In TV News… Rumors are that Apple is considering giving Ted lasso a surprise 4th season. Why? It really felt like that show had an ending, and it definitely would feel odd to see Jason Sudekis back. I have a feeling that’s a very unnecessary season that will drag down the legacy of the sitcom.
TV Shows Watched: Bel Air: S3E4 (Peacock) with audio description, Pachenko: S2E1 (Apple plus) with audio description, Bad Monkey: S1E3 (Apple Plus) with audio description, That 90’s Show: S3E3 and D3E4 (Netflix) with audio description, 911: S6E9 (Hulu) with audio description, and The Traitors: UK- Season Finale (Peacock) no audio description.
Podcasts: Films To Be buried With with Brett Goldstein (feat David Morrissey), The Projectionist Booth podcast- (Review: Alien Romulus), and The NPR Politics Podcast (Politics)
YouTube: Breakfast All Day (review: Alien Romulus) and Jacob Hubbard (Review: The Crow)
Movies: Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One (MAX) with audio description, The Supremes At Earl’s All you can Eat (Hulu) with audio description, incoming (Netflix) with audio description.
So, yesterday I talked a little about the difference in two projects that used dubbing, and their various flaws. Today, I’m focusing on one of the programs that really almost gets it perfectly right, and that is Apple Plus’s Pachenko, a show I didn’t expect to like nearly as much as I did during the first season, and rose to critical acclaim nabbing a second season and helping Apple expand their international brand. It is a very interesting show, because the primary focus is on Koreans living in japan, so Korean is the primary language spoken as it represents this racism the Koreans went through living in Japan at the time.However, the series does have some English, and also Japanese. So, Apple has done something unique here, and their audio description is done by a company I’ve never heard of. It is freakishly close to Warner Brothers, but I think they said W Brothers did the audio description.
the dubbing, something that the audio description team has no control over, comes into play quite a bit, and largely when the characters are speaking Korean. For example, there is a scene where some characters are speaking in Japanese, and our primary narrator mentions this, and then you can hear overlayed dubbing in English, where you can still hear the original performer, but there’s also English on top. For most of the dubbed sequences, you can’t hear the original performances. They’ve literally replaced the original audio. So, this show has a mix. At least with this show, there are some voice actors who sound like they are from Asian heritage, and have a hint of an accent while speaking fluent and intelligible English. So, it doesn’t feel totally whitewashed, though I can’t say that is true of the whole cast. I’m hoping because it exists, that the effort was made, and the other actors are perfect representations of their identity, and they just don’t have an accent.
And the description is also good, focusing a lot on really visual details. The way fog moves through a scene, or the care two of our leads take in making rice wine, and describing what they are doing step by step in a sequence with no dialog. Pachenko really already was a show I remembered for being a better described program, and in the first episode of the new season, it certainly stands in contrast to the poor actors in nice Girls, or the very white sounding cast of Women In blue. I think very little thought is given to dubbing, as film snobs are quite against it, but like I mentioned yesterday, for some of us it is our only option. For this show, in order to enjoy it without dubbing and also be blind, you would need to be fluent in three languages. That’s a narrow audience of blind people who speak Japanese, Korean, and English.
I want to keep having these discussions as I can, as projects come about, because by actually finally looking at how we can make quality dubbing so that directors aren’t so opposed to it, we have to acknowledge the current medium is kinda broken, and then figure out how audio description works here. For the actors who work on Pachenko, for the most part, they are better actors. Some really seem to be taking their parts seriously. If you want to get caught up in another really interesting series set in Japan this year, I’d recommend this.