If the removal of culturally unique references is considered “dumbing down” then I can see how that would happen.
Easier to remove the cultural references than replace them with new ones for each market. Especially one as varied as the entire US market.
It’s not just Paris. The USA stole all of it’s place names from established cultures so maybe it’s fair enough to be specific. It’s no different than making sure you say “Washington D.C.” rather than just “Washington”
Regarding the news, have you ever read any British tabloid newspapers? They do a damn fine job of dumbing down the news for their readers, and let’s hear it for the “Page Three girls”.
Budvar and Pilsner Urquell are my favorite beers thank you. I know exactly what I’m talking about. I also like Old Style Light just a little below room temperature. That is heaven if you ask me.
Very few american craft brew are worth digesting. As you agree, you have to look far and wide for a microbrew that appeals to me. I don’t like bocks. I like pilsners. A good Hefeweisen also serves me. I can’t make a pilsner yet, so I’ve finally figured out that dry hoping works pretty well for an ale. Guiness is good, but I hate most “If you like Guiness you’ll love this” beers.
I’m not saying Bud Light is the ultimate beer, but it does a better job for me than most microbrews. But that doesn’t stop me from trying them all. That’s how I learn what I like.
Worst beer ever IMO: Black Butte Porter
Come, now. This is GQ, and the GQ answer is that all beer is disgusting crap drunk by people who either don’t know better or are trying to impress people who don’t know better. There is no other excuse for its existence.
from a nearby manhole Wine sucks!
Aside from the Paris in France, here in the U.S., there’s at least one in each of Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois, California, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina, Idaho, Oregon, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Just saying “Paris” doesn’t exactly pin the location down for many folks.
I will only point out that no one found it necessary to dumb down The Benny Hill Show for export.
I think to be fair to the Merkins, there are a couple of things at play here:
America is the world’s biggest exporter of popular culture, so if, for example, a thick rural Australian accent is subtitled on US television, and a thick US southern accent is not subtitled on Australian television, it’s simply down to the audiences’ relative exposure to those things rather than anything to do with intellect.
Foreign producers and manufacturers treat the huge US market as a free form of R&D. We get fashions and TV shows here a year or two after they appear in the US because Australian producers want to wait and see what works and what bombs in America before parting with their money. American companies have no such luxury, so they possibly tend to go with more shallow and bland stuff, just out of caution.
My experience with US television and movies is that they produce a tidal wave of utter dreck, but when they excel, you get some of the sharpest, smartest stuff you’d ever want to see. And if that is only a small percentage, it doesn’t matter because the market is so enormous, so there’s a lot of good stuff.
Be honest, how many of those could you have listed from prior knowledge rather than looking them up? Quick checks on Wikipedia, and the first two I opt for at random have populations under 5000, and the third has 576. Hardly likely to be mistaken for the home of the Mona Lisa and the Louvre.
I wish they had. The Benny Hill Show Cliff Notes started to add up.
Paris, Texas, for one. But it really doesn’t matter which ones I may or may not have known. There are a lot of people in the U.S., and I’d bet that a good many of them are familiar with one or more Paris’s here. Granted, I happen to know where the Louvre is without the “France” identifier, but there are lots of city names in the U.S. that are the same as city names in other countries. It’s not a matter of “dumbing down” to include the country when discussing a city such as Paris or London or Vienna, or what have you; it’s a matter of specificity.
I just now happen to have been discussing this very issue with my dad, in between British-made programming on public TV. (Owing to career choices, I spend most Saturday nights with my family.) After a promotional break promoting various shows, during which he said “that’s bullshit” several times about nothing in particular, something struck me. “You think everything’s bullshit that doesn’t make a direct and obvious appeal to your emotions,” I told him. He made vague, mumbling attempts to gainsay this proposition, but that was all.
Now my dad is not too far off from being your culturally average American, so I thought I’d trot this out as a possible rule of thumb about European vs. American culture - especially as regards TV far like Kitchen Nightmares or Antiques Roadshow, which do seem to fit the paradigm.
So do Americans demand that their cultural fare make a direct and obvious appeal to the emotions?
In that case, why isn’t it the normal way to refer to such places outside of America? ‘London’ to a Parisian presumably could mean Ontario, and all sorts of confusion could result? If I hear that somebody lives in ‘East London’, it only takes a few brain cells to work out whether that’s an adjective or part of the name of the city.
:dubious:
Edit, meant to add:
Yeah, even I had heard of that one before. And it appears to be the only one that’s larger than the small town I’m sitting in at the moment. Whose name appears on wine bottles in the local shop, although they’re from the Australia namesake. We manage to figure it out without spelling it out.
Another factor, i think, is the knock-on effect of gas/petrol pricing.
In America, where gas is cheaper than anywhere else in the western world, there have traditionally been fewer concerns about the cost of buying gas (obviously, there are exceptions, like the last few years, and the oil crisis of the 1970s).
When gas prices aren’t much of an issue, people aren’t as concerned about running a car with a small, efficient engine. So, for much of the post-war period, lots of Americans have run cars with large six and eight cylinder engines, while a six is generally considered a pretty big engine in the UK, and a lot more people drive 4-cylinder cars.
With a small engine, it can be very easy to notice the difference in performance between a manual and an automatic gearbox, but if you’ve got a big six or a honkin’ V8 under the hood, you probably don’t notice the slight performance hit that you get from an auto transmission.
It could be that the newer breed of automatic transmissions reduces these concerns, but for much of the postwar period, gas prices and engine sizes were probably a contributing factor in the different take-up rates for automatic transmissions in the US and UK.
Maybe true for Europe, or at least parts of it, but not true everywhere.
In Australia, more people by automatics than manuals. I sold General Motors cars in Sydney for a year in 1989-1990, and even back then we probably sold 7 or 8 autos for every manual. In the cars with big engines (V6, V8), it was probably 15 or 20 to 1, while in the small 4 cylinder hatchbacks, it was probably about 3 or 4 to 1. I’ll bet that trend has continued, and that (outside the proper sports car market), far more autos than manuals are sold in Australia. And the majority of rentals are automatics.
On a more technological note, the difference between manuals and autos has blurred over the last decade or so, with the development of automatic transmissions that have a manual selector option (Porsche’s Tiptronic and similar systems), and the sequential manual transmissions that give the driver the control of a manual without the need for a clutch.
But they did find it necessary to edit out or block out certain key scenes or parts of scenes, so as not to confuse the local audience :o
Maybe it’s just a local Illinois thing. I mean, if you live in a small town and someone walks in asking you to fix their glasses and looks like a local too, what’s the chance that they just happened to buy them in Paris, France?
On the other hand I think I may be onto something. I work for the Dutch company Philips. which pretty much the entire world knows about. But during my stint in Iowa, when I mentioned “Philips”, the first thing that came to mind to the locals was not Koninklijke Philips Electronics, but Phillips Petroleum and the gas stations 
There’s also the simplicity notion: manuals have far fewer parts that could cause them to break down vs an automatic.
And I think it also has to do with the American vs European idea of motorsports. Most Americans consider a race to be a drag race, straight run from a green light. For which they insist an automatic is superior for consistency of track times. Europears on the other hand consider a rally, twisting turns, hills, under adverse weather conditions to be a race. For which a manual would be better suited in order to control an engine,s power curve, compression braking, drifting, etc.
I mentioned using “rub-on letters” once to a professor of mine (Irish, educated at Oxford), and he was perplexed. After a beat, he said, “Oh, yes, of course, Letraset. Why do Americans avoid trademarks so much?”
Later, I thought, “No, we use them a lot”:
Scotch Tape = transparent adhesive (Sellotape)
Xerox (now dated) = photocopy
Kleenex = facial tissue
Aspirin = acetylsalicylic acid
Post-It Note = repositional note
photoshop = alter a digital image
White Out = correction fluid
Tivo = digitally record a TV signal
Jell-o = gelatin dessert
X-acto = (?) modeling knife
Walkman = portable / personal cassette/CD player
Sanka = instant coffee
…and so on.
To make changes for trademarks seems perfectly normal and not "dumbing down,
to me.
For what it’s worth, we Poles are just as guilty as the Brits. Every pair of athletic-looking shoes are referred as ‘Addidas’ shoes, and every vacuum cleaner is referred to as an “Electrolux” 
I question that. While I live within a 90 minute drive of both Rome and Athens, I do not need a qualifier to be able to work out whether a reference is to Italy/Greece or to Georgia USA. (“USA” added in case people were mixing it up with the former USSR territory.)
US media invariably refer to SydneyAustralia (sic), and there is no real danger of confusing with anywhere else. We all know that Sydney is the capital of Australia…