Last night I popped in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD, choosing this particular one because it had an episode (All The Way) set at Halloween. Anyway, the next episode on the disc was Once More With Feeling, the Buffy Musical, which I decided to watch, since the disc was already in the player.
Having seen this episode dozens of times in the original English, I decided, just for fun, to play it in Spanish this time. I don’t know much Spanish, but I figured it might be interesting to listen to the songs and see how other singers performed them. But this turned out to be a very strange choice.
For some reason, instead of being entirely in Spanish, the show kept changing, from dubbed Spanish, to English with Spanish subtitles. Sometimes this change would happen MID SENTENCE. Or even mid song, in some cases.
Also, Spike’s song, Rest In Peace is entirely in English, and the final song Where Do We Go From Here was as well, at least until Spike and Buffy head out into the alley to talk, at which point the audio track changes abruptly from the English voices to hearing a Spanish version in the background.
Very strange, and while I didn’t want watch the entire episode a 2nd time in one sitting, the problem does not seem to plague the French version, at least Spike’s RIP is in French and the opening scene in the Magic Box doesn’t keep randomly switching back to English like it did in the Spanish version.
This does not appear to be a malfunction or problem with the disc, as if there was just a faulty track or something of that sort, it wouldn’t always know when to start popping up the Spanish subtitles when English suddenly starts coming outta their mouths.
Is this common for Spanish versions of shows? Did they run out of money mid dub and have to resort to half assing it? Is Joss just a sick bastard messing with us? I dunno, but it sure made for a weird night so I thought I’d share it.