Is this the ear you can't hear on?
It's a Wonderful Life is a great film that contributed more than a little to the "tradition" of holiday films to follow. Odd, then, the extremely bizarre (and never duplicated, I hope) decision made with my copy of the DVD.
Do read on.
I did a good job this year of not buying for myself while doing my xmas shopping, but at my local record store they happened to have a special: It's a Wonderful Life on DVD for $5 with any purchase. And I was purchasing something anyway, so I thought, what the hell.
I made sure it wasn't the colorized version. I made sure it had its complete 2-hour-plus running time. It looked like a good deal. Light on special features but I really don't care...$5 for It's a Wonderful Life is $5 well spent.
So last night was Christmas night and I still hadn't gotten around to watching it so I settled in about 10 o'clock and popped my DVD into the player.
And wouldn't you know it, it's the hard-of-hearing edition.
Right? We all know better than to accidentally pick up the hard-of-hearing editions of DVDs, don't we? It's something we all look for before we head to the register...
Has anyone out there even heard of the hard-of-hearing edition of anything on DVD?
See, the box says nothing (that I can locate) about it being a hard-of-hearing edition. But the subtitles are permanently on. There is no option to turn them off. There is an option to "change" the language (I'll explain those quotation marks shortly) in the subtitles, but you can't get rid of them.
Why not?
Well, on most DVDs (I'd have previously thought all) the subtitles run on a concurrent video track (right? correct me if I'm wrong...) so that they are really just overlaid onto the actual video of the film. Sort of like a transparency. They're separate, but simultaneous.
With this DVD though the subtitles are part of the main video track...meaning you see them advance when you fast-forward, which usually doesn't happen if they're on a separate track. They actually imprinted the English subtitles on the film itself.
Now what good does this do anybody at all? To have subtitles is fine, but to force them is absurd. That would almost be like forcing the commentary track to run--it's distracting, and not something most people would enjoy.
The best part is this: remember how I mentioned the captions in other languages? Well, normally you'd switch between no captions / English captions / Spanish captions / etc. But since the English captions are already part of the main video track, the foreign language captions actually run directly overtop of the English ones, meaning the text blends together into an unreadable white smear.
God bless us, every one.
So of course I spent some time wondering if any other DVDs had attempted this, and I couldn't find anything to suggest they have. Strange, however, is the fact that I can't even find any reference to this version of It's a Wonderful Life online, leading me to wonder if this was perhaps a run of DVDs that the manufacturer pulled before official distribution, they sat around in a warehouse for some time (copyright 2001), and finally this year they just sent them out as holiday purchasing incentives dirt-cheap to get them out of storage.
Can anyone shed light on this at all? As it stands, I think I own a copy of It's a Wonderful Life that doesn't even officially exist.
About this entry
- By Phil Reed
- Posted on Tuesday, December 26 2006 @ 10:08 pm
- Categorised in Film
- Tagged with it's a wonderful life
- 10 comments
How strange; and annoying...
By Tanya Jones
December 26, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
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"Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends. "
"What?"
"I SAID NO MAN IS A FAILURE WHO HAS FRIENDS."
By Ian Symes
December 26, 2006 @ 11:30 pm
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> But since the English captions are already part of the main video track, the foreign language captions actually run directly overtop of the English ones, meaning the text blends together into an unreadable white smear.
Sounds good. Any chance of some screen grabs?
By And Dragons
December 27, 2006 @ 1:49 am
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That HAS to be a mistake, surely? Any DVD should have the option to turn subtitles off even if they're on by default. Stupid copy.
By Sycorax82
December 27, 2006 @ 2:03 am
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>Any chance of some screen grabs?
At the moment, no. The only screen grab utility I have stops itself from working if you're watching a DVD. Kind of annoying, really...I understand what they're doing but dammit, can't somebody just turn a blind eye?
I'll try to find something free for Mac though.
>That HAS to be a mistake, surely? Any DVD should have the option to turn subtitles off even if they're on by default.
It could well be a mistake. I don't know anything about disc authoring or anything...one thing is almost certain: this was never released officially. I think they printed a certain number, stowed them away (either because they realized their mistake or realized their stupidity), and now are just trying to get rid of them...and short of burying them in the desert next to ET, they pawned them off on schmucks like me at Christmas.
Though, after posting this, a thought occured.
I have a VHS copy of Life is Beautiful...in the original Italian, but with English subtitles. Obviously VHS only had one video track, which meant that the subtitles were actually there, part of each individual frame, just as they are here on It's a Wonderful Life.
I wonder if maybe there was a VHS version of It's a Wonderful Life that had subtitles (hard of hearing version?) and that's what they used as their master for this particular run?
It's a logical enough explanation that I'm pretty much willing to accept that that's what happened. It's quite a shock, though, to hit the "subtitle" button on your remote control until the screen says OFF, and still see the captions there, mocking you...
By Philip J Reed, VSc
December 27, 2006 @ 2:13 am
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It sounds like an insanely early DVD, before the conventions were fully agreed on (not that they ever have been really).
It could have been a flipper-disc which played automatically and had explanatory symbols on the menu (remember them, Columbia-Tristar?), I guess...
Certainly there IS a decent, relatively-recent DVD edition out there (distributed by Universal in the UK).
By Andrew
December 28, 2006 @ 10:31 pm
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I think there are a fair number of Hong Kong movies which have the subtitles burnt onto the video. From what I gather, it generally seems to happen more with the more obscure films rather than the more high-profile releases like Jackie Chan and John Woo movies.
Although it's worth mentioning that the old Tartan Asia Extreme edition of Hard Boiled (the widescreen Tartan one, not the cheap 4:3 Prism one; and the old Tartan edition, not the new Collector's Edition which I've actually never seen in shops, only on the internet) actually has worse picture quality than a widescreen version I videotaped off Channel 4 a couple of years ago.
I like mentioning that whenever I get the chance. :)
By Nick R
December 30, 2006 @ 3:59 pm
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some guy very loud screem to my ear and i feel deaf
By serguei
July 18, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
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some guy very loud screem to my ear and i feel deaf
By serguei
July 18, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
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Evidently this forced subtitle practice wasn't a one-shot deal:
http://www.youknow-forkids.com/dvd.htm
Several releases here have the subtitles listed as "burned in" or "locked on." They don't go into details most of the time but from what I can glean it's the same issue we have here.
By Miguel Sanchez
September 01, 2007 @ 1:11 am
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