This weekend is my best friend’s 26th birthday. So yesterday, I went to the toy store to buy her a present.
Well … what do you buy your friends?
Anyhoo, I found this Batman Begins action figure (with neat caperiffic action). It’s the perfect gift for her, believe it or not. The labeling on the package is in English, Spanish, and French, which I don’t see often on toys, but I don’t particularly care. There’s a little blurb about how Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman to protect Gotham City, blah blah blah.
But did you know that when translated into Spanish, his name apparently becomes Bruno Diaz? I’m still somewhat mystified. And I wonder if I can find an action figure for Carlito Kent.
… Not only that, but Dick Grayson became “Ricardo Tapia” (Jason Todd just became dead: you can’t improve on some outcomes). But yes, somehow, the Bat-universe actually got itself a pretty thorough transposition into Spanish that the Super-universe did not (Supes’ world just got an accent when rendered for Latin America: Big Muscle Boy is still “Clark Kent”, and Lois Lane just becomes “Luisa” Lane). Commissioner Gordon becomes “Fierro”; the Joker becomes “El Guasón”, Catwoman becomes “Gatúbela”, the Riddler becomes “El Acertijo”. Gotham City got turned into “Ciudad Gótica”.
An important factor may have been the 1960s Batman TV show – its international-release dub happened to get a good team of writers who realized that the joke part would not work quite right with slavishly-literal renderings, so they added quite a bit of subversive cultural adaptation. Superman, OTOH, well, he’s so irredeemably a Middle-American White-Toast type that you figure, yep, this boy has GOT to be a gringo…
Okay, now it makes a little more sense. But I just sat there in Toys R Us, staring at it and giggling.
And I wonder why people walk wide around me. 