I still hate bilingual packaging.

It’s bad enough so many video companies use bilingual packaging of their own free will — or at least, I’ve always assumed it was of their own free will. Now, the Canadian Press reports that dark, sinister forces are trying to enshrine this practice in law:

The Quebec agency that enforces the province’s language law is investigating whether the packaging on some DVDs violates the Charter of the French Language.

Steve Gagne, a Quebec City resident, filed a complaint with l’Office de la language francaise last week along with a list of more than 900 DVDs he had found in area stores that had a French soundtrack but unilingual English packaging.

He sent a copy of his complaint to Line Beauchamp, the minister responsible for the language law, and the Parti Quebecois spokesman on language issues.

Gerald Paquette, a spokesman for l’Office, said the matter is being investigated and retailers and distributors will be informed of any transgressions. . . .

I got into the reasons why bilingual DVD packaging sucks in a post last year, when Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) came out. At the time, I said I wished I could take a picture of my Star Wars discs together, just to show how the last-minute switch to bilingual packaging ruined the consistency of that series. But now I have a digital camera, so here’s the picture:

Another victim of Fox’s recent change in policy was the Simpsons series — but in this case, at least with the discs that I have bought, the bilingual packaging is only on the outside. Seasons 1 to 4 were monolingual, then Season 5 put a bilingual slipcover over the monolingual case, and then Seasons 6 to 8 put monolingual books of discs inside bilingual cases shaped like the characters’ heads:

20th Century Fox is a relative latecomer to this. Universal and Alliance-Atlantis have been doing this for years, and so has Paramount, since at least 2002. Hence, nine out of ten Star Trek movies have had rather awkward-looking spines, crammed full of text; and in some cases, the films have identical titles in English and French, but the company duplicates them anyway:

Another recent convert to bilingual packaging is Warner Brothers, thus giving us a Star Wars-like inconsistency with Harry Potter:

In fairness, though, the Harry Potter discs were already a bit mixed up, because the first two films were packaged in cardboard sleeves while the next two films were packaged in plastic cases. I’ve seen stores try to sell these films in boxed sets, but the packages are different sizes, so it looks kind of awkward.