Monday, January 19, 2009

Spinal Tap

The text on the spine of American and German DVD boxes is often printed in different directions. (One is upright when the DVD box is on its back, one is upright when it's face-down, respectively).

Basically, this means that when I go to the library here and browse through the Recent DVD Returns cart, which lines up all the DVDs spine-up, I have to do this odd little head wobble back and forth, since the library offers titles that were also originally American films. It looks something like a not very clever bird trying to figure out how to stuff itself through a very small hole, starting beak first.

On a further note, I never really noticed this spine detail until I started seeing German material. This is the same with books as well, in which I find the German version practical (upright when face-down), mainly for this reason: When you are browsing books at the library, it's a less troublesome head tilt to go from browsing spine covers to pulling out a book that catches your eye and reading its cover. Okay, you'll just have to try it or imagine it yourself.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very in-depth thought. I live here all my life, saw some american films, but never noticed the difference. Thanks.

Marcin

Anonymous said...

So when I was reading this I was thinking really hard about the head angles thing, when I suddenly remembered that the covers of western books are on the left, as they read left to right. ^_^; It made more sense then.

Anonymous said...

and by books I mean any media with fronts and backs and spines I suppose. Though now that I think of it, japanese game boxes open like western books do so maybe their dvd cases do to... I've not had occasion to investigate.