Our good friend Retroman called me last day and showed me something that made a tilt in my mind…
Look at those two What’s That Bird? copies and discs. Both have the same catalogue number 8100016.
The one on the left just says “What’s that bird?” and the other on the right says “What’s that bird? – Britain and Europe”.
When we look at the discs, the one from the left says “What’s that bird? Europa” and the one from the right keep saying the same as the cover.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the disc from the left one…
We have an European catalogue number (8100016), an English title (What’s that bird?), a Dutch/German/Spanish (?) name (Europa) and all the copyrights texts are in French. What a confusion…
Retroman did put the disc on his CD-i player and both titles are exactly the same, 5 languages selection (French English, German, Italian and Spanish). So what happened with other titles out there, happened also here. The same version has been used for different countries.
The confusion here is about “Europa”. In 1992, Philips Media affiliates in Europe was emerging, the way how catalogue numbers should be given might still not be clear at that time, and being a multi-language one, “Europa” might be to embrace more than one country.
This discussion came a few days before MrMii6 and Seventy7 tagged me in the Discord server about Link™ – The Faces of Evil cover variant, using the English title for the Dutch version (with Dutch catalogue number).
I have another title for you that is Dutch that uses the European catalogue number, Body Contour.
But in this case, both discs (this is a double disc title) and the booklet, are using the Dutch catalogue numbers.
Another example are the Video-CD’s, you can easily find this kind of format over the internet, and many of them are subtitled for other languages.
Retroman also showed me one title from of his enormous Video-CD collection, Fine Things, an English language with Dutch subtitles.
This movie is using an European catalogue number (810****) instead of a Dutch one (814****).
