On the one hand, it claims to be ‘official’ and ‘sealed’ and the seller has a fairly good feedback rating.
On the other hand, the phrase ‘Quality is excellent’ often appears on bootleg/pirate movie listings and ‘What you see in the picture above is exactly what you get’ could either be a guarantee or a disclaimer.
A small handful of feedback comments (out of the 2+ thousand) mention non-original or copied materials, however, these are just a few comments - a small enough number to be possibly attributable to noise/stupidity etc.
Of course I’ll ask the seller, but there’s no real way to be sure that the answer I get will be believable.
What do you think? At the moment I’m tending toward the ‘no’ side of undecided.
That’s pretty much an admission that it’s a bootleg. Unless for some reason the person discards the original cases and replaces them with “official” blank DVD cases with inserts.
That’s much more of an admission. “I ripped the whole DVD – not just the main movie.”
The good feedback is probably a reflection of the (relative) honesty of his descriptions. Not many people would bite on that if they weren’t going to be happy with a copy. (Steeply-priced copies, though. Eesh. What nerve.)
Good point, although he’s selling more than one of this item (and it looks like it might be a stock item anyway), so a shot of an opened pack wouldn’t be out of the question.
IMDB doesn’t list this film as available either on DVD or in Region 2 - this also adds weight to the idea of it being a copy. I’m not buying. I’ll post back if/when I get a response from the seller anyway.
I just looked through the first 600 reviews & found 11 references to receiving copies. Some from positive reviewers. One guy bought more than one movie & received one original & one copy. I think it most likely that this is a copy. Probably a good one. :dubious:
The 1979 animated version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was made for TV by CBS and is supposed to be available on VHS only. Based on the cover art, that is the version your seller is offereing. It looks like the copy on eBay is a HK factory-made bootleg. The production standards are pretty high with those copies, and a lot of times it’s hard to tell the difference between a bootleg and the real thing.
The 1988 animated version was made by the BBC, and is available on DVD. The cover art - and everything else about that disk - are different than the one apparently for sale here.
Regarding a “sealed” film. If you mean with that crap clear plastic shrink-wrap, anbody can do that. You get a roll of special plastic film, put the DVD/VCR in it, hold a hair dryer over it until it shrinks to fit.
I used to work at a small electronics store and they would re-shrink wrap all of the used videos for sale. They never claimed they were “new”, unused videos, but they never admitted they weren’t.
Campus Crusade for Christ is selling it on DVD on their website, with nearly the same packaging. (The DVD label is uninterrupted image to the hub, unlike the eBay version.)
I have a hard time fathoming that they’d be selling pirated copies – but at the same time, they don’t seem to have any problem with characterizing it as “A NEW ANIMATED DVD!” without mentioning that the content of the DVD is twenty-five years old.
I think it has probably seen at least limited distribution as a legitimate DVD, though.
Well, the seller hasn’t responded to my question (I just asked ‘is it a factory-pressed disc or is it a DVDR or something?’). I thnk that’s enough for me.
If there are a bunch of good-looking HK factory bootlegs in circulation, isn’t it possible that CCC has also been taken in?