Let the retarded complaints begin [Borat DVD]

Cafe Society
1

This is gonna be HILARIOUS. We have a DVD buffer? to take scratches out of DVDs? cuz our customers treat them like crap? Every day someone goes, “Oh, so you burn a copy for every rental?” or “Is that machine for destroying DVDs?” or some such stupid question.

The *Borat *DVD is packaged–once you remove the cardboard sleeve, which of course we must to put rentables on the shelf–completely without any English. It’s designed to look like a cheap bootleg, and all the writing is in Cyrillic. The disc itself looks like a cheap knockoff of a blank DVD (“Demorez. Is live? No, is Demorez.”) with the single word “BORAT” inked by Sharpie (R reversed Cyrillically).

I cannot wait to see what kind of bewilderment this is going to bring about in our customers.

2

That’s pretty clever. Although I’m curious- does the DVD have the standard things such as a Fox logo and copyright, FBI logo and piracy warning*, and R-rating logo? I would be surprised if it didn’t.

*According to Entertainment Weekly, there’s an additional warning on the disc itself after the FBI warning: “Selling piratings of this videodisc will result in punishment by crushing.”

3

I’ve seen other less high-profile ways to do this while not ruining the unofficial/amateur appearance. The easiest is for the ‘American’ necessities to be added to the case on an adhesive label. And if the curious want to see what’s underneath, maybe have a meaningless alternative barcode, meaningless rating system and nonsensical pricing on the box itself.

4

Not on the packaging- I mean the real disc itself.

5

The packaging itself is all in Cyrillic, albeit with English credits and a real bar code. (There is an English slipcover, however.)

6

I answered my own question: I saw a picture of the disc itself online, and on the right-hand side are the words “WIDESCREEN (or FULLSCREEN, as the case may be, I guess) ©2007 FOX.” I wouldn’t be confused if I saw that (along with the fact that “Is life? No. Is Demorez” is an obvious play on “Is it real or is it Memorex?”).

7

Moderately funny hijack - I have a recently immigrated Ukranian friend who spontaneously decided to complain to me about his computer by saying “My laptop. It makes me so mad, sometimes, I want to crush it!” (complete with waving his fist in the air threateningly). And he was completely genuine. Later I told him that in our fiction, Eastern Europeans are portrayed as having a propensity threaten to crush things/people. He said he had no previous knowledge of that stereotype, but laughed “I guess they got that one right”.

BTW, Borat, despite supposedly being Kazakh, is of course more of a caricature of Eastern Europeans (and has threatened to crush people).

8

A guy I work with put a copy of the Borat DVD on the counter, since Friday, with a little sign that says–“Rent it today–NOT!” (It doesn’t “drop” till Tuesday.)

Biggest surprise of my week? Not a single customer who noticed it didn’t get it. Weird.