I feel like the complaint about Gen Z needing subtitles because “sound mixing in movies today is so bad” is just remembering life without subtitles wrong? or not getting what subtitles might be useful for? maybe my experience is unique to me but there have been multiple times where I’ve rewatched movies I loved as a kid and been shocked to find out what the actual lines or lyrics were because in my head they were just mumbling or gibberish.
like, sometimes the lines were said at a perfectly audible level with no overlap, but were said so quickly the words kind of ran together, especially if you didn’t recognize them (like how some kids think “dawn’s early light” is “donzerly light”).
sometimes lines or lyrics are perfectly audible and clear, but I just straight up didn’t know the words being spoken. there’s a Robin Hood movie that I watched a ton of as a kid with the line “there’s more than one way to bring down a quarry,” but I didn’t know what a quarry was and heard “corry” and thought maybe it was a kind of medieval word for a bird or deer.
sometimes home sound systems just suck. my mom did not want us to turn the TV volume up too high or sit too close to the TV, so a lot of stuff was perfectly audible normally, but not to me as a kid watching at home. not all of us had speakers.
also, sound mixing wasn’t always better! I watched the 1993 Three Musketeers movie so many times that I could quote the whole thing from memory… except for anything with Milady de Winter, because she spoke in a very low and quiet voice and I STILL can’t hear a darn thing she’s saying even as an adult.
it’s like complaining about people needing liner notes with lyrics in an album and being like “back in my day, we could just hear all of the lyrics perfectly!” no, you couldn’t. famously, Bob Dylan listened to the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and heard “I can’t hide” as “I get high.” people mishear stuff all the time, it’s just that now we have the technology to not bumble through life assuming that The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray has a character named Lady Mondegreen.
















