indeed it was literally only a couple of days before I was set to record the audio for this episode that I even found out that 3 years prior it had had a full DVD re-release in Malta.

Theres literally no information about this re-release online barring a Facebook page and a throwaway article buried deep in one of the lesser known tabloid sites. and finding that article was completely by chance. And apart from a handful of people who have commented on the facebook page to say the first 2 volumes were messed up (They’d apparently been authored as CD-Roms rather than DVD’s) it’s almost impossible to find any “Real world” evidence that these DVD’s actually exist at all. Im not denying they exist you understand. it’s just that outside of that facebook page’s own advertisements I havent seen one photograph on instagram, google or social media in itself of a member of the public owning a copy of these movies. Which does rather lead me to believe it may be a scam of some sort…but then…this is too obscure to really be proper scam material…or maybe it’s just obscure enough?…

Either way this series was a major impact on my childhood and adulthood, I was rediculously pleased to grab not only a copy of this on tape…but a copy that I actually owned as a kid and even though it’s only worth a couple of quid tops. it’s my most prized possession in terms of VHS. Probably only just being pipped by my original “Video Nasty” era release of “Tenebrae”

(All the VHS artworks look odd, they have a very basic design but they’re probably the most consistant thing in this series…)

As usual whenever I cover something a touch obscure Im usually immediately met with the problem of there just not being a high enough resolution image of the box art for the film im trying to cover. “You Can Read” is no exception. and the handful of covers I’ve been able to find online barely break the 500 pixel region…So here’s a 3k scan of the cover of Volume 3: Me I hope you enjoy the attention to detail.