As God is my witness, I feared he was going to have rented something about the Hutu/Tutsi genocides. And I feared more that I would laugh about his horrified reaction.
Oh, and duh.
I remember the first time I was annoyed by this practice: not long after The Lion King came out, I remember seeing Walmart stocking copies of “Kimba: The White Lion” near their registers.
“Geez,” thought I, “how lousy that some company made a cheap knockoff of ‘The Lion King’ just to cash in on kids like me. Man, it even looks like they blatantly copied Pride Rock for the settings.”
It wasn’t until years later I discovered that Kimba predated the Disney movie and that Disney almost certainly…took inspiration. That said, the Walmart VHS copies definitely had a cover redrawn to make it more Lion Kingy. I want to say it was even sold in a white clamshell case like Disney movies were.
Sure. I think that any full-catalog source like Netflix should carry them, and it should tune its search algorithms so the movie most people are looking for shows up at the top of the search results (even if it’s not yet out on DVD). I think they do a pretty good job with that.
Redbox carries only a tiny selection of movies. They should pick ones that their customers want, not the ones they can be suckered into renting.
For fellow Dudley Moore fans, I should point out that Seven is by no means a prequel to Ten. Caveat emptor!