Greetings from Germany. Here a link on German Amazon for the “Holmes & YoYo” 13 episodes DVD
Nowadays just look at Netflix, everything is released on the same day, and if you have the patience at the end of an episode you get end credits of more than 5 minutes that shows who dubbed the actors in Germany,France, Spain etc.
I don’t remember in the 70s and early 80s how long it took from the original air date to watch American TV shows on German television. My favorite TV shows back then (I’m 56 now) were “Mork & Mindy”, “My favorite Martian” and " Holmes & Yoyo". I do nowadays still find out about 70s shows like “My Mother the car”, that I would love to watch, but can’t find. I buy a lot from the American Amazon, but are amazed that the US releases TV shows, but like it is still the 90s you get a giant box with 20 plus DVDs.
In Germany we have something called “SD on Blu-Ray” (standard Definition on Blu-Ray), where I have all seasons of a TV show on a couple of Blu-Rays, bought complete seasons of “Northern Exposure” and “Relic Hunter” like that.
I love reading what other countries do with American TV episode titles, considering that a lot of time the titles never get on screen, or they are puns or specific American culturalisms that don’t translate.
Take, for example, episode 12, in English, “The Cat Burglar”, in Deutsch Der Katzendieb , which translates as…“The Cat Thief”. Does it have the pun in German that it does in English (the fact that a “cat burglar” is a nickname for any second-story-type thief, but in this episode, the thief literally steals cats!)?
And compare to the last episode, Bye Bye Bennie, in German, Ideen muß man haben , translated seems to be “You Must Have Ideas”, which seems more of a meta-commentary on this show itself! Maybe if they actually had ideas it would have lasted past 13 episodes.
In a way, I still have a grudge against Bova and Ellison. I liked Future Cop. As I remember, it was a good show. It was serious drama, had potential. I won’t comment on the merits of the suit, because I wasn’t in court, or ever read Brillo, and of course artists are entitled to be compensated, but the result is, no one got to watch the continuing adventures of Future Cop, but instead suffered as I did through the execrable Holmes & yoyo. And people still can, thanks to DVD! Even in Germany, they can suffer!
You are so right. The 80s comedy “Up the creek” was called in Germany “Das turbogeile Gummiboot”.
“being geil” in its original form means being horny (nowadays that word is also being used like something was really great e.g. "That movie I just watched was really “geil”.
So if I use “geil” as “something being really great”, “Up the creek” turned into “The really incredible rubber boat”.
The worst and highly idiotic thing they do to American Movies in Germany is change the original English title and give it a different English title.
The 2022 Gerard Butler movie “Last Seen Alive” was in German movie theaters under the name “Chase”
Another thing, maybe someone has an answer, I started watching a Spanish TV series called "30 coins (30 monedas) cause no one picked it up up in Germany, in the English dubbed version. Are American dubbing houses not capable to dub foreign movies so that the words fit perfectly the movements of the mouth? They are nowadays better than the horrific, yet funny dubs of Japanese or Chinese movies back in the day, where nothing did fit, but American dubbing is still really bad. I watch most English language movies in English and, unless they come out identically in Germany, buy a lot of American 4K or regular Blu-Rays, especially horror movies from US companies like “Severin”, “Vinegar-Syndrome” or “Scream Factory”.
Maybe if they actually had ideas it would have lasted past 13 episodes.