Greetings once again! I hope you all had a great holiday, and I wish all my fans and followers a happy 2011! Last night, I got an interesting treat in the mail. On December 17th in Japan, the 2004 film version of POTO was shown, dubbed in Japanese for the first time. I have a friend in Japan who graciously agreed to videotape it for me and send me a copy. For some odd reason, even though I despise English-language dubs of foreign films (give me subtitles any day), I love watching foreign dubs of films that were originally in English, especially musicals. This was actually my first time watching (almost) the entire movie dubbed in another language – I enjoy listening to the Spanish and Italian soundtracks, and I've watched bits of the movie with the French audio track, but in that case, the Phantom's voice appealed to me even less than Gerard Butler's (even though he clearly had more training).
One thing to remember about shows videotaped in Japan: often, if the films were made in the US or other countries, they'll have 2 different audio tracks. Japanese TVs can switch between them, but on most American sets, you'll need to unplug either the right or left audio channel; otherwise, you'll have the English/other language and Japanese tracks talking over each other for the whole thing. In this case, the English track was on the left (red) audio channel, while the Japanese was on the right (white). Anywho, here's my review of the Japanese-language dub of the 2004 movie.
