I can understand dubbing a movie to give it a broader market appeal. I have a copy of Hard Boiled, which was shot in Hong Kong, which is, understandably, in Cantonese, so they have dubbed it to English to help widen the market appeal (some people will not watch subtitled films). Personally, if there’s a choice, I prefer subtitled, even if I do end up watching the subtitles more than the pictures.
There is an art to dubbing, both of foreign language films and, more importantly, of English films. We notice the slightest slip very easily and trying to change the dialogue doesn’t work as we’re all very adept at reading lips. So when they dubbed Ewan McGregor from saying Annakin Skywalker’s midichlorian count to change it from 20,000 to 10,000 (or whatever), we noticed, and I spotted that the lead actor in Eragon referred to his dragon as ‘him’ at one point (Saphira is a female dragon) although the sound says ‘her.’
Something else that we seem adept at figuring out is what someone should sound like just by looking at them, so even if the timing is perfect we can tell something has been dubbed because the voice is from a person that doesn’t fit the one we’re looking at. This is fairly evident in TV ads as well, when they’re dubbed from a foreign language to English (in an effort to save money).
I was reminded of this because I picked up a pack of all three Mad Max movies last week, I have them on VHS, but not on DVD. I watched the first film earlier today and noticed, to my horror, that it is a version where all of the Australian sounding voices are dubbed over with American voices! So Mel Gibson’s familiar twang is lost, as is the emotion and connection to the character. It just rips away from the movie, pulls you out as, while they did a fairly good job in this case, it’s still so obviously not right.
Movie producers, TV execs, Ad execs, I appeal to you, don’t do it, it’s not worth it, you’re ruining your product.
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