Posts

To date a dub...

By
Image
  Being a ‘dubbing detective’ can oftentimes be a very complicated job. It takes a lot of time, effort and patience to familiarize yourself with a voice to the point that you can trust yourself to be able to positively pick it out in any and all types of roles. And that’s just one part of it! There are many other challenges one is frequently faced with when doing research on dubbing, and one of them is trying to pinpoint exactly when a given dub was actually recorded. Now, a lot of the time, English dubs in Rome were recorded in close proximity with the original production of the films, but there are also several examples of dubs which were recorded up to several years after the film was originally made. Sometimes, because an actor in the film who was unknown at the time of production but later ended up becoming famous and thus greatly increasing the film’s marketability. Other times because a certain type of film became very popular; prompting producers to try to make some mon...
2 comments
Read more

Robert Braun

By
Image
  Robert Braun was one of the all-time great English language character actor dubbers. He worked as a dubbing actor in Paris in the 1960s before relocating to Rome at the end of the decade and continuing his career there through the 1970s, thus making him one of a very select few to have worked extensively with English dubbing in both Paris and Rome. Unfortunately, he’s also one of those extremely mysterious dubbers of whom there’s not even a picture available, but his marvellously eloquent Richard Burtonesque voice – which can be heard coming from the mouths of quirky older characters in a great number of Edgar Wallace krimis, spy and horror pictures, spaghetti westerns and what not – should be very familiar to fans of such cinema. Below is a sample of some of his most famous dubbing roles from his glory years in Paris: Unfortunately, there’s practically no biographical information whatsoever available on Robert Braun, with the commonality of his name making him almost impossibl...
2 comments
Read more

English dubbing in Paris

By
Image
  With this post I’ll be taking a closer look at the English language dubbing industry in Paris. A bit off topic for this blog you might be thinking, but as it happens, there was quite a bit of overlap in terms of dubbing personnel between the dubbing scenes in Rome and Paris, and that, coupled with the fact that a significant number of important films from both Italy and the rest of the world were dubbed into English in Paris makes the Parisian dubbing world worthy of closer study. Unfortunately, English dubbing in Paris is, if anything, an even more esoteric subject than English dubbing in Rome, with very little effort having been made to preserve its history or to identify its participants. It is therefore high time to try to rectify that situation. Just like Italy, France is traditionally a ‘dubbing country’, having adopted the practice of dubbing films into French rather than subtitling them ever since the 1930s. The first few wavering steps to get an English dubbing indus...
4 comments
Read more