THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978?)
Unofficial - no label, cat.no S.R. 3003

Now here's an oddity... Another unofficial copy of "The Man·Machine" from Italy. 
 

I've posted one before, quite similar, and I know of others too - in fact, every now and then a new variant turns up. In this case, I had to take a closer look at a cassette I already own, but this one turns out to be just very similar. With the Italian "underground market" - ie. that of unofficial knock-off product - I fail to understand why they'd make so many different designs; wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just copy something one-to-one? Did the pirate industry cater for collectors like me, who wanted the same cassette in different covers? Surely not... So why then bother to have their own design for each run of bootleg? It's strange. 


Whatever the reasoning behind it though, here is another green themed design, with both the top of the front and the spine bright green. The spine has only one word, the band name, yet they managed to squeeze a misspelling into it... The right panel also spells the band name in two parts, "Kraft Werk", but if you tell me this was a design feature and not a fault, I shall not argue. 


The cassette is grey, with bright blue labels. It has the plastic flaps on the top of the shell, like on recordable cassettes (not just "like", either - if I wanted to I could record something else over this!) The "window" in the middle has no protective plastic foil, you can touch the tape right through it. So if your car has the cassette player underneath the ashtray, please be careful.






 

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