Never understood what the problem with having David Attenborough instead of Sigourney Weaver narrate Planet Earth was either.
The Aussie themes have even led to some history lessons in our house: a handful of episodes reference Australian soldiers (including Bluey's grandpa) which led to my kids asking what wars Australia fought in. Queue the (very) gentle introductions to WW1 and WW2, and the Pacific War specifically.
The exposure to places that are not-America is good for them!
"it's just a bunch of singing monkeys I wouldn't read too much in to it"
I mean most of native speakers won't have much trouble understanding Australian accents. It's the ESL people that would have a hard time without having enough exposure.
It’s very different tonally (much more serene), but fans of Bluey should check out the BBC kids’ show Sarah & Duck, which is aimed at a similar age range and also contains much for parents to love as well as children. It’s gentle and surreal, and I’d have been happy to watch it on its own merits even if I didn’t have a kid who loved it as well.
The Attenborough cut is my personal preference too.
"..until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more."
-- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-li...
Or to provide an Americanized analogy, you wouldn’t replace Morgan Freeman in a situation where you needed the sage reflections of an old man in voiceover form.
What we need to do is feed all of his narrations from the last 60 years into an AI and get it to process them; then we can use this corpus to have all nature documentaries narrated by him forever more.
I am, of course, joking... but would it really be that bad an idea? ;-)
I'm not disagreeing (I'm a bit too old for Bob the Builder and I don't have kids), I'm genuinely curious.
https://twitter.com/matttomic/status/1158910781964083201
The Japanese dub from what I've seen is surprisingly okay, but also kind of wordy, which they make up for by speaking faster than usual. (But they have the guy who does all the anime priests as Rev. Lovejoy.)
One out of every six big US movies would be black if it were proportionate to population, but they're not. The reason is because black people will watch white movies, but white people don't watch black movies. It's the people willing to walk away that make the decision.
It's very expensive to redub a series just to change the accent; they're getting a return on that.
What happened to "people just want to be represented in movies"? Simply put, since there are more whites than blacks in the U.S., then every film-maker has an incentive to represent them more to reach a broader audience.
This is absolutely not because "white people are more bigoted", which is laughable when you consider that they are surely, in proportion, the most xenophile people on the planet.
Would you mind substantiating this?
- reflect on how many white people have made a social virtue out of countersignaling their own group;
- point out how low the bar is in the rest of the world, and how easy this comparison really is.
You seem to be supporting that opinion, but angrily.
We don't need more Americanized stuff. If anything it should be the reverse: USA needs more international content, accents, etc.
But some episodes I wonder if overseas audiences get the same tensions. IE Curry Quest, walk for a curry swap but have to deal with a magpie.
Do people really understand how "out to get you" magpies can be in Spring? As a kid, they can be vicious bastards.. when I realised they were dealing with one I was anxious over how it was going to go.
My brother tried to order an apple pie fritter in Canada and the woman didn't understand what he was asking for. When he proncounced it fridder, she did :-) I understood both ways perfectly well but hey!
I think it started with Pawn Stars and went downhill from there. MBAs saw $$$ and had no qualms about dumbing down their national audience and trashing the reputations of the channels in the process. American TV is unwatchable IMO.
I remember when my complaint about the History Channel was that it was WWII all the time. It was still massively better than today; at least I learned about the Battle of the Bulge over and over and over.
Now I'm sure there's variations of British accents, but the ones we were exposed to as children seemed to coincide with "scientific" or other educational content.
That's an understatement.
or maybe: Thaaats and aaandastatement.
I grew up reading Paddington books, and about 90% of what I know about British money came from those books. Re-interpreting it to American dollars would have ruined the immersion into the story, IMO. I was very glad when the Paddington movies were unapologetically British.
Edit:
> Actress and conservationist Sigourney Weaver was brought in to replace David Attenborough as narrator, as it was thought her familiarity to American audiences would attract more viewers.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(2006_TV_series)
I'm not denying that Attenborough is a category in himself and a wonderful narrator of course.
Freeman and Sigourney are in a different category. Both are excellent actors and narrators in films directed by another people. Freeman is "the" voice in the anglosphere, but Rodriguez de la Fuente was "the" voice in the latinosphere. Everybody was trying to imitate their style and accent decades after their death. He was the leader in a wolf pack when nobody was doing that, and don't hesitate to escalate a clift to take a good shot of a vulture nest. He was not an actor that just arrives to a set, say their lines and go.
By the end of his life, Jacques Cousteau seemed a caricature of himself. The red cap, the thick accent--the Cousteau aesthetic was so overripe that director Wes Anderson used it as the template for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activi...
She, a world-renowned scholar and classicist, was replaced by Liev fucking Schreiber.
And it gives great ideas for playing with the kids.