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Homer Becomes Omar
geekster writes "With Omar as Homer, and Badr substituted for Bart, The Simpsons is now playing on Arab television.
But in order not to risk offending an Arab audience, the characters in Al Shamshoon, as the show is now called, have modified some of their most distinguishable traits." And you thought internationalization was hard for software!
Have to wear a Burqa?
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
This reminds me of the Doki Doki Panic/smb2 incident. Super Mario 2 was originally a Fuji Television promotion starring an arabian family called Doki Doki Panic. The people at Nintendo USA thought the Japanese version of SMB2 was too difficult, so they changed the Arabian characters in Doki Doki Panic to Mario and his friends. It's a really interesting story. Check out more here.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
There's a movie in France called "Les visiteurs" (the visitors). It's a hilarious movie about some middle-age french aristocrat and his servant time-travelling into our age and messing things up right and left. The movie is very funny... in France, because it relies almost exclusively on twists of the French language, and on French cultural references. I heard this movie was adapted to the US market and did a perfect flop there.
Well I believe it'll be the same for Omar Simpson: the original Homer is funny because it deforms and amplifies flaws in the US society. It's reasonably funny in many western countries, because the american culture is kind of universal, and even when it's dubbed, it's not too hard to understand half of the jokes (many very US-centric jokes are lost in France, Sweden or Spain though, particularly those involving famous personalities known only to the US public).
But in countries far from westerm values, and not as developed, with different and sometimes stricter sets of moral values, adapting the Simpsons to suit these people will suck the marrow out of the bone. It'll the arab version of the US "the visitors" flop. Either give them the full unabridged, ashamedly US version of Homer and let half of them love it and the other half hate it, or give them Omar and let all of them hate it.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The recent violence of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war has had an immense impact on the psyche of both peoples. This will translate into a deeper knowledge of each other and, hopefully, more understanding.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Knowledge of one's enemies transmutes to some extent in a sharing of cultures. Violence, as the ultimate virus, might be seen as injecting plasmids into each sides cultural DNA.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I live in Quebec (Canada) and we have a french version since forever. They tried for years to make the text more "local" and it ended up being very weird someone because some things just don't fit out of the US context. You laugh anyway because you still get the original joke. And someone it just doesn't fit so much that they keep it american ("I never been so proud to be American" in front of the toilet that flush like in America).
On the other hand, this is the only show where I think that the voice acting is better than the original. Not that the original voice acting isn't good but actors in the french version are just doing a better job.
Fortunately, the ones for the last few years are more sane and portray the familly as 100% american.
But the worse adaptation we have is King of the Hill. They decided to remove any and all reference to US in the text and turns it into total nonsense.
Both shows are funny to watch even tranlated but we are in a North American context too and can understand the jokes even when they are butchered. I guess it won't be the case in middle east...
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
You could ask Salman Rushdie, who has a Muslim background. He wrote a parody which was not well received by fundamental Muslims, and has been sentanced to death for abandoning the Muslim faith.
The book was so horrible, that even Cat Stevens agreeded somewhat that Salman should be killed. He later appologized, but the point is-- you're not supposed to agree with the ravings of a lunatic religious leader in the first place.
My post may have a humorous tone, but the events described above are real.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The real burning question regarding an arabic simpons edit: Who's working at the Kwik-E-Mart?
I mean, I'm sure guys like Apu working at convenience stores is a much less common sight in Syria than it is in the American midwest. Would they even get the joke over there?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
personally i think this is a wonderful project, it's a shame he's already having skittish reaction from hollywood execs
if we could just laugh more, in both the muslim world, and the west, at each other, how awesome a leap into a better world would that be?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Melon Farmers is a reference to the BBC TV cut of "Repo Man" where the words Mother-fucker were replaced by Melon farmer
On Canadian television, "mother fucker" is often censored to "*blank* fucker". yes, they cut out mother and leave the fucker. Im totally serious.
7-11s run by Indian guys
Nuclear Power Plants
Catholic or Christian churches with Evangelical stereotypes
Comic book stores
Nursing homes
donuts
Tom and Jerry
American Football, Politics, National Forests, and dive bars?
If not, how is a majority of this humor going to translate? It's a heavy parody of American culture. I'm just not sure how that's supposed to sell.
Television is not emasculated to suit the whims of anyone.
The first season of Sailor Moon had a bunch of evil henchmen who all dress the same.
In the original, one of them is a very effeminate man dating of of the other bad guys.
For the U.S. dub, that man was turned into a woman: Literally emasculated.
You can't take the sky from me...
You aren't. You aren't forced to watch The Simpsons or anything else on TV. You aren't forced to own a TV for that matter. Cultural values != individual values.
That sword cuts both ways. You aren't forced to listen to Howard Stern or watch explicit television either so why can't they be broadcast?
I think your remark about openness of society about, for example sex, of 'the western world' applies more to the united states than to western Europe. In the Netherlands there's even sex on 'public' cable television (not state sponsored though),there are no problems with nudity in any media (not even for children) and being a prostitute is officially 'just a job'. As for the rest of Europe, it might not be exactly the same, but it's not that different at all. I think the USA is one of the most prudish countries of the western world.
Please don't link low pregnancy rate with abortion this way. You'd only fuel (as if they need any) the already crazy anti-abortionists. If you compare the low birth and abortion rates for teenagers in Western Europe to the American figures you'll see that there's no correlation. (see this and use google). I suspect the same is true for Japan, but I couldn't find any figures.
As a side node, I'm not a big supporter of abortion, I too am troubled by the notion that an unborn child is not considered human until it has reached a certain age. However I very much dislike the self-righteousness of some of the (mostly christian) 'pro-life' groups.