Dubbed in Rome

  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of the films, but there are also several examples of dubs which were recorded up to several years after the film was originally made.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 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 money o...

Maybe the title of this blog post strikes you as a bit strange. Replacing an actor’s voice with that of another is, after all, what dubbing is all about. In this case, however, we’re talking about those strange occasions on which an actor goes from having one voice to suddenly having another one in the very same film! Yes, that does happen sometimes, and here are four curious examples with video clips to illustrate: The first example is from Umberto Lenzi’s all-star cast WW2 film The Greatest Battle (1978), in a scene featuring Guy Doleman in the role of General Whitmore. Listen carefully to when he says the sentence “You know, Sean here used to be one of the finest war correspondents in the world” in the clip below. If you pay very close attention, you’ll notice that after he says “Sean here”, there’s a little pause, and then the words “used to be one of the finest” are spoken by a different voice. And not just any voice. It’s the legendary character dubber Tony La Penna (eternally...