Hi all, this question is mainly for the older people on here, how hard was it to get hold of WAM videos and magazines before the Internet,unlike now as its all easy.

Very.

Although our expectations were, accordingly, infinitely lower

*bristles at being an 'older person' *

There is probably more WAM published on here in a single day than in a year back in the late 80s/early 90s.

In the UK, you had Splosh and the associated videos, plus the occasional scene in an ordinary top-shelf magazine. I only discovered Splosh by accident through an appearance in a 'newspaper' that was passed around a student minibus I was on. You then had all the fun of their slightly erratic distribution that led to my first copy being delivered to the house across the road (luckily they didn't open it!).

As I recall, Splosh required a money order in pounds, so I had to go to a bank in D.C. that did such things, and the cashier was a very proper Englishman, who inquired pleasantly what this "Splosh" thing was.

Finding a VHS that no one ever watched, and recording over it with stuff I saw on TV. Then hiding the tape. It worked out pretty well for awhile. I also had a collection of thrown out Victoria Secret catalogs. It was a tough time being a teen, but I guess my dad had it harder.

In the early 1990's I subscribed to Rob Blaine's Messy News. There were lots of videos sold through Rob, some produced by Messy Fun, plus others such as from Sloppy, Sopping, and Submerged. I think it started out as a "bimonthly publication of Messy Fun devoted to lovers of wet and messy fun". Then it became a "quarterly publication of ... ", and then a "periodic publication of ... ". For sure there was not as much content there as is available on umd.com, but at least it WAS available.

Until I discovered the Internet in 1998, I didn't know WAM was a "thing". The only WAM tape I had prior was a self made VHS of clips from things I taped off of TV. Boy I wore that out! I remember I had the Moonlighting pie fight, YCDTOTV clips, the Growing Pains pie fight, oh I wish I could remember it all. I threw it out when I was "purging the devil" from my life back when I cared about that kind of stuff. lol

When I was a teenager in the 70s there was nothing at all, apart from a scene I remember once in penthouse magazine in about 1977. It did, interestingly, produce quite a few letters to the magazine liking it, so I realized then it wasn't just me!

As others have said, I did not know that I wasn't alone in this fetish until AFTER I got out of college. I thought I must be the weirdest dude in the world for having a fetish for girls getting hit in the face with pies. WTF?! Who likes that.
Two things changed that. Sometime in the early 1990s I saw an interview with the director John Waters (he made trash-chic movies set in Baltimore). Anyway, he mentioned Splosh magazine and how there are these weird dudes who get off on women getting messy. A light went off. Shortly thereafter I got an internet connection and one of the first things I searched for on the nascent web was "pie in the face" and "splosh". Boom! Not alone anymore. This is the early 1990s-- not a lot out there, but it was enough. Anyone remember binary groups? alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy?

Right up till I got my first modem and first went on-line in 1995, I thought I was the only person on the planet with a fetish for fully clothed WAM. I had made some attempts to see if there was any material of that nature out there - I remember asking a video store owner in Amsterdam, with lots of nude wrestling vids, if he had any fully clothed oil or mud wrestling scenes. He looked at me as if I'd asked for a deep-fried ferret on a stick. I'd very occasionally come across fully clothed shower scenes in other people's porn mags but even those tended to involve losing the clothes real quick.

The in 95 I went on-line and on about the third day did a search for something like wet clothes - and Rob Blaine's name came up. Made contact and the rest is history.

It was only after meeting Rob on-line that I found out (from him) about Splosh, and the other early producers. I used to order a Messy Fun VHS video every six months, by posting a cheque to the US. It would take up to six weeks for the banks to clear it and deposit the money in Rob's account so he could send out the tape, and another few days for it to then arrive even by air-mail. You could also order photosets, which usually ran to 25 or 50 6" x 4" photographs.

Back then there was no PayPal, no Google, no eBay, no YouTube, and indeed no UMD - that only came along in 98. Searching for anything on the web meant using the incredibly new-fangled Altavista Search Engine - altavista.digital.net. Or the equally new-fangled Yahoo!

Rob confirmed that he'd heard from lots and lots of people who had all spent years thinking they were the only one with this fetish. I think if you lived somewhere like London there was more chance of stumbling across wam-related stuff, but if you lived anywhere else chances are you'd never encounter anything or anyone else with it.

Hard? It was virtually impossible. My interests lead me to believe I was one of the weirdest people on earth. With no real way to record anything and no way to research your interest we had to rely a lot more on luck and imagination. I could go on an on about the challenges but some examples would be -

Searching in the library I found a reference to "Life" magazine about quicksand but my local library didn't keep old editions of Life. I kept the date in my head and started going to flea markets and junk sales with my mom since I was about 14. After a year or so I finally located this 1963 issue of "Life" and inside was a modest black-and-white photo of Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg sinking in quicksand from an Italian movie "The Mongols". The image was sufficient to fry my 15 year old brain. Fortunately there were some Astronauts on the cover so I paid fifty cents for it and took it home. This was 1978 and I had already been searching for a year just for this single image. I searched old movie shows on broadcast tv for years afterward trying to find this movie. Nothing. There were others but rarely was it something good and there was no way to record anything. The first big breakthrough came with the advent of home video. I spent hours searching all the mom and pop video stores for sources. Later came Compuserve BBS in the days before internet. This is where I discovered "Something Weird Video Service". After weeks of snail mail correspondence I learned they could get "The Mongols". Mailed a check and waited. This is in the early 90's and I was married with a home of my own now. Days...weeks...finally it arrived and after roughly 16 years of effort I finally got to see this one scene I'd been wanting.

Then came a night in February 1995 when I had internet coming over a 2400 baud connection. That was the night it hit my brain to type "quicksand" into the Netscape search and see what happened. I wasn't expecting much but what came back absolutely changed my life - I WAS NOT ALONE!!!! I sat there as "The Quicksand Page" slowly scrolled down in front of my and at the bottom was "Messyfun" and Rob Blaine's alpha model Shaun hip deep in a red dress. My brain and heart simultaneously went into an overdrive that I have never before or since experienced. I literally did not sleep for three full days as I searched every nook and cranny of the available internet for more. I discovered alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy in USENET and here were others like me! I found Messyfun and Splosh! magazine! THE MPV BBS! I got a post office box and began mailing out checks like crazy. Everything still had to be transacted by snail mail. I thought it couldn't get any better. And this was all at the post office and internet and a BBS at 2400 baud!

This is why I want to slap the shit out of kids who complain now. You have to wait five whole minutes?!!! Too expensive?!!!! I can get 27000 times more stuff in seconds for free now than I spent half of my life searching for when I was younger. Literally.

Below is the difference from 1978 to 2018 Now I get to make whatever I want and indulge every fetish interest I ever had with some insanely beautiful and talented ladies. Yeah that's me with the camera. Life is good.

Dude, I'm there with you, and I'm younger. Like I said in my post, the generation before me had it even harder. At least I had VCRs growing up.

This all sounds so similar to my experience. Especially with Rob and the photo sets Wish everyone could know this for those days when I might seem overly enthusiastic around here.

Rob Blaine (Messy Fun) and I used to converse on bulletin boards in the late 80s and early 90s. He used to post me slides for a projector. Bill Shipman (Splosh) also used to sell slides and he also started producing the Splosh magazine in 1989

Oh joy when I was a lad

Wen i firts had the intenet i was 18 and the first thing i came across was crazy girls. Then umd. So i guss by reading tbe comments u all glad tbe Internet came lol.

Brilliant - I remember a penthouse from the 70's with two naked girls mudwrestling in grey mud. I was blown away by it realising that my fetish probably wasn't unique after all

I remember having a lot of the Nickelodeon messy game clips etc but the jackpot for me was Ann Margret in Tommy. That scene is unbeatable.

I never thought i'd say this in a thread but...

this thread makes me feel young

The first spark for me was the mudwrestling in Stripes but nothing really twigged fully until i stumbled upon some wam site (might have been Allwam back when it was just Allwam with the tons of mud wrestling) in the mid-ish 00's. Then i roamed around whatever i could find until stumbling onto UMD. Lurked for a few years til i made an account about 7 years ago.

I found Splosh's "Hot Coffee and Sticky Buns" for sale in WH Smiths believe it or not (VHS obviously).

That was before I had internet so guess it would have been my first ever WAM purchase.

Did manage to get a couple of subsequent ones from there too before they stopped selling "that sort of thing" for some reason...

Hi, I used to tape stuff of telly and hide the tape!
I was quite late to the Internet, around 2000
I remember seeing Splosh! mentioned in FHMonce and spending ages looking for it. I was also the kid who wrote into FHM problem pages about my fetish. They published it under the title 'Custard Gives me the horn!" I'd love to see that magazine again actually, as it fuelled several energetic teenage tugs!

Some of these responses sound very much like my own story. The earliest WAM influence I can remember is seeing footage from Woodstock (1969) with people mud-sliding. I was turning seven that summer, and was fascinated by the idea. My mom thought it would NOT make a good birthday party activity, unfortunately!
I spent my teens and twenties searching vainly for images of girls in wet clothing. Aside from the very rare Playboy or Penthouse photo, there was nothing. One day in 1992 (near my 30th birthday), I was flipping through a mens magazine (Mayfair, I believe), and to my absolute shock, there was a small photo of a girl covered in mud- in her clothes! It was a small piece on Messy Fun, complete with mailing address. That opened the door for me- I immediately ordered "My Friend Shaun" (for $60!!) and was floored. I still have that videotape, along with several others purchased from Rob.
For Christmas, 1994, I received a 'WebTV' box- basically a browser that used one's TV as a monitor- and one of the first sites I visited was Messy Fun. The rest, as they say, is history.

Wasn't very easy at all!!!

Nearly impossible. All that was available was an occasional pie-in-the-face scene on a TV comedy. However, I remember sitting in a movie theater with my 8mm movie camera (yes, 8mm) trying to film the pie scene from "The Great Race." When I had the film developed, it was so dark, you could hardly see anything. Then, I remember browsing in a photography store in NYC and finding a 8mm reel for sale featuring a couple of the highlights from "The Silencers," a Matt Helm movie starring Dean Martin. Luckily, it included the mud scene with Stella Stevens. The internet changed everything!

I'd have to agree with the above. I can remember in the late 80s watching YCDTOTV and Double Dare and feeling uncomfortable, as I was just learning about my sexuality. I'd always been a bookworm and early tech adopter, so I used a lot of BBS sites before the Internet was really a thing.

After a while, I was doing astronomy research on the Messier galaxy, and one of the links that pulled up was for MessyFun. What I saw there blew me away. There were other people like me out there - I thought I had to be the weirdest guy on the planet.

Over time, I got exposed to Splosh magazine (which a business-owner friend of mine ordered for me on the sly), and Messygirl back when it was just starting out, and later Clown Julie, Gilly's Silly House, and many others. Even later than that there was semi-messy sites like Slimewave and Strap-On Cum.

As my brain tried to process everything, I eventually took classes in psychology and got fairly good at it (though I never was certified). I developed a theory about fetishism and posted it on the net, which got me some heat. Now, I still look at the pictures rarely, but it's a part of my history.

It was very difficult. Until "Splosh" came along (I started with issue two), you had to scour the top shelf magazines for a wet/messy shoot. Thence we could buy slides from the likes of Wet Shots in Stoke on Trent. I remember being on a business trip in Stoke so having stored the address mentally I decided to go round there.

Unfortunately there were two streets with virtually indentical names. Inevitably I went to the wrong one first. Success at the second attempt to be greeted at the dor by a young lady who I recognised from the photographs, so bought a set of her in a muddy cow watering place near a canal or river. I think she was surprised to have a customer knocking on the door.

Then the centre of activity seemed to move to Tenby. I seem to recall that one young model having been "bathing" in the mud at Landshipping was unfortunately struck by a clean up shower failure and had to walk through the streets of Tenby in a totaly muddied state. Incidentally Leon Moomin's home town was Tenby, but he says he was totally ignorant of the "scene" there and kicks himself for not knowing about it.

Brian Glover's Crazy Girls offered another source of material. I seem to remember he offered a "bonus" to anygirl who would pose for him on their sixteenth birthday (legal at that time) and subsequently on their eighteeth birthday. He offered cheap holidays to his villa in Spain in return for a few shoots out there.

Now you have the internet you have no need of VHS tapes, Slides and magazines. You young'uns don't know you're born, y'know.

I would catch wet or messy in a movie. I'd write it down and maybe rent it if I wanted to see it again or record it if I caught the movie coming on again in the TV listings. Rosanna Arquette wet in Big Blue comes to mind. I also remember a scene where a lady was put in the shower fully clothed to be waken up or something. Can't remember the name of that. Ferris Bueller's pool scene with Mia Sara.

what would i have done with a "WAM video"? Played it on my Super 8 projector?

You'd watch a show with a (surprise) WAM scene and... that was it. If you were lucky, you could catch it on the rerun that summer, or (like "Love & The Bakers Dozen") TV Guide would have a photo feature on it.

Instead I used my imagination: I'd see and sometimes keep photos that looked like the girl was about to get a pie in the face or lose her balance and fall into the pool. I'd then fantasize about what was going to happen next. I still get excited by such photos. Several pie-fantasy examples are attached here. On the one where the woman is actually holding a pastry (#4), even better! and isn't she holding it like she is about to throw it? The debutante (3rd photo) is also great, like Curly in In The Sweet Pie & Pie but sexier.

How hard? they hadn't even invented the White Plastic Chair yet!