Video -- When The Top 10 Pale, Try These Offbeat Videos

The big videotape sellers this season are "Fantasia," "Home Alone" and "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves," all priced at $25 or under. But how do you know the person you're buying for doesn't already own all three?

If you're trying to please the cassette junkie who has everything (or may have by Christmas), it's still possible to come up with something interesting he'll never think of. You may have to go through a mail-order company and wait a few weeks for delivery, but if you start now you might make it before the big day. And you'll get points for being original.

Here are a few tapes your videophile is not likely to be getting from anyone else this season:

-- "Festival of Animation" (Mellow Madness, $29.95) and "Animation Celebration" (Expanded Entertainment, $39.95). Fans of the "International Tournee of Animation" programs that play college towns and university districts every year can now own their own copies of the animated shorts that make up the programs. "Festival" includes such favorites as "The Cat Came Back," "The Big Snit" and "Charade," while "Celebration" features more recent cartoons. For information, call Mellow Madness at (916) 444-2266 in Sacramento or Expanded Entertainment at (213) 473-6701 in Los Angeles.

-- "Jane Campion Shorts" (Facets Video, $49.95). A collection of prize-winning early shorts from New Zealand's best-known filmmaker. "Peel: An Exercise in Discipline" is the ridiculous true story of an impasse involving a stubborn young father and his rebellious 10-year-old son's habit of tossing orange peels out of a moving car. "A Girl's Own Story," a 27-minute featurette about adolescent angst, is dedicated to the filmmaker's parents, the Beatles and "the spirit of the '60s." Best of all is "Passionless Moments," a 13-minute collection of the sorts of misunderstandings, missed opportunities and embarrassing episodes that can fill a day without really registering or adding up to anything. As Campion puts it: "There are a million moments in your neighborhood; each has a fragile presence which fades almost as it forms." For information, call Facets at (800) 331-6197 in Chicago.

-- "Babalu Music!" (FoxVideo, $14.98). "Weird Al" Yankovic assembled this 51-minute collection of "I Love Lucy's" greatest hits, made up mostly of Ricky Ricardo's Tropicana performances, among them "Cuban Pete" (with Lucy joining Desi Arnaz), "Cheek to Cheek," "California Here I Come," "Straw Hat Song," a birthday-party version of the "I Love Lucy" theme, "We're Having a Baby" and "Babalu," in which Arnaz/Ricardo attacks a conga drum. There's also an MTV-style dance collage, assembled from pieces of the show, that Yankovic put together.

-- "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History" (Facets Video, $39.95). This Australian import is a nonfiction comedy about the animal world's answer to kudzu. Imported from Hawaii to Queensland in the 1930s, 102 cane toads quickly multiplied and became millions. Through interviews with cane-toad haters and a few people who have adopted them as pets, director Mark Lewis suggests that a fine madness is abroad in certain parts of Northern Australia. The pro-toad people want to erect a monument to the creatures. Their children put them in dresses and doll houses and stage mock tea parties, and some people smoke their poison. One addict, filmed in shadows, talks about discovering the Yaqui magician Don Juan's "separate reality" through toad poison, seeing the world the way a cactus or a cane toad sees it.

-- "Elvis in the Movies" (Good Times Home Video, $9.95). This 80-minute tape is being promoted as a documentary, but it's really a collection of all the preview trailers produced for the 33 movies Presley made between 1956 and 1972. The visual-aural quality isn't great - the color in "Viva Las Vegas" and "It Happened at the World's Fair" looks particularly washed-out (the brand-new Space Needle is enveloped in a haze) - but the black-and-white early films still look pretty good.

-- "The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays" (Rhino Home Video, $19.98). The late Frank Capra didn't make many Hollywood movies during the 1950s, but he did write, produce and direct several entries in the Bell Science series, a collection of hourlong documentaries aimed at schoolchildren ("Our Mr. Sun," "Hemo the Magnificent," also available from Rhino). This may be the best of them: a kind of science-fact thriller featuring animation by Shamus Culhane ("Betty Boop"). For information, call Rhino at (800) 843-3670 in Santa Monica.

-- "Westinghouse Studio One" (Movies Unlimited, $24.99 apiece). This series of hourlong early television dramas includes "Wuthering Heights" and "Of Human Bondage" (both with Charlton Heston), "Pontius Pilate" (with Cyril Ritchard), "Jane Eyre" (with Kevin McCarthy) and a 1951 production of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" set in fascist Italy. Movies Unlimited has tapes of many other vintage television programs, including "The Jack Benny Show," "Doctor Who," "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Upstairs Downstairs." For information, call (800) 523-0823 in Philadelphia.