Classic “Blaxploitation” Films Find SVOD Home At New Service: Brown Sugar

David Lieberman
Updated

Fans of Shaft, Super Fly, and Foxy Brown have a new way to catch up on these other mostly action films targeted to African American audiences. Bounce TV — the network founded by Martin Luther King, III and Andrew Young — just launched a subscription VOD service for the movie genre called Brown Sugar.

Viewers can try it for a month for free, and then will pay $3.99 a month. The films will be uncut, and commercial-free. They’ll run on iOS and Android devices, with other platforms to come later.

The service tapped two stars of the so-called “blaxploitation” genre — Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and Pam Grier — and rapper-entrepreneur Rick Ross to be its “official ambassadors.”

“Brown Sugar is just like Netflix, only blacker,” Grier says. “These movies are entertaining and fun, but they were also empowering to the black community as they depicted African Americans as strong leading characters and heroes for the first time.”

Ross also notes that the movies influenced “every aspect of rap and hip-hop; in the music, the lyrics, the fashion and overall style – the Blaxploitation genre is where it all began.”

The service will curate the films into several sub-genres including:

  • War in Harlem (Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Black Godfather, Across 110th Street)

  • Foxy Mamas (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Cleopatra Jones, Friday Foster, Sheba Baby)

  • Righteous Revenge (Dolemite, Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem, Hammer)

  • Stickin’ it to The Man (The Mack, Black Gunn, Three The Hard Way)

  • Good Cop, Black Cop (Action Jackson, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs)

  • #BlackLove (Bad, Black & Beautiful, Brothers, Black Sister’s Revenge)

  • Shake Down, Take Down (Blue Collar, Amazing Grace, Cool Breeze)

  • Jive Ass Turkeys (I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Car Wash, Uptown Saturday Night)

  • Black Horror (Blacula, Sugar Hill, Blackenstein)

  • They Got Game (The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, Greased Lightning, Joe Bullet)

 

 

 

 

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