'Borat' DVD gets pirated... NOT!

Posted Friday, March 2, 2007 at 3:36 PM Central

by John Couture

One thing is certain on Tuesday, the DVD market will be taken over by Kazakhs as the long-awaited Borat makes its debut. But, it looks like the DVD consumer will be getting more (or less) than they bargained for.

Underneath the standard O-ring packaging, the look and feel of the artwork on the sleeve of the DVD will appear as though it is a pirated product. The entire artwork is in Kazakh and the only english on the entire sleeve is in the billing block on the back of the package.

But, the deception doesn't end there. The image above is for the widescreen version. The image below is of the full screen version. Yes, they created two separate inserts. Beyond being completely in Kazakh, the artwork is also tattered, blurry and has running colors to make it feel that it was Xeroxed on a color copier.

The real coup de grace humor piece though is when you actually open the outer amaray case. The disc itself (as seen above) has the appearance of a Demorez DVD-R. Obviously a shout out to Memorex, it even has the very Borat sounding tagline, "Is Life? No. Demorez."

For a little fun, try searching for "Demorez" in Google. I smell a little product tie-in.

The alternate packaging is a little joke from Fox intended to capture the spirit of the movie and it certainly gave us a good laugh. The actual movie is in English.

I'm not so sure they'll be laughing at retail when consumers start bringing these back as "defective."