In English:

Dubbed into Spanish:

If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has ended up with piss poor sound quality, which forms a chapter apart.)

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Categories: Languages, Les bourgeois, Splog, Theatre

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1. boynamedsue
   June 11th 2008 12:43

   And yet there is a generalised belief that they have the best dubbers in the world. In reality, they struggle to have the best dubbing artists in Spain…If it weren’t for the unnatural, hyper-Catalan “Dubese”, I would say Catalan dubbing was better.

   I once played pirates of the Caribean to a group of students (in V.O), they said they found the voices strange. I realised that Spaniards actually believe that films SHOULD SOUND unnatural and stylised, and when it isn’t they think something’s wrong.

   Like Americans watching British TV in the old days, they found the colours “wrong” because they were too natural.

2. Ian Llorens
   June 12th 2008 01:44

   Even today, I find the Catalan dubbed version of the Black Adder, absolutely fantastic.
   Dallas was a different story.

3. boynamedsue
   June 12th 2008 01:59

   never saw Blackadder dubbed… It might well work in Catalan.

   For my money, Catalan script writers dip too often and too deeply into the refranari, winding up sounding a bit too pagès and olde worlde.

   Not as bad as the Spanish ones though…Don’t you hate how everyone sounds like they are from Valladolid? Except the Latino characters of course, they all sound like Speedy Gonzalez (even when they have no accent in the original version).

4. Trevor ap Simon
   June 12th 2008 08:00

   This house has no telly, so I’m fortunately spared any of this most of the time, except when the other half tries to drag me off to non-VO flick salons.

   @Ian: My advertisers have asked me to ask you not to mention Dallas – it doesn’t connect with the 16-25 segment

5. David
   June 12th 2008 13:26

   Ah, Sir Edmund Blackadder and Baldrick…the trench-war magician cook who gave the world such treats as “Rat au Van” (a rat that’s been run over by a van)…really puts to shame both Ferran Adrià and Santi Santamaria. Now that’s what I would call high-standard comedy.

   BTW, I wasn’t impressed at all by your promessi sposi spoof, boy, nor did I think the Portuguese computer-nerd tsunami stuff was any better, either. As a matter of fact, both episodes come across as pretty unimaginative, hackneyed stuff, the kind of thing school leavers would put on for the closing ceremony.

6. boynamedsue
   June 13th 2008 13:29

   Each to their own D.

   I piss myself laughing at “Bella Fighera”, and the “Tsunami de informaticos” is a good use of dead pan voice over mixed with surrealism. OK, similar things have been done before, but there’s nothing truly new under the sun.

   The point of the blog was, it’s difficult to imagine a Spanish comic doing anything similar.

7. David
   June 13th 2008 23:59

   Not quite. There must have been some spoof of a well-known Spanish classic at some stage. At school in Italy everybody’s got to plod their way through Dante’s Divine Comedy and I Promessi Sposi.. so most Italians are fed up to their back teeth with both, particularly with the latter. A show like “Bella Figheira”’s likely to get many laughs anyway.
   I don’t know if there’s anything similar in Spain. Staging a convincing take-off of Don Quixote shouldn’t be all that difficult, though.
   Perhaps I was a bit too harsh on the “Tsunami de informâticos”, with its surreal take on insufferable computer freaks. But surely this is something one could expect to find on Spanish TV, too, on programmes like Noche H, El Gran Wyoming’s or CQC? just an idea.

8. boynamedsue
   June 14th 2008 10:18

   The Tsunami de Informaticos could be done by Gran Wyoming, but he would do it differently.

   The T de I sketch works because it takes a ridiculous premise (and quite a cool phrase) then plays it straight with it. The characters react as if they were part of a genuine natural disaster, the voice over is close to the shocked awed tones used by reporters in these situations. Spanish comedy would use a “funny” voice-over, including liberal use of catchphrases and the word “frikis”, and the acting would be more self-consciously “funny”.

   It’s like Spanish TV feels the need to signal in big gold letters “THIS IS FUNNY!!! YOU CAN LAUGH NOW!”