For 17 years, it was one of the most requested films in America. You could not legally buy it or rent it. It played on television, people taped it, dubs got passed around, but no store ever stocked it, because the studio that made it could not afford to release it.

AMERICAN POP (1981) is Ralph Bakshi's animated history of a century of American music told through four generations of one Russian Jewish family. It opens with a boy fleeing a Cossack raid that kills his father, a rabbi, and follows the bloodline through vaudeville, Prohibition, jazz, the beats, psychedelia, and finally punk, each generation inheriting the same musical gift and the same capacity for ruin.

It features music from Dylan, Hendrix, The Doors, Lou Reed, Bob Seger, Pat Benatar, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvis, Heart, and more.

When the songs were cleared around 1980, home video barely existed, so contracts covered theaters only. The rock stars had licensed their songs cheaply because they thought Bakshi was cool, the man who made cartoons for adults.

When video exploded, re-clearing dozens of the most expensive songs in the catalog cost more than anyone would pay. So the film sat, stranded by its own soundtrack, until 1998.

Bakshi has long expressed disdain for the Hollywood machine. Summing up his frustration with the studio system, Bakshi said this: "My good films were independent and my bad films were not."