You know him as the cheeky and charming Puss, immortalised in fairy tales, providing endless humour in the
Shrek
films beloved by all. You'd be excused, then, if you got a little confused when you happened across a movie poster in your neighbourhood mall and noticed him described as
Cat In Boots
, instead of the more familiar
.
Since the movie is known as
Puss In Boots
in most of the western world, we decided to do a little investigation, to see if this was some sort of censorship we should be reporting on. After all, the main character was still called Puss in the movie, regardless of the title, and no scenes seemed to be cut when our reporter at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival saw
(where it also happened to be known as
Cat In Boots
).
When we contacted the National Media Council, we were told - very clearly - that they had nothing to do with this. "This is a decision on behalf of the distributor," said the NMC, and off we went to track down the distributor.
Four Star Films got back to our query and said that "the movie itself is exactly the same version, scene by scene, as the US version, with absolutely no changes".
"It is common practice to many foreign territories outside of the US to change a movie title to suit their territory better, which is what we did with
Cat In Boots
," we were told.
Oh well. We could understand that; sort of. Take the case of
; it was released as
The First Avenger
in some countries in eastern Europe, so changing the working titles of films is not too far fetched.
And above all, it takes nothing away from
a funny movie that's a pleasure to watch
.
