*Bounce TV is joining the subscription streaming service world by launching a new app called Brown Sugar — available on mobile phones, tablets and online for $4 per month.
The service is home to iconic movies that defined the blaxploitation genre, including: The Mack, Foxy Brown, Shaft, Super Fly, Dolemite, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Uptown Saturday Night, Cooley High, Three The Hard Way, Coffy, Black Caesar, Five on the Black Hand Side, Cleopatra Jones, Mandingo, Willie Dynamite, Which Way is Up?, Car Wash, and The Original Gangstas.
“I’m really excited to share what we’re doing. This is so broad,” actress Pam Grier told Vibe magazine. “When we look at such a collection that is so large, it transcends and encompasses so many films that I have done that reflect pop culture, but so many artists like Shaft (Richard Roundtree), he’s the real James Bond to me. You have Ron O’Neal, Eddie Murphy, [just] so many films, that you have can stream to see what our pop culture was.”
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Grier became known in the early 1970s for starring in a string of successful women in prison and blaxploitation films like The Big Bird Cage, Coffy, Foxy Brown and Sheba Baby. She starred in Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress.
Pam Grier and actor Fred “The Hammer” Williamson are the ambassadors of the app, alongside producer and fan of the blaxploitation genre Rick Ross. The trio appear in a new commercial for the streaming service, check it out below.
“You can see the influence of these movies in every aspect of rap and hip-hop; in the music, the lyrics, the fashion and overall style,” Ross said in a statement. “The Blaxploitation genre is where it all began.”
“Brown Sugar is just like Netflix, only blacker,” Grier said. To those unfamiliar these films, Pam describes ’em like this: “Kids today are a reflection of who they are and where they’re going and how they’re responding to what’s going on in the world. They’ve learned inclusion and we’re having issues of exclusion. The kids today are what I was 40 years ago, standing up and making an identity and fighting for it.”
She continued: “It is education and revisiting a time where they could sit with their parents and grandparents about what we wrote and danced to. That’s what was happening then and every generation will have it. Whether it’s SXSW or Burning Man. You see artists interchanging and sharing their music and passion. It comes from the heart and sometimes it comes from the sword. The African American soul is not monolithic, it’s liberal, moderate, fundamental and conservative. The music is based off plain old church gospel.”
Read Pam’s full Vibe interview HERE
You can also get your free trial of Brown Sugar HERE.
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