The Tacky Ubiquity of Knock Offs
For the Control Nathan Rabin 5.0 component of the Kickstarter campaign for The Joy of Trash I recently watched the notorious 2007 Ratatouille knock-off Ratatoing. I know a lot of people found it wildly derivative but I thought Brazilian voiceover artist Platton Oddsport did an acceptable job in the lead role.
Ratatoing is product of shameless South American schlock merchants Vídeo Brinquedo, who became notorious for cranking out surreally awful clones of Disney and Pixar hits.
Not long after subjecting myself to Ratatoing I watched the Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers movie on Disney+. A major plot point in the audacious, marvelously meta reboot involves characters like The Little Mermaid’s Flounder and Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers’ own Monterey Jack getting “bootlegged”, or altered for the worst so that they can star in bootleg knockoffs of the shows and movies that made them famous.
It’s appropriate that the bootleggers are ripping off Disney in Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers because the studio has always been an irresistible target for knock-off artists for several reasons.
One of the reasons Disney gets ripped off so universally is because it tends to adapt fairy tales in the public domain. Before it was Disney’s The Little Mermaid it was Hans Cristian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid.
So rip-off specialists can claim that they’re simply adapting classic children’s stories that coincidentally happen to have also inspired the Disney animated smash on the new release wall as well.
When I worked as a video store clerk in high school and college we would carry a lot of knock-offs from places like Goodtimes video. When I rented a mother a copy of the Goodtimes version of Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast I felt obligated to inform them that it was not the Disney version they were familiar with and saw advertised everywhere but rather a cheap knock off that was only forty minutes long.
More often than not, they just accepted the inferior knock-off because it was better than nothing, the Disney version they wanted was already checked out and children are famously undiscriminating.
Disney knock-offs benefited from the law of supply and demand. The demand for the new Disney movie was sky-high. No matter how many copies we stocked, chances were good that they’d be rented out every weekend.
Frazzled parents didn’t want to go home empty handed so they went home with something that wasn’t what they wanted, or what they went to the video store for, but at least looked like what they wanted but could not have.
The decline of physical media should be disastrous for knock-offs. It’s not as if a digital version of Turning Red is going to be all rented out so frustrated families will be forced to settle for Canadian Panda Curse Girl.
As I know all too well, digital rights are weird and random sometimes, so it is, in fact, sometimes easier to get your hands on a cheap rip-off than the real thing.
Look at Asylum. They have thrived in the digital area, cranking out cheapies like the recent Top Gunner, whose release MAY have something to do with the new Top Gun movie.
Asylum is following in the footstep of Roger Corman, who made a mint producing low-budget versions of the big studio release of the day, like Carnosaur, its answer to Jurassic Park.
It goes back even further. One of the D.W. Griffith’s innovations involved stamping his name on the title cards of his movies to separate them from cheap knock-offs like Beginning of a Country.
Knock-offs have always been with us. They always will be. They’re just part of what makes capitalism so tacky and vulgar and weirdly irresistible.
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