The BBC's dubbing process for “The Water Margin” (1976) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The BBC's dubbing process for “The Water Margin” (1976) [video]

youtube.com

12 pointsquickfox9 comments

Reminds me of the ‘Magic Roundabout’ which used animations from a French TV show but completely changed the characters, plot and script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Roundabout

Is there somewhere to see the original transcript of Magic Roundabout, it would be very interesting to see the differences.

The Water Margin was on when I was a kid, and after watching perhaps the first episode, I missed all the others, as I was sent to evening elocution lessons, together with the son of my parent's close friends. He was Scottish, so in retrospect I can perhaps understand his parents decision, even though I sometimes had difficulty understanding them, lol, and probably vice-versa, our family were very middle-class English, they were IIRC from Glasgow.

But in any case we kids were both absolutely livid at having to miss this essential schoolboy series, and would spend most of the following day trying to catch up with the story via playground gossip. I remember affecting an extremely exaggerated upper-class English accent in the hopes of putting our parents off the whole elocution project, but on the contrary they seemed delighted. lol.

You should have started speaking Glaswegian. They'd have stopped the lessons instantly.

LOL, didn't think of that at the time, we were fast friends and I picked up a few choice phrases even though they were fairly well to do.

There seem to be quite a few of the originals on YouTube - not sure if we can get automated translations.

The Water Margin really was essential watching at that time. Not sure that the subtleties of script changes would have made much difference to it’s audience though.

PS I also went to elocution lessons but managed to persuade my parents I was a lost cause after two lessons!

That sounds similar to the Czechoslovak series Pat & Mat [0] which contains almost no dialog, but it became very popular in The Netherlands (as 'Buurman en Buurman', neighbor and neighbor) where Dutch dialog was added.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_%26_Mat

Lip syncing a non issue if the lips don’t move!

Actually not a bad idea to avoid lip movement if you want to export internationally.

Reminds me a bit of other overdubs that went the whole rescript route, although in comedy form:

''Most eXtreme elimination Challenge''

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Most_Extreme_Elimination_Challenge

or the 1960s motion picture ''What's Up Tiger Lily?''

https://wikiless.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F

From the video it seems as though the script writer (who doesn't speak any Japanese) wrote the script entirely using what he thinks the characters are saying and what he would 'want' them to say. The Wikipedia page for The Water Margin [0] adds that he also used brief plot synopses.

Still pretty baffling though. Does anyone happen to know how close they ended up getting to the original story/dialog?

Was it common to optimize for 'lip movement accuracy' over translation accuracy for dubs?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Margin_(1973_TV_seri...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com