Legal movie DVD’s are pretty scarce in China. Piraters sell discs here for a flat rate per piece of media. Yes, that means Ishtar sells for the same price as the latest quality Casino Royale dub. Typically this is around 10 RMB per disc. That’s about US $1.30.

Westerners also get a nice chuckle from the mangled “blurbs” on the back of the DVD cover, where it’s either a terrible English description, or something erroneously cut-and-pasted from a completely different film.

So imagine my surprise when browsing in a store I picked up the box DVD set of Family Guy, Season 4. In front of me was a surprisingly well crafted blurb. Not only was it perfect English, there was something familiar about it.

The back cover read:

Obviously there were some odd things:

1. It had “See X below” which meant it was obviously copy/pasted from something larger
2. It was much better than your average blurb
3. It was remarkably informative and balanced

It reminded me of something I might read in Wikipedia.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I bought the seven disc set for a whopping 70 RMB (just under US $10) even though I’m not terribly fond of the show.

While the [[Family Guy]] article now reads quite different, thanks to the complete edit history of the article being available, we find the December 1, 2006 version reads:

Family Guy is an American animated comedy created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. The show was cancelled once in 2000 and again in 2002, but strong DVD sales and reruns on Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim led FOX to resume production of the show in 2005 (see “Return to television” below). To date it is one of only a handful of shows in television history to be cancelled and later revived by the power of their fan bases, and one of the few shows to be brought back to air by the same network that cancelled it. (See also Cagney and Lacey and Doctor Who). The title character is Peter Griffin, an inept blue collar head of a lower-middle class family frequently beset by the consequences of his foolish antics. Family Guy’s brand of humor is notable for the usually brief, frequently nonsensical cutaways (usually featuring oddball pop culture references) and flashbacks to various points in history, geography, and reality involving the characters and their outlandish actions (see “Structure and comedic approach” below).

So there you are.

Wikipedia: bringing information to pirated DVDs near you.