Saturday, 26 September 2009

Dubbing and poster art correlation?

On ebay at the moment there's a Belgian poster for The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with titles in Flemish and French:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BLADE-OF-THE-RIPPER-EDWIGE-FENECH-GIALLO-IT-POSTER_W0QQitemZ290351658560QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item439a4eb640&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14


The poster art itself is the same as the Italian version.

It makes me wonder: During the heyday of European popular genre cinemas, was there a correlation between whether a country dubbed or subtitled and whether they had their own poster art or not, beyond simply having the translated or other title and perhaps emphasising the native star above the foreign one.

Did ' bigger' markets, or ones with a particular national orientation, have their own art, whereas smaller ones just used pre-existing art?

2 comments:

gialloshots said...

Along those lines, I remember recently seeing a set of Dutch or German photobustas for "Blood and Black Lace" where they had used the original Italian issued posters. They just pasted a Dutch sticker over the original title but everything else was still in Italian.

And I have a set of photobustas for "Confessions of a Sex Maniac" where they have also pasted the new German title over an Italian poster. Maybe they weren't being cheap but were ahead of their time in the recycling business?

Luigi Bastardo said...

If you look very closely at that poster, you can see that the bottom credits are in Italian. The auction lists this poster as being "restyled for the Belgian market." Indeed, the original Italian title was probably covered with a snipe and issued that way. Usually, the Belgians had their own, unique -- not to mention smaller -- artwork.

Cheers,
Luigi