Boss Out of Town wrote:davester65 wrote:Sareth wrote:Oh! Then you're gonna LURV Shenhua to pieces...
I just watched the episodes with Shenhua in them. Her methods of killing people is similar to my character, but Revy is closer in personality.
Edit: There's also the fact that I can't get past that Shenhua has about the most annoying voice in all of creation.
It's like if Gilbert Godfrey sucked on helium.
I prefer the subtitled episodes, because usually the Japanese voice actors have less annoying voices than the American ones, but not in this case.
Narf. I guess that's a Japanese voice actor's idea of what a bad Taiwanese accent sounds like. The English dub uses an Asian actress who sounds a bit like Margeret Cho's mother.
For additional laughs, check out Revi’s attempt to speak her allegedly native English while in Japan. The series is fuzzy about which languages are spoken in Roanapor, where the local dialect is probably Thai or possibly Malay. However, the American characters presumably speak English among themselves, the Russians speak Russian, etc. This might help explain why Revi winds up buddying with Etta: Revi is from New York, while Etta is allegedly from Alabama and various other places in the States. The American voice actress certainly doesn’t have her speak with any trace of a southern accent.
Anyhow, Revi does not speak Japanese, and Rock presumably speaks English when conversing with his “friends” in the Black Lagoon company. When Rock and Revi go to Japan, where Rock interprets which I presume is Japanese to English for the negotiations between a Japanese Yakuza and the Russian Balalaika. Revi left alone, talks to some school-boys about guns, addressing them in the Japanese voice actress’s version of English, which they, as good Japanese school boys, all know as a second language. However, the production company did not put much effort into the translation or rehearsals. It took me four run-throughs to pick out all the butchered English words in Revi’s dialogue.
Having had a chance to watch more of Black Lagoon, right into the second season, and it is one of the series where I consider the English script to be noticably better than the Japanese script. While I am not fond of the "stream-of-expletives" dialog style, it works perfectly here. The entire artistic premise of the series is juvenile psuedo-macho self-indulgence, and the language fits right in. If you lived in a world in which being a stone-cold sociopath or a giggling psychotic made you a more deadly fighter or assassin and being subject to outbursts of uncontrollable rage made you harder to shoot,
this is how people would talk!
That said, the series has some good writing mixed in with the cartoonish violence, with lots of serious comments about the brutalizing effects of human evil. The despairing end scene, with its slow, tragic music, ending with Revi ready to use the shotgun on whoever is intruding on her pain, sums up the series nicely.
Pointless Digression . . .
It was so much easier for the guys making those World War II movies. They had a selection of Asian-American actors, most with classical training and desperate for work in Hollywood, and two common options: the chopped, “sing-song” version of a Japanese accent, which even a Euro-American actor in thick yellow make-up could muster, and the “I went to Harvard” excuse. Since it was known that many Japanese military men had actually studied overseas, the Japanese-American actor could justify speaking better English than the actors playing the Americans and get some good lines.
It occurred to me that there were many ugly racist caricatures of the Japanese floating through Hollywood from the 20s through the 50s, which makes it sometimes awkward to portray the ugly truth about Japanese behavior during that period. To the Chinese, in particular, Japanese soldiers were like Nazis without manners. They really did, by all accounts, toss babies on bayonets for laughs, and their officers really did have contests to see how many helpless prisoners they could behead with their swords in one timed minute. One ironic point I sometimes make: the biggest death toll for a bombing raid in World War II was not Hiroshima, or Dresden, or the Hamburg firestorm, or the fire-bombing of Tokyo. It was the American Doolittle Raid in 1942. Only a couple of dozen American aircrew and Japanese died, but the Japanese army, hunting for crashed American fliers in China, butchered as many as a million civilians in official and unofficial reprisals.
