Maybe an industry "insider" can answer me this one.
Admittedly it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as it used to be, but it still happens and it's most fucking annoying sometimes: WHY THE HELL do companies sometimes release DVDs (and videos for that matter) with the "wrong" stills on the covers?
Surely it would be just as easy and no more expensive to "get it right" and show the punter just what he's getting for his hard-earned cash.
But apparently not. STILL we get covers showing scenes NOT from the film inside. Case in point, just to cite one example: My main fetish thing is stockings & garter belts, and while perusing the shelves of my local porn-mart I stumbled across a DVD from a usually reliable major studio that caught my eye - half a dozen gorgeous girls, all of them on fire in the cover pics and one of them looking especially sexy, getting shafted in black stockings and a garter belt. The scene looked so hot and the girl looked so sexy in what she was wearing, that clinched it for me and I shelled out just under 30 Euros (a little over 30 bucks) for it - SPECIFICALLY for that one scene.

When I got home, loaded the thing into my DVD player and let it run however, what I saw really pissed me off. YES all the girls in the film were the girls on the box art and YES the box art accurately reflected the contents of the film - EXCEPT in one (for me crucial) case: the scene featuring the girl who on the cover was getting fucked in her garter belt & stockings was NOT the one I'd bought the DVD for. It was a different one entirely, and one in which she was completely naked.

So pissed off was I that I drove all the way back to the store and demanded a refund or exchange - but because there was nothing wrong with the DVD itself, they refused. So the upshot was, I was left 30 Euros worse off and stuck with a disk I didn't want - all because some a**hole laying out the box art at the production company couldn't be arsed to check that the correct pictures were being used. Or maybe even DELIBERATELY used the wrong ones. Either way, it's a sorry fucking way to run a railway.

This isn't the only time this has happened to me (and it's a particular pain in the ass when you're buying a disk, as opposed to renting one), and I've no doubt that others reading this have probably had similar experiences. As far as I'm concerned there's no excuse at all for this and it's a problem that apparantly still hasn't been sorted out.

Thoughts & comments anyone?

Edited by - floraman on Aug 27 2003

Edited by - floraman on Aug 27 2003