Of all my home video makeovers, none are more necessary than television box sets, which even when nicely designed (as the Sopranos sets absolutely were), they are still unnecessarily bulky and almost always lacking in pertinent information such as original airdates of the episodes, writers, directors, and guest stars. Here are a handful of examples for three beloved TV shows of mine.
Some more hard media video cover makeovers. See the first DVD Redux post for more on these...
Note: Technically, the Faster, Pussycat! cover isn't a "redux" as I recorded this off the tee-vee and made the cover from scratch.
I've remade covers for practically every DVD and Blu-ray on my shelves. The reasons for this are twofold: First, most of them are butt-ugly, designed to belie any period esthetic and appeal to the lowest common denominator consumer. Secondly, they often lack what I consider important information on the content in favor of hyperbolic blurbs, shitty Photoshopped graphics, and (particularly on Blu-rays these days) a preponderance of technical specs for all the different delivery methods on the movie or TV show within.
Secondly, home video packaging is unnecessarily bulky. TV box sets particularly are ten times bigger than they need to be (see elsewhere), but even regular DVDs do not need to be a full quarter of an inch thick. My remakes are all packaged in slimline cases, taking up half the shelf space and looking much cleaner than commercial DVD / Blu-ray releases. My main exception to this rule: Criterion Collections. I do not tough those. They are sacrosanct.
For my covers, I almost always use one of the original one-sheet posters. On Blu-rays, which are not proportional to the posters, I usually have to truncate the art, which kills me. I've started using DVD cases for Blu-rays to facilitate better usage of the original art. For the back covers, most of the time, I will simply scan the back cover of the commercial disc and use that. These four cover redux feature new back covers designed by myself as well.
I'm posting my Video Redux Covers by genre, starting with a handful of horror and sci-fi movies. As with my CD designs, I'm posting the art untrimmed, with visible crop marks.
This mocked-up DVD cover was done to accompany a piece I wrote in 2004 lamenting the lack of a decent home video version of A Charlie Brown Christmas (something which STILL HASN'T HAPPENED SIXTEEN YEARS LATER!).
