BACK TO THE FUTURE
Italian Trilogy Steelbooks (UHD+BD)
Well, well, the Italian steels for BTTF have arrived. Cheaper than Zavvi, no custom fees and German audio on all discs.
However: Amazon.it shipped them in a flimsy A4 cardboard envelope (two together, one stacked on top of them). Good thing that I ordered it to a pickup location, because our mailman is usually pretty rough as far as stuffing oversized envelopes into the mailbox is concerned. Luckily, no damage I could detect.
In contrast to the 35th Anniversary steelbook set that was sold outside English regions, these steels do have an English title printed on. Very nice. The Italian version has a J-card with the Italian title.
The back side of the J-Card is of course Italian. Funnily, "Tedesco" (German) is only mentioned for UHD, not for the BR. Of course, all discs have German audio (same authoring as the 35th Anniversary).
The main argument for these SBs is the usage of the classic Drew Struzan artworks - finally! The 35th Anniversary offered just cheap photoshop fare. The fronts are pretty clean apart from the necessary producer/director credits, which are integrated around the title logo. No other texts.
Print quality is quite strong, with bright colors. There are some metallic effects, like on Marty and Doc's sunglasses and fob watches, or on some parts of the DeLorean.
Thankfully, the steels have glossy finish! A giant leap forward from the scratchfest that was the first UHD steel.
The back sides are minimalistic, but photorealistic: an electric guitar, Biff's casino chips and two cowboy hats.
The spines are pretty sweet, and look quite uniform. The modification on the logo (to have the same angle) is quite good, I have seen it done way worse. No formats are mentioned anywhere on the steel.
Now for the insides. The 35th Anniversary had some atrocious Photoshop collages to offer. Here, we have some iconic panoramic couple shots, which is always better.
The discs are stacked on top of each other in the right tray.
Same goes for Disc 2.
By the way, one major advantage of the Italian version: just one (!) rating logo on the discs!
Here is Part 3 (here, the designers decided to forego the concept of "Doc/Marty" couple shots and went for a "Doc/Clara" shot). Still works though.
What I don't like, however:
the bonus disc is missing! Probably, because here, the movies are sold separately and not as a trilogy set, and the disc covers the entire trilogy. Therefore one still needs another copy of the 35th Anniversary set to have the whole content...
My conclusion, apart from the bonus disc:
WHY NOT DO IT LIKE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?