During the last year we have been working a lot on adding support for non English films on Super8database. As a result of that it has started to dawn on me how many German releases there were. I knew the German made quite a bit, but I had no idea how many they really released. It is a lot! We are getting close to 1000 German releases in the database now. That's quite impressive considering the number of people in Germany and that they probably didn't sell well outside Germany.

The second thing I have realized is that they usually made quite good covers. I think about the graphics, and not the durability of the clam shell covers.

It’s impressive how much data that is already there! The graphics are INDEED fun to look at!

It would be interesting to find out if many of the German titles were on low fade stock, they certainly have a lot more titles than were available from the UK/USA.

In the Netherlands, German films were very common and dominated the 8mm market. Most Dutch collectors at the time hated this, as they were used to see films in the original languages, with Dutch subtitles, whereas German releases were dubbed in German. Whenever I buy collections from Dutch collectors, chances are at least half of the films are German releases.

That's some interesting facts, Bert. I have been wondering if you had German friends or something, as you have had a few German titles in your webshop. In Norway we had the original language only as far as I know, and not even subtitled. I wonder if this was the case for other non English/German countries?

I believe the situation was about the same in the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) part of Belgium, although French releases were also important there. Together, the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium constituted a relatively small language territory. So only small numbers of Dutch titled films were released (by Dutch companies such as Real Film and Arco), and German releases were much more common. Most collectors preferred English releases, but these were less widely distributed. The late Ton van de Kleut of Topfilm in Amsterdam, who had good connections in Germany, played an important part in the distribution of German releases on the Dutch market.