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The most popular response is (paraphrasing here) Interesting.
I was just getting accustomed to your nonsense ;)
?!?
( ;) )
Admittedly I never head those actors dubbed by American voice actors, but really, if someone watched an Italian movie dubbed into English how would that affect my life in the slightest bit? I would still be able to watch my Italian movies in the language I prefer, so who cares?
Saying that people can't enjoy stuff because you can't enjoy it is childish. I don't like Mission: Impossible. I absolutely hate it. So what, shall I go to Mission: Impossible forums and insult people or make them feel bad because they enjoy it? Who cares if they like something I don't, it's not going to affect my life in the slightest bit. Grow up, people. Life is made of troubles already, no need to create more.
2) These are forums, we come here to discuss and debate the validity of an array of subjects. It's the nature of the game to discredit, criticise,... I didn't insult you, I insulted a subject that was opened for debate. Not you, @Walecs. I would never. And you know that.
3) Why shouldn't we come to a thread about dubbing Bond films and criticise that practice by voicing that it damages the films, the actors jobs, and the viewer?
4) I had to endure 3 episodes of Poirot, hearing Suchet dubbed in Dutch just the other night while in a mitteleuropean city. Then, Hitchcock's Marnie. Why? Why would you do that? Where is the high pitch voice David Suchet trained so hard to give Poirot his "brain voice"? Where was Connery's Scottish accent and deep voice and slight lisp?
5) - Now that's being plain selfish, wouldn't you say? Someone mentioned chauvinism a few posts ago?
6) About ten years ago, while I was in Rome, they had Stanly Kubrick's Eyes wide Shut dubbed on the telly. I can tell you something. That was not Kubrick's film. That was the same as if they'd chop the editing on it, or had it streamed in black and white, or upside down for that matter. It was not the original film. If you think you're watching the original films when they're dubbed, you're dead wrong. They're versions. Poorer. Manipulated. You might as well cut the sound and just watch the pictures. It'd be a truer experience. I know I eventually did, for Poirot, Marnie and EWS.
7) Dubbing's dumb.
Dubbing of Bond films exists across the years, in English and otherwise. There's no changing it. Bond films have done that regularly in English up front. When it's done for foreign release in a language other than English, there are notable variations in meaning and context and outright comical unintended outcomes. I enjoy this kind of trivia and cinema history and pop culture relevance. In the same way I enjoy looking back at the literal foreign language translations of Bond film titles. Sometimes funny, sometimes on target in a different way than the original.
Separately and obviously: dubbing will change over time. I leave it to the countries involved and affected citizens to act on that.
If there's a need for an anti-dubbing discussion on its own, that could be interesting. But you'd have to prove it to me.
Oh, we don't need to discuss ad nauseam the surreptitious causes for intelligence decay. We don't need to agitate the status quo of stolidity. We don't need an "anti-dubbing" discussion, as much as we don't need to acknowledge the societal collapse that is occurring as we speak. Yes, there has been dubbing of Bond films across the years, some idiosyncrasies of it are funny as hell. Many are interesting to discuss in a thread made exactly for that purpose - this one. I admit that. But defending dubbing will always be as dumb as defending any other fiend practice that occurs solely for the purpose of giving continuity to the otioseness of the doltish dense.
Univex out.
On the whole, German dubbers are probably the best, but even having said that, in Licence to Kill, there are scenes where characters, and even groups of characters, are clearly laughing, but are undubbed. Their gaping mouths are silent, like Al Pacino at the end of Godfather III. Just bizarre in its laziness. I don't understand how any of it exists.
@Univex: As much as I also prefer undubbed movies, you can't expect, that people throughout the world are able to speak, read and understand English fluently, as do native speakers. It's a difference to have learned English at school, even study it at university on the one hand, and be a master in speaking and understanding English, as native speakers (who grew up speaking English) do. And dubbing movies also offers jobs for actors, who can't get big roles in movie franchises, TV series, etc. As you mention Connery, for non-native speakers who are not familiar with Irish or - in Connery's case - Scottish accents, plus Sean's lisp and how he mumbles away his lines. That's his way of speaking, and it's fine for many people, who are familiar with it. But I think, politics should not be an argument pro or against dubbing.
@DoctorKaufmann, I expect people to read subtitles in their own languages. That's all.
So I came into this thread expecting people to be talking about the intricacies of the dubbings: how they change metaphors or jokes and perhaps what they tell us about the film that the original English version doesn't tell us. Also how funny it gets when characters change the language/accent they're speaking in the middle of a film and it gets very meta. Instead, I see this comment and can only shake my head in disbelief.
No, @Univex, dubbing is not the end of the world. To say that it's making people stupid is a ridiculous statement. Comparing people's bias towards dubbing to using heroin is absurd and honestly quite dumb. And your point about not learning a new language by dubbing a film is so backwards I had to laugh. Do you really not realize that watching a dub is one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with a new language??? Let's take the example of an English-speaking child in the UK who wants/needs to learn, say, a foreign language such as Portuguese. Do you really expect the child to seek out Portuguese cinema? Where to start would be the first issue. Also the quality of Portuguese productions is weaker than Hollywood's newest blockbusters (great actors leaving the country for the US, paired with much smaller budgets etc). How do you get a child to watch some low-budget film with characters and faces they do not recognize? You simply don't. They're already familiar with the AAA franchises from the US/UK, however. So what you do is get them to watch films at home that you own which have a Portuguese dub and you put English subtitles on. This is a film you know they want to watch. This is far more effective than watching the OV with foreign subtitles because chances are that the kid won't be reading them at all after 3 minutes. Also, hearing a new language is vital for catching intonation/pronunciation. So dubbing a film is a great tool for helping to learn a foreign tongue. Something I'm assuming you've never had to do?
Another point I'd like to make is that dubbing is a necessary marketing strategy to sell your film to foreign markets. If SPECTRE hadn't dubbed the film to death for other countries then you could cross off a few hundred million to the worldwide box office. Audiences, especially the older members, might never have had the chance to learn English and to insult them for not reading subtitles instead is wrong. If people prefer dubbing to subtitles then the distributors have no other choice (an easy choice though) to hire some people for a dub. And to be perfectly honest, dubbing these days isn't half as bad as it used to be. Voice artists stick with actors their whole career and for those countries their voices are somewhat iconic. And the quality as I said is quite good in many countries to the point where emotions in the voice can be heard that are near identical to the OV (rarely as good, but there are exceptions).
I'd like to counter your point about dubbing being damaged art. Yes and no. Sure, many small details are lost in the process no matter how good a dub is, but at the same time you're creating new art and for some films it can actually be better, as somebody on this thread pointed out earlier. Something far worse than dubbing, which changes the film's original state, sometimes is when they provide a different cut to the film for a different region. To this day I'd argue that people in NA aren't actually watching the 'true' Casino Royale. At the very least they're not watching the same film the rest of us are and that is a shame. Releasing a Director's Cut is a further pet peeve of mine. Blade Runner for example is a mess to discuss/review because of it. So dubbing isn't even close to being the worst thing that can happen to a film.
Now I personally always prefer the OV over a dubbing and will gladly sit through a foreign film with subtitles (even if I don't need them). Although I've watched tons of English films in other languages and cannot say that it has ever destroyed a film. (Don't have much experience with foreign films dubbed in English because I choose subtitles like I said.) But I make an exception with Bond films because I've grown so accustomed to everyone's real voices by watching them one thousand times over that I simply refuse to ever hear it dubbed.
P.S. I will add that I do find it ridiculous when people use the excuse of "not wanting to read" in order to watch a dubbed version of a film, because that is laziness, although if they prefer the dubbed voices through their exposure, and have greater access to watch it as such, then I've no issue whatsoever with them choosing the dubbed version.
P.P.S. I utterly loathe the OV dubbing of Lazenby's Bond as Sir Hilary Bray in OHMSS. It was lazy, of bad quality, and worsens the overall film.
Now, myself, I prefer the original version (and I'm considered an oddity among my relations because of that). But I view dubbing as sort of necessary. A necessary evil, if you will, but certainly less so than pan and scan or colorization. Hwever, I will make an exception for musicals. As much as I enjoy watching translated musicals in the theatre, I'm absolutely opposed to dubbing movie musicals, especially the songs. So there.
And to bring back the thread on the road (sort of), what about differences between versions of the novels ? Case in point : in Casino Royale, when Mathis comes to see Bond, posing as a radio salesman, in the original version, he tells 007 : "You're burned, burned, burned." The french translation gives us a better progression : "Vous êtes brûlé, grillé, carbonisé." (IIRC) (tr. : Youre burned, grilled, carbonized.) IMHO, it gives a better flavour to the dialogue. What do you think ?
+100000 Thanks for bringing some sense into this thread. Comparing dubbing, which is a honest way to make money, to heroin, which is an illegal way to kill people, is beyond ridicolous. You may hate dubbing as much as you want, but such statement is really dumb.
You do know, that they translate all the musicals into the language of the respective country it's performed? Just saying. And some of these translations are either hideous or hilarious.
@Univex: As I said above, I personally prefer the movies undubbed, at least English language movies. People of may age and younger do prefer undubbed movies, as we/they are more customed to watch those movies/TV series in English. BTW, wuith AVTAK I am grateful they dubbed Tanya Roberts, because her own voice is really annoying, she sounds like Daisy Duck in distress, the German voice is much more pleasant to listen to. Same with Kevin Costner. But, yes, basically I also prefer the undubbed versions.
BTW, when German TV bought THE PERSUADORS, they decided to go for rather odd and silly jokes, which often did not have any relation to what the characters said. And wiuld you bleive it, whereas THE PERSUADORS were not as succesful ads the producers hoped it to be, in Germany it was a tremendous success. And apparently Curtis and Moore noted this, so they though, the German dubbing authors should write the dailogues for another series (which then would have been translated into English), but -thankfully - this never happened..
And in the 1960's Sir Christopher Lee appeared in two German Edgar Wallace movies, and he was mot dubbed, he actually spoke German. Apparently he was able to speak and understand German, Okay, the first character was supposed to be Chinese, the other character was Australian. But apart from a slight accent, his German was perfect.
And Peter Ustinov sometimes dubbed himself in his movies, as he also was able to speak German fluently. So at least it was his own voice.
And in GF, Gert Fröbe had to be dubbed into English, as his German accent apparently was that heavy, that the producers feared, nobody in the UK and USA would understand a word he was saying.
I wholeheartedly disagree with that. You may be creating something new alright, but it is not what the people whose names are still all over the film have intended to make. In that sense, it can never be the better film. Even if a silken voice replaces Demi Moore's coarse voice in A Few Good Men, it wouldn't be the film they intended to release and that's what matters to me. How can I judge a movie if I'm not watching that movie?
If I took GF and replaced Connery's lines with my own dubbed lines, it wouldn't be GF anymore, it would be "Darth Dimi's Altered Version Of GF". The famous "Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman presents" would have to be omitted because those fellas never intended for me to paste my own voice over Connery's. The cast list would have to read "half of Sean Connery as Ian Fleming's James Bond 007".
And before anyone brings George Lucas into the debate, if Mister Star Wars decides to change details and replace faces and add animation about/in/to Star Wars twenty years later, then by all means Mister Star Wars can do so, because he's Mister Star Wars after all. But if chauvinism triumphs and people refuse to watch a movie in any other language than their own, then that's not the same thing.
As with the dubbing in Bond films, e.g. Nikki Van der Zyl, again, if that's the movie that got greenlit by the producers, then that's what I shall accept.
Incidentally, this isn't me worshipping at the altar of the English speaking. Sadly, many Asian movies get dubbed in America as well, from Japanimation to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragen to you-name-it. Looks like that chauvinistic attitude exists everywhere, although much less so here in Flanders. We watch all our movies in their original languages, except when it's a film made for the littles ones and even then, we can still choose between the "OV" and the dubbed version. The incentive is to get people accustomed to watching films in their original language, as they were intended, as soon as possible. That's how I learned a great deal of English in my life, picked up a few Japanese words and so on.
And with DVD and Blu-ray, everybody can pick the original language when watching a movie.
I don't think Daniel Craig, or anyone else on the production, gives a hoot that people are professionally dubbing over the film. Like I said, it's basically a marketing tactic which is vital for international box office. Without it you can write off around half of SP's final gross.
What is your opinion on different cuts of the same film? Technically if one single frame is missing then the film is not the same and it's not what "they intended". There should only be one cut and therefore many regions of the world wouldn't be able to distribute a film because of censorship laws. What will you do when No Time To Die is released in IMAX and most people are going to non-IMAX theaters and aren't watching the actual film then? Also, the home release version won't be the film that the filmmakers intended because it won't be in the IMAX format either. And don't get me started on the Blu-Ray color grading and corrections. I could go on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that pretty much everything isn't the intended version (whatever the heck that even means) so there's no harm in dubbing over it.
At the end of the day, audiences should be given the choice to watch it in any language they want and not be shamed into seeing the OV when there are other options.
Robert Rietty (actually, Lucio Rietti) dubbed Strangways in DN, Largo in TB, and Tiger Tanaka in YOLT.
OK, you can always say that this dubbing was done in the original language which the actors had also pretended to speak for the shooting, so the dubbing was not that obvious as opposed to re-voicing with a lack of regard to lip movements. Still, one can tell it is not their original voice (more so than with Fröbe, actually).
But some of the greatest movies ever were created by combining actors from different countries who did NOT speak the same language, so the "original" was heavily dubbed from the beginning. In fact, there were often several "originals" in different languages, just like in the early days of sound movies they filmed the same movie two or three times for different markets. It still is most notable in the probably hundreds of French-Italian co-productions from the 1950s and onward. Take Luchino Visconti's Il gattopardo, definitely a masterpiece. The main protagonist is played by Burt Lancaster, who AFAIK spoke English during filming. The young lover was Alain Delon, acting in his native French. Then there was Claudia Cardinale, who spoke Italian for her character.
But since the movie was released "originally" both in French and Italian, all had to be dubbed at some point, and it took nothing away from the film. In Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso from the 80s the old projectionist was played by Philippe Noiret - originally in French, and the protagonist's girlfriend in later life (only in the the long director's cut) by Brigitte Fossey - also in French. For the Italian "original" (which should probably have been in Siciliian dialect, but we won't go that far, will we?) they had to be dubbed.
Once again, I don't have any desire to see a movie dubbed in a language that doesn't fit the story and location. But let's face it, dubbing as such is not necessarily a disaster or an insult to the movie. It can be a helpful tool in international cooperation and obviously also a money-saving device for the producers. And besides, I can well acknowledge and appreciate that some people do not wish to read subtitles and are distracted from the movie by them. If a majority in Germany did not wish to have dubbing, we wouldn't have had it almost universally for the last 90 years.
Exact my feelings. I could not have said it better. If you prefer the OV, fine, if you prefer it dubbed in any other language, feel free to do so. I prefer the undubbed versions, but I also like watching it dubbed,
And I also assume, it will be KEINE ZEIT ZUM STERBEN. It's not verbatim, but KEINE ZEIT ZU STERBEN would be grammatically awkward. And we had worse German titles. DER MORGEN STIRBT NIE being very strange, but then, we know, that the original title was to be TOMORROW NEVER LIES.
1) The film as released, which includes a dubbed Fröbe, is the version people should see. It's how the film was made.
2) Germans may gain an original Fröbe, but they lose pretty much everything else, including the original Connery. A Connery Bond without Connery's voice? That's like watching Metallica perform with Justin Bieber "singing".
3) English isn't my first language either. So? I watch Das Experiment in German with Dutch or English subtitles (depending on where I bought the DVD); I watch La Grande Vadrouille in French with Dutch or English subtitles. I fail to see the problem. If the word "computer" is used in a film, a French subtitle can say "ordinateur". People might actually learn the meaning of the word "computer" and learning something new is never a bad thing.
4) I agree about DVD and BR. But tell me this. Not every movie once released can be bought on DVD or BR in our home countries. It goes out of sale or it's simply never released with the proper dubs / subtitles. Well, I don't care. I buy the film on eBay or Amazon and it's possible that it comes with only English subs (or none at all). What's even better is that I have already saved a lot of money by purchasing films on eBay instead of here, in Belgium. Original prints, bought directly from the UK, usually come way cheaper. So, what does someone who cannot handle original versions of a movie do when there's a film he wants to watch but it's only available with English subs (or none at all)?
Anyway, I'm getting a tad tired of this debate so I'm ready to move on. If people want to watch 20 films featuring Samuel Jackson and never know what Sam's voice truly sounds like, fine. If people want to watch Bond films with a different title ("Opération Tonnerre" because something was wrong with "Thunderball"?) and without the legendary voices of Connery, Moore, Dalton, ..., fine. Give me all the examples of B-, C- and Z- characters that were dubbed in the versions I watch; it'll still not make me accept the fact that British secret agent James Bond talks like he was born under the Eifel Tower.
I will concede that that's a very fair point.
I won't spoil the thread continuing to berate dubbing. I still can't see what's the problem with subtitles. And I do defend that these little things are signs of intelectual decadence - the heroin bit was figurative, I thought that was implied.
Well, I mainly agree with @DarthDimi on this subject. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read me and answer. I'll now fully concentrate on how I love the title No Time to Die ;)
Do keep talking about the funny idiosyncrasies of the different dubbing of Bond films throughout the years. That, I think, was the original point of the thread. Sorry if I led it astray.
Cheerio folks.
It's different and you know it. When things happen during production, they influence what the final cut looks like. That's entirely different from watching Pulp Fiction in a language we weren't intended to hear, especially given, in this case, Tarantino's subtle and delicate word choices. The results are tragedies:
- lip syncs are screwed up
- whoever I'm hearing, it's not Sam Jackson, not even close, and it takes me out of the movie
- that scene, heavy on wordplays, has lost its entire effect now
- an American gangster, not shy about dropping S-, F- and MF-bombs, sounds like the very opposite of that
- ...
You are trying to find flaws in my reasoning, and I'm not too proud to admit that there are probably many. But scrutinizing over my words by bringing in far-fetched counterexamples will not divert the attention from the fact that dubbing in a foreign language comes with a serious loss of quality.
Let me exemplify this with red wine. I'm saying: you're drinking this wine after overexposing it to heat and sunlight and mixing it with salt; that's how far off you have gone from drinking the wine as it was intended to be drunk. You're saying: but what if the guy who exports the wine has run out of proper glasses and makes us drink the wine through a straw; surely that's not how it was inteded to be drunk either. I'm saying: that's quite different and you know it. ;-)
Okay, I fixed that little detail. ;-)
But hey, fine by me. Again, if people want to watch NTTD, starring Daniel Craig but then without his voice because reading subtitles puts too big a strain on them; if, in other cases, chauvinism prevents people from welcoming a foreign language in their midst, ... whatever the reason, I'll happily let them.