Toy 2 techs get an F

Publish date: 2024-06-27

Expletive-filled 'Fidelity' scene spliced into homevid

Parents are getting yet another shocking surprise from a Disney animated movie on home video.

Some copies of “Toy Story 2” — which Disney expects to be its best-selling DVD title ever — have turned up at Costco stores around the country with footage in the middle of the movie from the R-rated “High Fidelity” in which the F-word is used twice.

Costco pulled the movie from its shelves last Thursday after the retailer and Disney received about eight complaints from consumers.

Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment blames the glitch on the studio’s manufacturer, Technicolor Videocassette, Inc., and says the problem affects less than 1% of the discs.

Little problem

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Last year Technicolor shipped “Pinocchio” DVDs that had DreamWorks’ animated movie “The Prince of Egypt” recorded on them by mistake.

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Technicolor acknowledged a manufacturing defect in the “Toy Story 2” discs and said in a statement, “Technicolor will continue to investigate the cause of the defect and the magnitude of the problem.” The company would not comment further.

Disney and Technicolor say the problem is limited to a batch of the most expensive “Toy Story — The Ultimate Toy Box” three-disc sets that were shipped to Costco stores nationwide.

The retailer pulled all those collectors’ sets off its shelves — about 1,000 copies — and is awaiting replacement sets from Disney and Technicolor. The problem does not affect the lower-priced two-disc sets featuring both “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.”

“We are confident that the defective product has been isolated and removed from store shelves,” Disney said in a statement.

No answer yet

It is not clear how the glitch happened but it was apparently done at Technicolor’s facility in Camarillo, Calif., where the DVD version of Disney’s “High Fidelity” was also duplicated.

It’s not the first time Disney has had this kind of public relations nightmare with its animated features. And it’s only the latest in a series of recent glitches on the relatively new digital DVD platform.

In 1999, Disney had to recall several million videocassettes of “The Rescuers” when it was discovered that the video version had been transferred from an old master that had a couple of frames of film featuring the silhouette of a naked woman inserted in a scene of the movie.

A few years ago the studio was embarrassed to learn that the videocassette and laserdisc versions of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” featured a few frames of the animated Baby Herman doing some un-baby like things with his fingers to a live-action woman as he walked under her dress. Those frames were digitally altered for future video releases.

Artwork backtracking

Disney also changed the artwork on the video packaging of “The Little Mermaid” in the early 1990s after complaints that one of the castle turrets looked more like a phallus. When the lyrics of a song sung by Robin Williams in “Aladdin” drew criticism from certain Arab organizations, new lyrics were recorded for the movie’s release on video.

Disney is also encouraging consumers who get a copy of “Toy Story 2” with the R-rated material to return it to the store where it was purchased for a replacement.

(Enrique Rivero contributed to this report.)

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