Examples:

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (the book)

And before you say “alternate title”, since these supposed alternate titles are included in the full version of the main title (even if it’s usually not listed in full), how does this differ from “true” alternate titles that replace the entire main title?

Example:

Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey vs Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

Into the Deep vs Yakamoz S-245

And then there’s the standard sub-titles, for example:

Captain America: The First Avenger

(Sorry for my lazy title choices but I couldn’t think of any others)

It seems like we have 3 things here: an “or” title in the name (alternate title which is included in the full version of the main title), a completely different alternate title that replaces the main one, and a subtitle following a colon after the main title. Are there different names to distinguish these different types of titles??

Also can we talk about how sub-title is used to mean closed captions as well as “sub-name” (sub-title used in this context)? It makes it impossible to search about because most people understand subtitle to mean closed captions, I think.

  • HonkyTonkWoman
    2·
    6 months ago

    It has to do with analog TV & tape-based media distribution.

    Captions follow a very specific standard & are required to be included on certain broadcast media.

    To ensure captioning remains consistent across consumer devices, captions come in specific file formats, typically generated by a third party.

    The files are delivered alongside media deliveries & contain timecode markers to sync the text up with the dialogue.

    Before digital delivery of media for broadcast, each piece of media arrived on a tape. Each tape had the caption file embedded as lines of video, TVs could scan those lines as they came across in the broadcast signal, & display the captions.

    On certain old televisions, you could see the captioning during the broadcast, it would appear as broken black/white dashes across the top of the image.

    Any text included in a caption file is considered captioning. Any text outside of that file that appeared over video (including titles, alternate language translations, logos, etc), is considered a subtitle.