Regarding Dr. Horrible comments

Caught the Acts 1-3 of Dr. Horrible on youTube, thanks to the heads up from Lis.

The discussion was very interesting and I wanted to share some thoughts.

First, I wanted to say that I appreciated feedback regarding captions/subtitles. A few days after I made some comments about captioning on the Internet, I was pleasantly surprised to see subtitles for Acts 1-3 of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog on the web. All I had to do was click on the CC box. It was the first time I ever saw anything like a movie on my laptop with subtitles. In the past, when I saw a movie on my laptop, it was a DVD rental. This time, I did not have to rent a DVD. I could go to hulu.com and click on the Dr. Horrible video, then watch it!

Movies are not always accessible to certain audiences. These audiences include people who are learning English as a Second Language, people with varying degrees of hearing loss and people who cannot process auditory information. For many years, they had to wait for a movie to come out on Video and then DVD.

Now it is slowly changing for the better. With the advent of movies like Dr. Horrible and the willingness to include subtitles or captions, there is hope that despite the rapid changes in technology, everyone will have access.

Subtitles: When moviegoers see a foreign film, unless it is dubbed in English or has English speaking scenes, there are printed words at the bottom in the English language. I've known people who grew up watching foreign films because of the access issue.

Rear Window Captioning: When you buy a ticket, you go to the guest services and ask for a gadget that looks like the rear window for your car. It has a cup attachment so you can put it in the seat and adjust the window to read the words printed on the rear wall of the theater below the screen projector window. There are more movies with rear window captions in the theaters because some people object to subtitles in movies. They do not want to be bothered by words at the bottom. I really do understand their feelings. However, everyone deserves the opportunity to be able to enjoy movies.

Open Caption: It is similiar to English subtitles for Foreign films. This is for English Speaking films. They had open captions for movies like Pearl Harbor and Patch Adams. It costs a lot of money to rent an open caption print. It changed over the years. In the beginning, the captions came from one group (cannot remember which). Later, it was the studios or distributors who decided whether or not to caption a newly released film in the theaters.

Hope no one was offended by my comments.