FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Don’t the French have a word for movies that are so bad that they are entertaining to watch? Something like “nanar?” I know as an English-speaking person I tend to use that word simply because English doesn't have a term for “so bad it’s good,” and I get tired of saying “so bad it’s good" every time I want to talk about The Room or the Carnosaur trilogy.
Yep, the word is indeed "nanar".
The shining example on Japanese animation being the dubs from the 80's-mid 90's, story time
:
Once upon a time in the late 80's-mide 90's, there was a juvenile program called "Club Dorothé" at the hour kids got back from school, and which was the only program that broadcast Japanese animation... except that since the common belief is that everything animated is for kids, they just picked the most popular series in Japan at the moment, which was "Dragon Ball", "Sailor Moon", "Attacker You!"... or "City Hunter" and
"Fist of the North Star"!
You can imagine the shitsorm that arose, leading to some 4Kids worthy edits, such as Ryo renamed "Nicky" and inviting women to vegetarian restaurants instead of love hotels (which coincidentally makes him classier than the original!) and all the villains got typical French names, such as "Monsieur Gérard" or "Maurice", and all references to killing or maiming were replacing by goofy dialogs straight out of some Daffy Duck cartoon! And of course all the nudity and violent scenes being heavily censored.
But the "best" was without any doubts "Fist of the North Star" : see not only most of the French VAs hated Japanese Animation as a whole, but they also believed that "Fist of the North Star" was a "Nazi work" because some svastikas were presents (a Budhist symbol before somehow being recuperated and altered by the Nazis), and only accepted to continue the dubbing at the condition to give them free rein on the dialogs. Yep you read that right, the VAs could say absolutely everything they wanted.
So they took the opportunity to
litter the work of lames and completely nonsensical puns and Kafkaesque dialogs, to the point that it's completely impossible to understand anything of the plot, which led to the series being quickly canceled and becoming a cult classic!
More about it in this Tvtropes article, in the "Anime/Manga" folder : http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GagDub
End of the story.
