1994: YEAR IN REVIEW : VIDEO : Seven Dwarfs Slay Dinosaur! : In a boom year of ‘event’ releases, so far ‘Snow White’ is whomping ‘Jurassic Park’ in the fight for video supremacy.

This was the year “Jurassic Park” was snowed in. Steven Spielberg’s monster blockbuster may be the biggest box-office hit of all time, but when it came to video, T. rex and the raptors were no match for Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Sneezy and Dopey.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with its reported 27 million copies sold to retailers and mass merchants, pulled the magic carpet out from under the previous sales champ, Disney’s “Aladdin.” “Jurassic Park” has shipped 24 million copies.

This Super Bowl matchup for video supremacy, which kicked off in October during the video industry’s lucrative holiday-oriented fourth quarter, is still being played out in stores (of these millions of titles shipped, how many will eventually be bought by consumers?). So far, Ms. White is outselling Mr. Rex.

Such “event” releases capped one of video’s most winning seasons, particularly from a retail perspective. A few years ago, it would have cost you about $90 to buy on video such hits as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” or “Speed.” This year, both were priced for the sell-through market for less than $25.

No longer did a title need to be primarily for children or their families, a classic collectible or one that took in more than $100 million at the box office.

“Sell-through was really the story this year,” said Bart Story, Video Store magazine’s director of market research. “The studios took a greater risk putting out titles for consumer purchase, an option that in prior years they wouldn’t have considered viable.”

Family films continue to dominate sell-through. The year’s Top 10 titles released directly to sell-through (as opposed to being first marketed as a rental title and later reduced in price for the consumer) were: “Snow White,” “Jurassic Park,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “The Fox and the Hound,” “The Flintstones,” “Speed,” “The Return of Jafar,” “Beethoven’s 2nd,” “The Fugitive” and “D2: The Mighty Ducks.”

From “The Secret Garden,” released in February, to “Tim Burton’s ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ ” in September, this year was also distinguished by the consistent stream of video hits, “more hits than ever before,” said John Thrasher, Tower Records/Video vice president of video purchasing and distribution. “It proved that video is a year-round business rather than a fourth-quarter business.”

Vying for more market share or at least more video store shelf space, studios continued to mine their vaults for buried treasures that they released on video for the first time. For the second year, Fox Video released at least one of its designated “Studio Classics” on the first Wednesday of each month. In 1994, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Carmen Jones” and “Call Northside 777” made their long-awaited debuts.

Cabin Fever Entertainment launched its “Little Rascals” collection with 12 volumes of the original, pre-MGM shorts. The series, hosted by Leonard Maltin, was one of the year’s surprise hits, with nearly 3 million individual tapes sold.

While it was a great year for sell-through, which enjoyed a 14% increase over last year, it was considered merely a good year for rental, which experienced a 2% growth, Story said.

The Top 10 videocassette rentals of 1994 were “The Fugitive,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Pelican Brief,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Philadelphia,” “Grumpy Old Men,” “Tombstone,” “Speed” and “Jurassic Park.”

Video is a Hollywood hit-driven business, but it was an encouraging year for other categories of programming. Special-interest video sales increased by nearly 25%, said Paul Caravatt, president and executive director of the Special Interest Video Assn.

SIVA defines a special-interest video as a program that deals with “subjects that teach, train, guide, inform, inspire, entertain, enlighten and enrich.”

Special interest had its hits too. The 1992 release “Road Construction Ahead” is a phenomenon described by Caravatt as “the Jane Fonda workout of original children’s tapes--it was the right tape at the right time.”

Its success spawned an increasing number of programs that give children the chance to live out their vehicular fantasies. These include the “There Goes . . . “ series on A-Vision Entertainment’s KidVision label, “Garbage Day!” from Child Vision and “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up: Railroaders” from Big Kid Productions.*