When the Copy and the Original Share a Birth Certificate
Every so often our catalog throws up a case so strange we have to sit with it for a minute before writing the headline. This is one of those cases. Two entries, both titled The Hunchback of Notre Dame, both from 1996, both animated, both starring a bell-ringer named Quasimodo and a fearless woman named Esmeralda. In our house style, one of these gets filed as the plucky, soulful "original", and the other gets filed as the "million-dollar copy". Let's be very clear before we go any further: this is the house joke, not a historical claim. Mockbusters.tv exists to celebrate the idea that the scrappy, lower-budget version got there first in spirit if not in fact — it's satire, not archaeology. In this particular case, the joke practically writes itself, because the two synopses in our own files are describing recognizably the same film from two different angles.
Reading the Two Case Files Side by Side
Our so-called "original" entry keeps its camera tight on the tower: ropes swinging, Quasimodo dancing with the bronze bells he calls his only friends, a gypsy girl singing and spinning in the square below. It's an intimate, song-driven account of an outcast bell-ringer discovering he has more courage than anyone in Paris — himself included — suspected. Simple linework, soft heart, Victor Hugo's novel as the load-bearing wall.
