Tag: big cats
Got my hands on the English version of the film. It was made jointly by Bink Films, Animal Planet and BBC. So in the US it was released by Animal Planet, and in the UK — by Bink Films. I already wrote about the American version of A Lion Called Christian earlier. Now I've finally watched the English one and compared it a bit. Since the same footage was used, the films are practically identical, except for a few scenes that didn't make it into the final versions. The voice-over is also the same, though in the English version it's read by a woman, and in the American one — by a man; the narrators probably have different accents, but that's hard for me to catch.
So everything said about the American version applies to the English one too. But the DVD edition itself is better. Here there's just one film on a single-layer disc, rather than 4 on a dual-layer one like in the American edition, where the bonus materials only had deleted scenes, as far as I remember. And the Bink Films edition has a bit more bonus video with separate interviews and, most importantly, it has English subtitles, thanks to which you can understand everything that's said, or at worst you can pause and translate the moment you're interested in.
I received the second part of the order from two collections of films about lions. The parcel arrived a week after the previous one, although the tracking section on the site itself said it had shipped a day earlier. It came a day before the stated date, and that's good.
This is also a collection of 4 films, but here it's a set of DVD boxes, each with a film, and all of it in a single case whose front opens with a velcro fastener and has the film descriptions printed on it. The packaging is nicely done, but the discs and boxes themselves are not so great - the pictures on the covers and discs are taken from the public domain and have nothing to do with the films, as the Lord of the Lions cover below confirms.
Funny thing, I found this collection through Amazon.com's recommendations, since George Adamson was listed in the leading role, the collection cost $30 and it also included three films that have long been available with Russian voice-over on torrents; I decided to search the internet for the film Lord of the Lions itself and found it in this very same collection for $20 on... Amazon.com. I don't know how it happened that the same product in the same store was sold at such different prices. Most likely it's because it was in different departments and the title and description were entered differently. I ordered the last twenty-dollar collection, now it's out of stock and they've already changed the price to $30 -$3 discount, that is, now $27, while the one that's easier to find still costs $30.
The collection includes the following films: Lions and Hyenas: A Balance of Power, Lions of Etosha, Lions of Gir, Lord of the Lions
Turns out packages from the American Amazon don't take all that long to arrive either — Kevin Richardson's book was shipped on September 1st and arrived today, two weeks later, even though at shipping the expected arrival date was given as October 8th. The only shame is that the order of three books was split into three parts and they were sent separately; though they didn't charge extra for it and a book keeps better being alone in its packaging, now I'll have to go to the post office for each one. This time the mail carrier called the house so as not to drop off the notice or the parcel itself, last time it was just the notice.
I was also glad that the book has a price of 25.99 on it, but they sold it for 17.15 plus 5.32
P.S. For anyone interested, I put up a torrent on torrents.ru with the electronic version of Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God.