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Comment by drfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Laurel and Hardy had a different scheme: they'd leave up all the sets, and later re-take all the scenes that had made it into the final cut, phonetically, in up to 4 additional languages. All of the other actors were replaced by native speakers, but audiences everywhere wanted to see, and hear, the real Laurel and Hardy.

Randy Skretvodt's "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind The Movies" quotes Stan Laurel: ...after shooting the entire picture in English, editing it and previewing it, they would bring in "French, German, Italian and Spanish interpreters. And they translated our dialogue into each language...we'd set up the camera, and we'd do the French version of the first scene...and each scene we did four times before we moved the camera for the different change."

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> but audiences everywhere wanted to see, and hear, the real Laurel and Hardy.

This was probably due to the fact that until some time earlier people had not actually ever heard _anyone_ speaking, these were amongst the first movies which had audio, they just had not thought of dubbing.

But they started applying normal dubbing soon after: according to wikipedia, the "self-dubbed" movies were produced between 1929 and 1931 but then stopped.

A fun side effect of this is that the new dubbers kept the odd english accent! So if you get a copy of later movies where Hardy is dubbed by Alberto Sordi (one of the greatest actors of italian cinema) you can hear him make this funny fake accent, and mispronouncing words (e.g. very famously "stupìdo" rather than "stùpido").

In the 70s Monty Python picked up this tradition by shooting two episodes of 'Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus' for German TV.

The first special was written in English, then translated to German, and all Python members learned their German lines by heart. They didn't have time for the second special, so that one was dubbed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Fliegender_Zi...

They're on YouTube with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHs45_EQvO0

Peter Gabriel did this with "Melt": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49mdn20QsbM

Yes, you really can hear the whole album in German.

It goes the other way with Kraftwerk, that released every single album both in German and English, except for Tour de France which is appropriately available in German or French

The 1999 soundtrack for Tarzan by Phil Collins was also recorded by Collins himself in English, Italian, German, Spanish and French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m03Wcfx8dPE

For a more extreme example, Pocahontas' "Colors of the Window" in 33 languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKD8tIMlV8

I have often wondered recently why this isn't done more? Just re-shoot the same show/movie with Spanish French Chinese Japanesse Arabic etc.. speaking casts. make the smae show for diffenrt markets with different actors use the same sets the directors already have the scenes set up hell you could record camera positions and the camera could move exactly the same in different versions.

Cost too much in labor/time.

Overdub is super cheap compared to multiple shoots.

Probably because it would still be significantly cheaper to just sub/dub the english version. And finding quality casts for all the languages would be a lot harder too.

I'd much rather watch a foreign production with top quality actors subbed in english than an assembly line english version with sub par acting.

(Although I can see it being alright for stuff you already don't expect to be quality, like soaps)

Labor is the most expensive component. The sets & equipment are peanuts by comparison.

I wonder if any 3d movies have done this and synced speaking mouth movement with different languages.

Software does indeed exist for animation localization.

Don't know about films but kids TV programs seem to do this.

Edit, father who has seen Paw Patrol in lots of different regional versions on different streaming service.

Kids TV is really good at this, until quite recently I didn't even know that Paw Patrol was originally a US show which then gets dubbed by a UK cast alongside the more expected regions with entirely different languages.

Time is money. You’re paying far more people and tying up far more resources to shoot 4x takes as you would to hire voice actors to dub.

> I have often wondered recently why this isn't done more?

Because you have to pay N casts, shoot N × as much film, do N times as much editing, and use the sets of N times as long. The only thing this saves on is constructing the sets.

> hell you could record camera positions and the camera could move exactly the same in different versions.

Which probably is of less value that you think unless you do the same thing with the cast, who usually aren't as mechanically programmable.

With deep fake technology you could presumably do one take in the main actors primary languages, then just hire voice crews per language maybe?

The deep fake could adjust the actors to make the body match the audio where appropriate.

Maybe a couple years off from being very feasible? Maybe use a sensor suit to add gestures.

There’s a lot of advances coming up that seem like they could make for some interesting art.

You're downvoted at this point but I think this is definitely going to happen in the future, even if it's just rewiring mouth movements to match the new audio.

This is already nearly there

I don't think that lip movements are the thing holding dubbing back. Most dubbed voices have a cheesy Days of Our Lives vibe. Its quite easy to tell a dubbed TV show without ever looking at the screen.

Curious, could the voices also be altered / deep faked so that they sound similar to the actors' voices?

You know, that might be about the first legitimately good use of deep fakes.

Personally I've tried to watch programs dubbed into English before and found it very distracting, to the point I'd almost rather watch it in the original language subtitled (though that takes considerably more concentration).

I'm not sure how much of an issue this is to people who don't have English as a first language, where they have presumably encountered dubbed English films since childhood.

I'm a native French speaker, watched dubbed English movies since childhood but started hating it and being disturbed by dubs when I was a teen (didn't really notice or care about it when I was a child). Lips not moving in sync with the audio break immersion for me. Plus, more often than not, voice actors for dubs are just not very good and that destroys the actor's performance.

So, I transitioned to only watching subtitled movies around 16 once I could just buy dvds and have access to the original version.

Growing up in the Netherlands (everything subtitled) we had access to German television (everything dubbed) and we always frowned about how everything sounded the same. I'm still convinced that the same three voice actors were doing all the characters in all the properties I ever saw on german television. When you grow up with subtitles, it's second nature, and dubbing is annoying.

Dubbed cinema is a horror, you are watching a completely different movie if you're not watching the original.

With subbing, you can enjoy the real acting and easily follow along with what is being said so you can understand the plot as well.

Of course, there's something lost in translation with subbing as well, but it's still much closer to the original than a dub.

Please never judge a movie by the quality of a dub.

Or they could use what Star Wars Rogue One used for Leia and Tarkin, which I don't think was technically deepfaked, but cgi, but close enough.

If you're going to all that effort you might as well adapt the stories, or storyline, to the local culture.

I don't know if it is practical in general, but the Norwegian show Norsemen is filmed twice: once in Norwegian and once in English:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsemen_(TV_series)

It's on Netflix: quite amusing.

Yes, fair play to them for this

First 2 seasons were great in places, I stopped watching the third.

But in this case all the actors speak English, you don't need a whole new cast. Plus they put on that Norwegian accent that makes it great for English audiences.

It's a great show that manages to be both about Vikings and modern Norway at the same time.

I have to imagine that it would be tough to cast actors in multiple languages that all fit the same vibe as the original. My understanding is that the casting process is relatively difficult and takes a lot of effort; why do it multiple times and risk putting out a mediocre imitation?

Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns had a mixture of languages spoken during filming. In the English releases it certainly looks as though some of the minor characters are dubbed from another language, but my multilingual lipreading skills are not up to determining whether that other language is Italian or Spanish or even something else.

Hollywood does this with productions from other countries, for example "City of Angels" [1] for "Der Himmel über Berlin" [2], or "Vanilla Sky" for "Abre los ojos" [4]. And not only do the use American casts, they re-shoot the whole movie.

The result is inferior most of the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Angels_%28film%29

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_Sky

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Your_Eyes_%281997_film%29

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