A (NSFW) Not-On-DVD Update!

Hey kids:

Remember several dozen posts ago when I posted a little item on what movies weren't on DVD yet?

And one of them was quite a little jaw-dropper by the name of The African Queen?

Remember how surprised I was by the fact that such a classic of American cinema had not yet seen the light of a DVD pressing factory?

Remember that?

Well, guess what?

THIS:

Barnes and Noble

Wal-Mart

Amazon

FYE

Best Buy

Target

Deep Discount

Overstock.com

CD Universe

Blockbuster

DVDs.com


Yes, and it's about ding-danged time, too!

YARSH, what does it take for studios to realize there's a demand for movies this good to be out for public consumption? As the past owners of a particular Iowa farm land-turned baseball field observed, "if you build it, they will come". Well, Paramount made the DVD, and the public has grabbed it up. Point made.

Of course, before THIS little beauty came to be, the world had to make due with little bootlegs from less-than-reputable companies...not like this kind of thing is an everyday occurrence naturally. Heavens forbid.

Not like this was available beforehand:
























And your eyes aren't deceiving you: those ARE Asian symbols just below the actors' names. And no, you've probably never heard of The Castaways DVD company before. Apparently, they're a little company that comes out of the UK that specializes in skimming things like this juuuust under the radar. And since it's an all-regions disc, it can wiggle past the whole Region 1/Region 2/ Region 3 debate.

Thing is, since this was foreign DVD work done on a US movie, when it came to closed-captioning it for other countries, something (even a FEW things) got lost in the translation. Since people apparently worked on this for whom English was, let's just say, not their first language, a few scenes got a little...different.

Take for example the scene near the end of the movie where Bogie and Kate are dressing up the ship to attack a German ship, and they begin to argue about who should be the one to pilot the ship out. Kate rightly asks "Who do you think you are to order me around?" And Bogie, cigar clamped tight in his jaw, storms right up to her and growls, "I'm the Captain, that's who, and I won't take you along!"

Good scene, right? How could they mis-caption that?

Well, I guess Bogie does kind of mumble around his stogie and part of his sentence is hard to understand to the cheap labor they have over at The Castaways, so his semi-classic line instead becomes a line for the ages:


























BOGIE!

Do you kiss Lauren Bacall with that mouth???!

Calling poor Kate Hepburn names, shame on you.

I have yet to see the new pressing for African Queen, so I don't know if they did any better with the captioning or not. Maybe one of my regulars can inform me. I would hope so, seeing as how it just tries to PG-13 the joint up. Maybe they did it on purpose, to appeal to a larger audience who expects some of the Seven Words You Can't Say On Television in every movie they watch nowadays.

Myself, I just hope The Castaways never gets hold of The Sound Of Music; I don't necessarily want to read Julie Andrews cussing out Christopher Plummer.

Dope out.

- TGWD