Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Copyright Infringement Wednesday (New Year's Eve Edition)

New Year's Eve, looking forward to sitting in front of the television, wanting something decent to snooze in front of; I perused my DVD collection looking for the very best film my shelves had to offer. The Dark Knight? Sweeney Todd? Truck? No, these were not good enough..... then I saw it, the film I had to see this afternoon:

Terminator Dog
T-D: Terminator Dog (터미네이터 독)

A dog that's a terminator? A sequel, a prequel, a spin-off from the James Cameron classic? Not exactly. A quick search on google revealed nothing except a link to the Brian Yuzna classic "Rottweiler".... A closer examination of the DVD and I saw that the original title was indeed included though not in the most obvious of ways:

Terminator Dog

Bottom right hand corner, just after the heart warming statement that T-D: Terminator Dog had been shown at the Ninth Puchon Fantastic Film Festival (Pifan), is the original title of the film "ROTTWEILER". Even on the Pifan website, the film is listed as "로트와일러 Rottweiler", so the distributors have deliberately altered the name of the movie after its original festival presentation.

But what of the cover picture? That shot of the robotic dog is not exactly what I would call a rottweiler (looks a little bit like a wolf to me) and is more than a little reminiscent of the dvd cover for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Has somebody been to the plagiarist school of cover art? The original image for "Rottweiler" is much less copyright infringing, so why not use that instead? Probably because it's not very good, but that is beside the point.

Well for 3,000 won, you get what you pay for... a crap Brian Yuzna film about a naked convict being chased by a cyborg dog with blue eyes.

I leave you now with the inspiring spanish language trailer for "Rottweiler" so that you too may share in the joy of the Terminator Dog:

1 comment:

archbishop said...

Ha, I was out at a DVD bong with a waegook friend of mine last night and we watched this cinematic masterpiece. I was telling an American friend about the wonderful beauty of T-D and she googled your page. I think I'll have to see if I can find a copy of this to bring back to California when my contract ends.

Have you seen the commercial with a Korean version of Trio doing "Da Da Da" showing the Hyundai that rips off Mercedes? Basic idea taken from a VW commercial but the footage doesn't match at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_s5-R_JE4c