Love ’70s? Get funky with Brown Sugar
New service breathes life into bold, old classics starring African-American icons
Brown Sugar may not have the luster of Netflix and Amazon, but the new African-American movie streaming service does have character. Lots of characters.
The lineup among the 100-plus films available at launch includes iconic character-driven 1970s movies such as Black Caesar, Cleopatra Jones, Foxy Brown, Shaft and Super Fly.
You can watch on Android and iOS devices and computers for $3.99 monthly after a one-month free trial period.
Most of Brown Sugar’s collection “are probably not even on DVD or VHS,” actress Pam Grier said in an interview. Grier, who appeared in several films on Brown Sugar, including 1973’s
Coffy and 1974’s Foxy Brown, was enlisted as an ambassador for the service by parent company Bounce TV. “To have a streaming service that shows this amount of content is just wonderful.”
Launched in 2011, Bounce TV is an African-American digital TV network that is now in more than 94 million homes. Among its founders are Martin Luther King III and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young.
Brown Sugar is “just like Netflix, only blacker,” Grier says in a video starring her and fellow spokesmen hip-hop mogul Rick Ross and actor Fred Williamson ( Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem).
Brown Sugar’s collection of films — many of them action movies made on economical budgets — could be timely, “because people are getting tired of special effects movies. ... You watch two bombs explode and 18 cars and nine planes,” Williamson said. “People get tired of all that stuff. People want to see characters.”
And societal norms may have kept some theatergoers away when these flicks hit originally, says Williamson, who earned the nickname “The Hammer” in his NFL career before going into movies. “There’s a lot of people who wanted to see these movies, especially blue-collar white guys, but there were certain things that prevented them,” he said, “They might be embarrassed sitting in a theater watching a film with a black star. This was a problem in the early days.”
This new service, Williamson said, “gives them an opportunity to sit at home and see films they have heard about. They have heard about Black Caesar. They’ve heard about Foxy Brown. They’ve heard about Shaft, but they never had the opportunity to go see it.”
Doing so is like a virtual trip into the Wayback Machine. The clothing, hairdos and music transport you to the ’70s. Some of the movies are in slightly grainy standard definition. Others, such as Foxy Brown, Shaft and Super
Fly, look spiffier but you are reminded of the days before pristine HD and 4K Ultra HD video.
The service says it has the best prints available of the movies it offers. Since most watching for now will be on computers and mobile devices, image quality won’t be much of an issue. Brown Sugar aims to expand to other devices such as Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku Net TV boxes.
If you have time to check out Brown Sugar, forget about the resolution of the image. Just focus on the characters.