robotech_master (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robotech_master) wrote2002-04-09 03:05 pm
robotech_master) wrote2002-04-09 03:05 pm
Drunken Botchery
So I happened to stumble across the DVD of the first Jackie Chan Drunken Master movie the other day--from Columbia, done up in stylish bilingual anamorphic, with commentary by Ric Meyers and the co-author of the Jackie Chan autobio, etc. For $20, it seemed like quite a bargain. So I picked it up.
Except there's one problem. It claims to be bilingual, but it...isn't quite. According to dvdreview.com, there were audio dropout problems with the Cantonese soundtrack in places, so they had to substitute the English dub for substantial portions of it--including at least the first three chapters, right up to about twenty minutes in, where the father of a guy Jackie beat up shows up to demand satisfaction.
NOWHERE on the package does it say this. Heck, even the subtitles give the Chinese names of characters, not the anglicized dub version. It's left as an unpleasant surprise for purchasers, not to mention a source of no little amount of confusion--at first I thought my DVD player wasn't working right, until I got on the net and found out what the reason was.
And the thing of it is, I know that the Cantonese audio track exists in its complete form--I have a VHS of the original Hong Kong version of Drunken Master, with the Cantonese sound and bilingual burned-in subtitles, from Magnum Video. I never noticed any drop-out problems with that! Heck, the audio on the DVD's just mono anyway, it'd be fine with me if they'd downright had to take those portions of audio track from just such a VHS, as long as it was included there, complete and uncut. I know that it shouldn't matter so much, that even the "original" sound track for the movie was dubbed in afterward, but still...when I want to watch a Jackie Chan movie, I want to hear a Jackie Chan movie, not that annoying English voice.
Anyway, color me disgusted and more than a little surprised that Columbia's done such a half-assed job on this, one of the greatest Jackie Chan movies of all time. If anyone knows of somewhere I can send my complaints, I'd love to hear about it.
Except there's one problem. It claims to be bilingual, but it...isn't quite. According to dvdreview.com, there were audio dropout problems with the Cantonese soundtrack in places, so they had to substitute the English dub for substantial portions of it--including at least the first three chapters, right up to about twenty minutes in, where the father of a guy Jackie beat up shows up to demand satisfaction.
NOWHERE on the package does it say this. Heck, even the subtitles give the Chinese names of characters, not the anglicized dub version. It's left as an unpleasant surprise for purchasers, not to mention a source of no little amount of confusion--at first I thought my DVD player wasn't working right, until I got on the net and found out what the reason was.
And the thing of it is, I know that the Cantonese audio track exists in its complete form--I have a VHS of the original Hong Kong version of Drunken Master, with the Cantonese sound and bilingual burned-in subtitles, from Magnum Video. I never noticed any drop-out problems with that! Heck, the audio on the DVD's just mono anyway, it'd be fine with me if they'd downright had to take those portions of audio track from just such a VHS, as long as it was included there, complete and uncut. I know that it shouldn't matter so much, that even the "original" sound track for the movie was dubbed in afterward, but still...when I want to watch a Jackie Chan movie, I want to hear a Jackie Chan movie, not that annoying English voice.
Anyway, color me disgusted and more than a little surprised that Columbia's done such a half-assed job on this, one of the greatest Jackie Chan movies of all time. If anyone knows of somewhere I can send my complaints, I'd love to hear about it.
no subject
From there, I've filed complaints on both wal-mart & huggies with excellent results and I was able to get in touch with a higher-up Maxis employee to discuss their software.