First of all, Brian, I
REALLY hope you read this post. Not all of it is going to be complimentary, but what isn't is still going to be constructive. I've heard you are now out of the commercial tickling business, having sold TR to FetishVault. Well, maybe that's the worst news I've ever heard about the tickling media fraternity.
Firstly, you've mentioned a number of videos are no longer available to you through loss, damage, or other means. From the days of VHS I have of yours...
Beauty Must Laugh
Without Consent (without the additional footage added later)
Doctor Baynes (with the additional footage added later)
One Sunday
Say Uncle
Dungeon Of Happiness
Midnight Hysteria
Bound By Laughter
Tickler In Black
I also have Priscilla Please Stop and The Laffworks on CD-ROM. Sadly most of the "classic" TC era clips I owned were lost in the Great Hard Drive Meltdown of 2005, by which time you'd stopped selling them.
If you have lost any of the footage from these videos and still have a license to sell it, I'll be happy to mail you my copies so you can extract the footage for Fetish Vault (or yourself if the material doesn't come under the sale you made to them) to sell commercially. Obviously the footage won't be as good as if it were taken off a master tape, but hey, beggars can't be smeggers.
Now, where was I?
Hmmm...
Well I've been around the tickling community, online and offline, for about nine years now. In that time I have yet to find a producer of clips whose product even comes close to the quality of the original dozen to fifteen VHS videos offered by TIB. The following monotonous monologue is my thoughts on TC as a company and producer over the past decade.
I came to the tickling community thanks to the internet in the early autumn of 1999. The TMF itself wasn't due to be founded for more than another year and at the time the only place I found to interact with other ticklephiles was a chat room on a web-site (now long defunct) called "Tom's Adult Tickling Site", run apparently, by someone called Tom Hawkins.
Shite, I've been around the community for nine years!!! A sobering thought...
At the time of first getting online in September '99 I only had a foot fetish, which I'd had more or less since childhood in one form or another. I searched for this online and a number of sites came up, among which was
www.femfeet.com. At the time, TIB owned this site and it was a sister site to Realtickling, being a place with a member's area with short clips and photos, while Realtickling sold the physical videos.
Within a very short while of discovering Femfeet/Realtickling I realised that tickling was intriuging to say the least. Within a couple of weeks I plucked up the courage to buy the video
Without Consent, starring Priscilla James and Toni Summers. This turned out to be literally the hottest thing I've seen to this day.
I continued to buy VHS from TIB until he stopped sending tapes abroad due to customs problems, something I found rather frustrating at the time as all my videos had made it right through, although some had been opened and inspected.
I loved the vids I owned (listed at the top of this post -
Bound By Laughter was something of a turkey, but it involved a section with Priscilla tickling Cierra Baynes, the HOTTEST ticklee in any tickling video EVER!) and wanted to keep buying them from TC.
But then came the advent of clips on the internet, the single most revolutionary and enabling development in the distribution of tickling media yet to happen.
And then... well there's no diplomatic way of putting this, Realtickling tickling material became boring, unoriginal and lost the sizzle that the earlier videos contained in shiploads. Essentially it became mass-produced tickling porn, with nothing to offer. The last three years or so I didn't buy anything from TC unless it had been released before about 2003.
You know how you can go back to a place you knew as a child and all those childhood memories will flood back, bringing back all the emotions you felt at the time you were young? Well trawling through this thread and sucking all these lovely pics into my hard drive has done this for me in a tickling sense.
I can now look back on Realtickling's early stuff with the benefit of the experience I've now got, but didn't have at the time. This is what made it special and thus far, unique in the tickling world...
One always got the feeling that the girls knew each other well. There was rapport, there was charisma and a feeling that this was a bunch of friends who'd met through tickling and were doing this because they all loved it deeply and personally. This was obviously not the case with the majority of the models, but Priscilla James, Nikki West, Tawni Preston, Tori Spears (another one of my all time favourites) and Toni Summers all appear, reading between the lines to have had some contact with each other outside of the filming dates. I may be being a gullible fuckwit here, but I think that sort of rapport and closeness is next to impossible to fake. Acting is usually very obvious in tickling videos, painfully so.
Kristin Lea, although she mostly didn't seem to work with Priss and her set, seemed to have a very close rapport with TIB and Kathy. I would guess she knew them both well on a friendly basis.
In the case of Priscilla one got the feeling that she "knew" several of her Femfeet/Realtickling colleagues in the biblical sense! No-one can tell me that Priscilla, despite having a boyfriend (Jason was his name? Was he the tickler who appeared at the end of Without Consent tickling Priscilla and Cierra? It wasn't TIB anyway, not unless he was putting on a fake voice), didn't bat for both teams so to speak. The sheer, raw lust she exuded when sucking the toes or tickling the feet of most of her victims was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy too real to have been faked. I got the impression that Nikki West in particular was more than friends with her.
I think the feeling that a lot of these old nostalgic pics give me is that these days were a sort of "Blue Lagoon" of tickling media. Something that involved a lot of closeness between the participants that was very obvious onscreen and that added immeasurably to the sight of one person tickling the hell out of another. The material that TC released in the era of TIB wearing a Batman mask and lipstick was not even in the same league. Page after page showing twenty clips of either a pink mat and black scene boards, or that upright contraption. It was dire to watch and I stopped buying very quickly. It was also heartbreaking to see all the charisma and originality just drain out of a company whose product I loved. There were some high moments: Jackie French oozed charisma, vulnerability and ticklishness like it was going out of fashion and Sara Lee was also great to watch, before she decided that real tickling wasn't for her and she wanted to head somewhere it was gentler. But on the whole, things headed downhill from 2003/2004.
Well, now TC is RIP and TIB is MIA. That's a loss to the tickling media market. I would have loved to see material come back that recaptured the "classical" era when we had to buy VHS tapes. The early material produced by His TIB-ness ranks to this day, in my verbose and self-important opinion, as the greatest I've ever seen. Priscilla James undoubtedly bears a lot of the credit for that, as she was someone with the sort of lascivious tickling streak one usually only sees in bald, fat, forty-five year old perverts, but in the body of an extremely hot lady in her (then) early twenties. Her charisma and probably her connections in the market of ticklish girlies (assuming my opinion of her is correct) probably accounted for a lot of that. Coupled with TIB and Kathy's production and marketing, it made something that lived brightly and beautifully, but it now sadly only a memory.
Well Brian, you asked for poster feedback and assuming you’ll ever be around here to read it again, that’s my contribution. If ever you come out of retirement, please bear the early days of your tickling vids in mind more than the latter ones. The early ones stand alone.
I'd do pretty much anything to get that clip again. Any chance of Sierra agreeing to a limited new release Brian?
