Worst. Packaging. Ever.

by Scott Tobias
August 23rd, 2005

Waiting for individual seasons of The Simpsons to arrive on DVD is a little like waiting for bread rations in the USSR, but after months of anticipation, Season Six finally arrived on my desk today. But rather than follow the conservative, uniform design elements of other five box sets—which are distinguished in appearance only by color—the discs have been housed in plastic yellow shell that approximates Homer’s head. On the store shelves, there’s no doubt that the new set has an eye-catching look, but God help you when you actually take this sucker home. For one, the shell is a bitch to open, akin to prying for oysters. Things don’t get any better once you get inside: After an avalanche of loose materials come spilling out onto the floor like magazine subscription cards, you find that the discs themselves are covered by a flap which won’t be able to withstand the ravages of time. (And what other show has more replay value than The Simpsons in its prime?) This is a clear victory for form over function, and it’s not the first time I’ve been frustrated by design elements run amok in packaging.

The turning point for me was Sting’s The Soul Cages (which also happened to be a turning point in recognizing Sting’s sucktitude). Maybe I’m not clear on my packaging history, but at the time, I remember that virtually all CDs were housed in the plastic jewel cases that been the default industry standard for as long as CDs have been in existence. The environmentally conscious Sting took a stand by releasing The Soul Cages in a case composed mostly of paper, but you had to open up about three or four flaps to get to the adult-contempo crapola at the end of the line. In the years since, the multi-flap system has been pushed to greater extremes—from Keith’s description, opening the nine-disc Alien Quadrilogy sounds like a silent comedy routine waiting to happen—but I think we can feel good about blaming Sting for this phenomenon.

It seems decadent to complain about packaging issues when in so many cases, the media more than compensates for the practical woes, but these storage and access issues can be as discouraging as porcupine pins. A few other examples: The Herbie Hancock box set comes in a transparent plastic cube that’s not only hard to store alongside your other CDs, but as confounding to open as a Chinese puzzle box. The four-disc Talking Heads set, Once In A Lifetime, takes the shape of an extremely elongated picture book, measuring five inches high at the spine and a ridiculous 16 inches long, guaranteeing that it won’t fit in any bookshelf ever conceived. Then there’s a pair of Paul Verhoeven discs: Basic Instinct comes in a hard clear plastic shell with a ice-pick pen inside, but no label on the spine; Total Recall comes in a round case shaped (and textured) like Mars and perched precariously on top of a paper mount that immediately loses its grip the moment you pull it from the shelf.

Am I alone or can we start a groundswell of support in favor of sanity in packaging? Please share your own horror stories in the comments below.