I almost forgot, why do American studios have to rip off good Asian material? For instance, we recently saw The Eye in its original Mandarin with subtitles and it was great! Now I hear that someone in the States is going to remake it, probably so that they can put some cute blonde in the main role (like they did with The Grudge). If you don’t like subtitles, get over it. There’s a lot of creative people out there in non-English speaking parts of the world.
Another thing that chaps my hide is the crappy American college kid episode of MXC that was made a couple of years ago. MXC is basically the 80’s Japanese game show Takeshi’s Castle overdubbed with hilarious English dialog. Great show, I love watching it. However some studio genius figured that they could make money by filming dumb college kids doing the same events but with McDonald’s logos on all their helmets. Man, that was one piss poor episode.
This reminds me of the fact that I loved watching shows like Speed Racer, Starblazers, Battle of the Planets and the one where there were five teenage characters that wore bird-shaped helmets (and for the life of me I can’t remember the title right now) when I was a kid. At the time I could tell that the characters’ mouths weren’t quite in sync with the English dialog but that didn’t bother me at all. It wasn’t until long after that I found out they were actually Japanese cartoons with English overdubs. While that worked great for cartoons it wouldn’t work for live-action and I’m sure I would have hated subtitles at that age.
