I thought I’d read it all during Excess Hollywood when Doug often talked of folks who complained that their movies were faulty because it came in widescreen and they couldn’t see the whole picture.
But a few days ago, I learned that not only the DVD sellers have it bad, but the DVD bootleggers, too.
I would personally never promote, or influence into you buying a bootleg, or downloading a movie you didn’t pay for, but often times when the bootleggers approach me on the street, they’re swarmed with folks looking for a deal.
They’re willing to pay five bucks for a DVD-R in a white envelope with a movie slip, just to watch a bootleg that 60 percent likely, will look terrible. I know, because my friends and family buys them often.
Again, I would never promote or influence this behavior, but I can’t stop people from buying bootlegs off the street.
But I digress.
A few days ago, while sitting in a hospital waiting room for my nephew, a woman comes in to sell bootlegs.
This older woman who looked to be a little in her forties, bought a bootleg days before, it seems, and approached this woman bearing DVD bootlegs about “The Simpsons.”
It seems her bootleg featured Bart Simpson running in the nude, and exposing a good portion of his lower torso, including his penis, and this annoyed her. It’s not enough the movie is rated PG-13, or that it has course language, but the woman was especially annoyed at this nude scene.
It seems, she says, she was watching it with her kids, and this nude scene appeared. Angered, the customer asked the bootlegger if it was possible if she could cut the scene from the bootleg itself for her children.
This request brought on a rush of thoughts and annoyances that I really couldn’t muster up at the time, and still can’t.
The fact this woman was demanding specialties from a bootlegger, demanded a scene cut from an illegal copy of a theatrical release, and the fact that PG-13 didn’t strike a chord that perhaps there’d be something not suitable for kids was shocking.
But even more shocking was that this is a woman who was basically stealing, and wanted to be given an exception from a lady who was really just selling them and had no desire in actual production.
Alas, the woman did nothing but shrug confused and didn’t bother to tell her that she was just selling the goddamn discs, but this customer was idiotic enough to pay another five bucks for the Simpsons movie bootleg, hoping that the scene of Bart wouldn’t be featured.
Because lord knows this isn’t a parent who does her research. She’s buying a PG-13 film, and she’ll never understand that, because it’s animated. When you’re demanding specialties from a bootlegger, you can’t be a very good parent to begin with.
Nice to see some credence given to me about the constant “dumb consumer” stories from Excess Hollywood… I don’t know if I should be pleased or frightened.
