Ok everyone, please take your seats. The show is about to begin. For the sake of audience members around you, can you please turn your cell phones off or switch them to vibrate? If you have a pager, uh, please get out of the 90s and join the rest of us. Welcome, friends. It's Tuesday (or Martes en espanol) and I'm back with even more under the wide umbrella of dubbing. This should be the final one, but hey, I never say never (except for the two times in that sentence).
So far, we have tackled clean versions of songs on the radio and family-friendly speech on television where obscenity rightly belongs. What's left? Plenty, friends, plenty. For now, I enter the world of personalized items that don't work 100%. Whatever do I mean by that? Stay tuned, and you just might find out.
As a child, I received a great gift on one of my early birthdays. It was a little record in a blue sleeve that had my name written across the top. Inside, it promised, I would find songs about yours truly. I couldn't wait, and we through that bad boy on the turntable and let 'er rip. (In that last sentence, the "bad boy" somehow turned into a she. I hate it when that happens.) The first song, though not timed too well with the dubbing, was basically about how awesome I am. Check it out:
"There is a boy named...PETER,
A boy that we all know,
We like to visit...PETER,
Because we like him so.
We like the way that...PETER
Can smile and say Hello.
We like to visit...PETER
To...PETER we will go!
There was a similar (but cooler) thing that my mom got for my dad during my childhood. She sent in personal information about him, and some time later, a kick-ass cassette tape came in the mail. On it, legendary Laker broadcaster Chick Hearn did a play-by-play of an imaginary basketball game starring...PAUL KLEIN! This was better than the Peter record because Chick was cooler than whoever was singing my name a couple of times. Also, Chick used the information at his disposal, and even mentioned that my dad was married and had two kids. Around that time, my brother and I called our dad "Geeze" for being old, so Chick said, "And it bounces off the head of...GEEZE" at one point. It was awesome. I'm pretty sure Kevin remembers most of the tape word-for-word, so maybe he can enlighten us in the comments section.
With technology, great things have come to us as a people. Namely, there has been a recent spike in personalized phone calls from famous people. For example, I got a call on my cell phone that looked like it was from my friend Dave. I said, "Hey, what's up?" What I heard was not Dave though. Instead, it was Samuel L. Jackson. You might not know Dave, but trust me when I say that's a big difference. Loosely remembered, he said, "Hello, PETER! This is Samuel L. Jackson. Your FRIEND...DAVID wants you to stop PLAYING ON YOUR COMPUTER and go see Snakes on a Plane." It went on for a little longer, and I naturally went online to find it and send it to someone else. Pretty cool, eh?
Apparently other people thought so too, because not much later, I got a call from David Ortiz of the Red Sox telling me to go to www.mlb.com for all the best blah blah blah. It spread even more, and I had the distinct pleasure of sending Dave a call from none other than Optimus Prime of the Transformers. It told him that his LOVER...DUSTIN (it didn't know Dusty) was actually a Decepticon knows as "Scorponok." It gave me a few names to choose from, and Scorponok was hands-down the best, and not just because he's a Scorpio astrologically.
Lastly, I can't hold onto this story any longer, and it's related to names and dubbing, so bear with me. Growing up, my brother and I watched "The Neverending Story" many times. Near the very end, the main character (a boy named Bastian) has to give the princess a name or else the whole world will end. It's science fiction, people. Anyway, he finally runs to the window and yells something completely unintelligible. Kevin and I watched so many times, and all we could get was that it seemed to be three syllables. A good twenty years later, Kevin realized that the internet could help us. On tons of pages, it says that Bastian yells his mom's name of Moonchild out the window. "Really?" I asked. "That's what several places say, and it's in the book that the movie's based on," he told me. I wanted to hear it myself, so with Kevin on the phone, I did a search on Google and finally found a place that had that scene. I was giddy with anticipation after so many years of uncertainty. I held the phone up to the speaker on my computer, and anxiously awaited the moment. "Bastian, say my name!" the princess implored. "Ok, I'll do it!" he yelled, and he ran up the stairs, threw the window open, and took a deep breath before yelling..."HORSEDICK!" Someone with a deep voice had dubbed over that part just to get people like me. I couldn't fucking believe it. That bastard! But like Ron Burgundy after Baxter ate the whole cheese wheel, I wasn't even mad; I was impressed.
So there you go, friends. That closes the book on the dubbing category (for now, at least). Have a great...TUESDAY, and I'll see you back here...TOMORROW. Shaloha.
3 comments:
My family also got the Play-By-Play cassette tape for our old man for father's day...Mark "Gunner" James. - Rockabye
At least you had your name incorporated into a song, dubbed poorly or otherwise. I have never heard the name Elayne used in any song. When I was a kid, I found a song entitled "Elaine" at a record store. I bought it, hurried home and excited started to listen to it. It was just an instrumental. Big big disapointment.
It was not a cheese wheel that baxter ate, rather is was The Wheel of Cheese. Please show The Wheel his proper respect in referring to him in furute posts. Thank you.
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