Chinese DVDs

I've been thinking about this new post for some time. It will take me a lot more work than most, but I just spent 90 minutes choosing and scanning the pictures for it, so I'm ready to go.

We've been buying quite a few DVDs here. There are barely any movie theaters, and they typically don't show any English subtitles (not that we have been to one to see for ourselves). However, there are DVD shops everywhere.

Well, they were everywhere at first. Then, they all shut down for several weeks. From some expat friends who are married to locals, I finally heard that there was a big police crackdown. Apparently, Suzhou received a government recognition as a model city of some sort, so their was a huge push to crack down on illegalities, both large and small. That was also why there was so much traffic enforcement at our nearest intersection.

For a while, there were guys out selling DVDs streetside off of temporary stands. Now all the shops are back in business. Obviously the shops were able to wait out the cops.

The DVDs are all, by definition, pirated. One could have ethical qualms about that if one wished, but there is literally nothing else to buy. A typical single movie costs 10 RMB, or about $1.50. A boxed set for a television show might cost anywhere from 70 to 150 RMB. Video games, buy the way, are even cheaper. Except that only about one in four will actually work.

The quality varies wildly, although it is often better than you would think. We have only purchased one that was just filmed in a theater with a camcorder, the movie 10,000 B.C. The movie was so bad that there wasn't much a bad pirating job could do to make it worse.

Despite being pirated, there has often been quite a bit of work put into the packaging. However, the packaging is photoshopped and cobbled together in truly bizarre ways. You now that old joke about enough monkeys at enough typewriters would someday write a novel? Maybe they would just produce a pirated DVD. It is better to show than to explain, so without further ado, I give you two items of evidence.

Exhibit A: Battlestar Galactica.

When I was a kid, the premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica was cut off so that President Jimmy Carter could give a speech. If there had been suffrage for pre-teen boys, his 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan would have been even worse (no, that doesn't count as talking about politics).

In any case, if you haven't ever watched it as an adult, the old show really stinks. It isn't as wretched as Buck Rogers in the 25th century (Lee and I once ordered it from our Blockbuster Online account back home to try and watch with the kids, it is worse than you can imagine), but it is bad.

However, this new Battlestar Galactica is really good, except that we had to buy it four times. In the first three sets I purchased, it was missing half of the second season. Apparently the pirates even pirate the pirates, because the copies were all coming from the same bad source.

Looking at a pirated DVD packages is a lot like one of those "Find everything wrong with this picture" features in the newspaper. So if you want to study it and see how many problems you can spot before I go on, by my guest.

Here are some of the more notable anomalies on this package:

Item 1: The front cover photo collage.

This truly is a photo of several of the principal cast members from the show. However...

The background image is taken from a completely different sci-fi TV show: Stargate Atlantis

and this section is from Star Trek

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Now we move on the back cover

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Item 2: The Reviewer Quotes

I'm quite sure that Battlestar Galactica is neither a "Tween Comedy" nor a horror movie. I'm also quite sure that there is not a city called "Geiroit". I'm doubtful that San Francisco has a newspaper known as the "Chronich".

Item 3: The Extra Features Box

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And this is obviously taken from yet another completely different movie. This sort of thing is extremely common on DVD packaging here. Maybe they think no one is going to read the fine print, so why bother making it match?

Exhibit B: Iron Man

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Once again, the packaging looks quite normal at first glance. However, study it closely...

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Item 1: The Reviewer Quote

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This time it isn't actually a review quote at all, just some random text that was cut-and-pasted off of IMDB, a movie info website. Sometimes, you can actually find bad reviews used on the cover, literally saying "This movie sucks".

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Item 2: The Proof of Purchase

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Maybe there is a market for counterfeit DVD proofs of purchase. Can I redeem these for a plush toy or something?

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Item 3: The Aspect Ratio description

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I always check to make sure I'm buying movies widescreen. When I taught high school and sometimes used movie clips to illustrate a point, I would invariably have a kid complain that the top and bottom were cut off. I would try to explain that it fact, to make a full-screen movie, they "panned and scanned", cutting off the sides of a widescreen movie. Some of the dimmer kids never could get the concept. However, in this case, they would have been right..

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A scene from Iron Man, in which Gwenyth Paltrow's chest talks to some guy's chin.

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As you can see, for this disc they took a full screen version (which was already cropped) and then literally chopped off the top and the bottom to make it "widescreen".

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Conclusion:

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Some of this is just typical Chinese bad English. Some of this is just lazy photoshopping over the top of a previous package. But I am convinced that some of this actually has to be intentional. One example that I don't have to show you is a Battlestar Galactica sets that I didn't buy (I'd already bought two at that point, and I wasn't going to buy another just for laughs). The title logo looked exactly the same, except that it was spelled GALACTIGA. Putting together a finished logo like that was not just a matter of typing, and it would have been much more work than just cutting and pasting. I think that there are guys out there amusing themselves by putting stupid things on DVD covers.

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Either that, or I'm back to the monkeys and typewriters explanation.

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