When ‘Beauty and the Beast’ aired on British TV, I absolutely loved it, when I was a kid. Staring Ron Perlman, as Vincent and Linda Hamilton, as Catherine, watching it was an escape from the world of bullies and things that sometimes went on at home. The trouble was, it was only on one day a week, which wasn’t enough for me. I would escape into my own world, when it was time for bed and imagine being there with them, giving myself a new name and creating new stories. It was my safe world, because this was a safe world for all the different characters that lived there, below the city streets. Each of them with a past story, before they came to live there, where they felt safe and loved. Having a purpose.
I watched every single one, except for the very last one, or the one also before that. I was absolutely gutted I missed the ending, which I recorded and did not catch the end. It obviously started late, because I always used to put an extra ten minutes past the finishing time. I kept looking in the papers each week, wondering why it was not on and wondering when it would be on again, not realising it had completely finished altogether. It wasn’t until I was an adult and having access to the internet and Googling it, that I had learnt it had completely finished and how it ended.
For some years now, (but I don’t know how long exactly,) I own the whole episodes on DVD’s. As a late-deafened adult, I totally rely on subtitles to watch anything, so when I ordered the DVD set from Amazon which the DVD’s are import, I made sure it said that they had subtitles. Which it did. But when it came to playing them on my all-region DVD player, I only found that the subtitles were only on the extras, not on the series itself. I was disappointed, but because I needed the escape again, I kept them and watched them all. But watching only, as I could not follow the conversations and the character, Vincent is not a person you can even lip-read for a start.
Fast forward to the present, I bought a second external CD/DVD player for my laptop of a different model, so I could just play my American import DVD’s. Not only do I have ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ I have ‘Sue Thomas FBEye’ complete series too. (No problem with Sue Thomas though, the subs were available when watching them on my old DVD player.) When I played a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ DVD, to check it worked on this new external player ok, I could see there was an options for closed captions and so I clicked on it and before my eyes I seen subtitles pop up to what was being said at the time. (Theme music that starts at the beginning and the words of Vincent.) So I am expecting this will happen on every one now. I was so happy to see this and cried with tears of joy. This TV series means so much to me and I can’t see I will ever get bored with it. It’s my escape still, when I watch them, but the only difference is I won’t be creating new scenes and jump into that world when I go to bed at night, as I did when I was a kid.
