Saturday, November 12, 2005

Magnum and Magnum P.I. - Cultural Differences



I come to this topic because Em posted something really funny about Magnum aka Tom Selleck. I loved to watch Magnum in the 80's. One reason was Tom Selleck himself of course - I found him groovy and cool (besides his mustache) and: I loved his VOICE!

Well, we Germans are dubbing all movies and series from other countries (rarely we have subtitles, that is when somebody from Bavaria speaks). All the actors in the States have their own German voice. Robert de Nero, Tom Hanks etc have always their own German voice and so has Tom Selleck. I never heard the real voice of Tom Selleck!

A couple of months ago, just awake and in this status of trying to remember who I am, where I am and why I am, I was listening to the radio in the bathroom. All of a sudden there was an adervertisement for a local car dealer. Listening to the voice my thoughts were:"This is Magnum!", "Ahhh - Tom Selleck!", "Poor guy, wow, now he has to do poor adervertisments on German Radio!"

An hour later on my way to work it dawned me that this of course wasn't Tom Selleck - it was the German voice of Tom Selleck who spoke. Right, what should a synchronisator do when his actor is not acting anymore?

So due to Em's post, I did some research today on the German voice of Magnum and found some interesting facts. First of all Tom Sellecks German name is Norbert Langer and in Germany he looks like this:



Em - I'm sorry - I wasn't able to find a picture to see if he grooms his chest hair - but I'm pretty sure he does.

And I found out, that our German Magnum Series was way apart from the American Original. They have cut out a lot of scenes and even episodes they didn't like.

First of all it was named Magnum instead of Magnum P.I., second I never knew that Magnum had a Vietnam war trauma and what really shocked me was that they cut out all the details about Higgins being at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. German TV even changed the whole episode "Never again, never again" drastically. The former Nazis hiding on Hawaii became Palestinian assassins in the German episode. I don't get that - why? In the 70's and 80's the Nazi time was openly discussed in Germany and I really see no reason for hiding this to the public. I also see no reason in not showing Vietnam War Trauma - what the heck was going on? I really have no clue.

But one thing is for sure: if I would watch Magnum in the States, it would be the same shock for me as looking at Tom Sellecks groomed breast hairs. Another voice, another Tom, another Higgins - completely different action strand. Wow - I would like to see that now immediately!

1 Comments:

At 1:40 PM, Blogger emily said...

i would like seeing Norbert's hairy chest. Why, I don't know. But it would be funny if he had that serious expression on his face and was shirtless.

 

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