I saw the movie Ransom on TV the other night, and my roommate and I got to wondering: when they dub over the “bad” words in movies, how do they do it? Is it the real actor’s voice, or a stand-in? We know it can vary from movie to movie – some are well-dubbed, some are VERY poorly dubbed – but when they do it well, how do they do it?
If it’s a big budget movie, the studio makes a tv release in which they have the actors come and do the dubbing. Lesser movies are edited by the TV stations themselves, and they usually just chop the audio out where the naughty words are.
It’s not just the TV versions that are dubbed. Often dialogue is dubbed in the theatrical version for various reasons, to change a line or whatever.
Sometimes, a movie is shot with both “clean” and “dirty” words. “10” was shot this way. Example: in the scene where Bo Derek tells Dudley Moore about her love of music and what she does when certain songs are played, in the “dirty” version she likes to “fuck” to Ravel’s Bolero and in the “clean” version she says “make love”. These are actually different takes instead of overdubs. I guess the director figured it was easier than having the actors do overdubs when the movie hits the small screen.
that’s how they shot Dream On, I believe. did nakey scenes for HBO, and bowdlerized versions for syndication.
my favorite dub-over? well, there’s three.
T1000: Call to John. Call to John now.
Sarah: (Fuck) You do it
Kevin Bacon, in JFk: Mother-fletching…
Mayor: What’s the problem?
Egon, maybe?: (Dickless) Pencil neck over here shut down our containment facility.
Peck: Your honor, they were operating a class-3 blah blah blah blah…
Mayor: Is this true?
Peter Venkman: Yes. This man (has no dick) is a pencil neck
In “Galaxy Quest”, there’s a scene where Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver come to a passageway with flames and hammers. Told that she needs to go through the gauntlet, Weaver’s voice says, “Screw that”, when her lips definately say “Fuck that!”
Probably to keep the rating below R.
In Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickin’s voice says, “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff”. His lips say “Dallas” instead of Vegas.
In this case, the movie had been filmed just before JFK was shot. However, there have been other cases where I can tell that the lips and the sound track don’t match and have often wondered why.
In Galaxy Quest (which I just saw last weekend), I think they did that on purpose – to make it funny, and to make it more like it was a real TV show or movie that had been edited for “cleanliness.” It was so obvious that it must have been a joke. (I thought it was funny!)
the best / worst editing ever has to be from the TV version of falling down. It was so poorly done it was laughable. My favorite is
Actual: Fuckin Faggot Shit
TV: Stupid Fairy Stuff
Ok, I get it, not
and the whole speech at the end of giant really isn’t james dean’s voice. yup, overdubbing everywhere!
Haven’t seen the movie in a while, so this isn’t an exact quote, but the TV version of “The Rock” went something like:
“Your best? Losers whine about doing their best. Winners go home and date the prom queen!”
Bet you can’t guess what the original movie said winners do with prom queens …
Some of my favorite TV overdubs:
“When the stuff hits the fan…” – “Scent of a Woman”
“He’s thinking with his duck.” – someone in some stupid 80’s comedy that I never caught the name of
And two from “Thelma and Louise”:
“Clean my clock.” (the rapist’s last words)
“Darryl, go fry yourself.”
Oh yes, the words “sissies” and “pansies” were bleeped from the title song to “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” when I saw it on TV.
Speaking of Mel Brooks’ movies, my best friend has often complained about a TV version of “Blazing Saddles” in which Gene Wilder is overdubbed by an actor with a much higher voice. “Little <voice shoots up several ocataves> jerk <voice returns to normal> shot me in the <voice goes up again> you know!”
I’ll never forget when I saw “Die Hard” on TV. Being a Bruce Willis movie, you know that the dubbers must have worked ALOT of overtime cutting out the swear words – and surprisingly, I actually liked the edited version at least as much as the original version!
Most obvious edit I can remember: the Clint Eastwood movie “High Plains Drifter.” After the stranger rides into town and everyone’s talking about hiring him to kill the bad guys, the following line occurs: “Since our sherriff is about as much use as tits on a boar…” When edited for TV, they replaced “tits” with “boots”, which I suppose would have worked except that “boots” was obviously spoken by a completely different person who didn’t sound even remotely like the actor he was dubbing. It makes me wonder if they ever actually listen to the person’s voice before asking him/her to dub lines.
…The complete omission of all drug references, as well as all nightclub scenes, from The Doors. Why I even tried to watch this on commercial TV I still don’t know.
…“Fool” instead of “Fag” in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. I could understand why they felt “fag” was unacceptable, but I think it’s better not to bowdlerize. Fools didn’t make much sense in the context.
Any time AMC shows a movie with all sorts of kudos to
the director. They bowdlerize all offensive words rather than respect the directors’ and writers’ original intent.
I have seen some networks like TNT and USA show the movie and just “bleep” out the offensive words. When they show a nude scene, they have that blurry effect over the offensive body parts. They did this effect in “The Shining” during the shower scene. I would much rather see a movie on TV like that rather than the obvious dubbing and deleted scenes.
A couple of weeks ago LA Confidential was on TV. Sample dialogue. Everytime the word “fuck” is used, they replaced it with “do”. It drove me crazy.