The Cinematic Art of Fantastic India, Vol. 1: The VCDs

Many a movie industry the world over-bless 'em!-resorts to "hard-sell" tactics to move merchandise, so India is far from unique when it comes to this practice. For instance, in its neighboring nation Pakistan, distributors often utilize highly similar techniques, plastering totally unrelated imagery pinched from other movies all over their theatrical posters in a slapdash frenzy of crude cut-'n'-paste chaos (Turkish movie posters often share an analogous spontaneously-slapped-together "look", and they not-infrequently utilized "pirated" imagery too). Both Pakistani movie posters and VCD sleeves share much in common with India's, despite the two nations' many cultural/political/religious (etc.) differences. Way over on the other side of the planet, Mexican lobby cards-more so than their movie posters, for the most part-frequently dabbled in much the same design technique, cobbling-together outrageous compositions whose pictorial contents sometimes barely resembled the films they were touting at all... if any. At their worst hideous eyesores, at their best deliciously delectable eye-candy (much the same applies to the Indian VCD art depicted in this book), Mexploitation lobbies are currently popular favorites among collectors, and with good reason. While the "pinched pics" phenomenon occurs with far less frequency on Italian fotobuste (the plural of fotobusta; basically, XL lobby "cards" printed on glossy paper), the odd particularly outrageous/egregious-but in a good way!-example does occasionally appear. Over 150 full color reproductions of VCD covers as well as VHS, DVDs, pressbooks, posters, and lobby cards.