Viewing 12: El Maestro del Disfraz
It can get worse. The Master of Disguise in Spanish is virtually unwatchable. It’s horrendous. It is an utter disaster. Having to watch the movie at 2:30am one night, I was attempting to switch things up by watching the dubbed version. I didn’t even need English subtitles because at this point I know roughly every line in the film. This seemed like a good idea at the time. I was horribly mistaken. The atrocity was in some ways actually pretty humorous. If you are fan of utterly bad shit, I highly suggest watching the Master of Disguise with Spanish audio. Allow me illuminate some of the problems.
The Master of Disguise relies on impressions, silly voices, slight word play and speech affectations for about 70% of the humor in the film. The other 20% is slapstick and the final 10% is fart jokes. When you take out the strongest parts of the movie by removing the English speaking actors voices, you are left with just slapstick and fart jokes (and I guess laughing at the terrible Spanish voice actors and funny dubbed speech over nonsynchronous video). One example of the dubbing failure is when Pistachio imitates Shrek. This is a pretty dumb moment in the movie to begin with, but if you don’t actually have the audio track of Dana Carvey imitating the characters in the movie, HOW THE FLYING FUCK IS IT SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY? Similarly, when Pistachio mocks the Texans at his father’s restaurant, there is no way to convey the provincial attitude of the patrons that leads to Pistachio making fun of their accents. It just falls flat.
The wordplay jokes also end up making little to no sense. I personally love the line about Pistachio’s home being “full of ransackery” that he says to the police. How is this possible to translate? It would require a lot of thought to concoct a similarly absurd sounding non-word in Spanish—thought that there is no way the Spanish language team was willing to provide.
It’s not as though the actors in the movie were up for any Oscars, but they definitely could have been A LOT worse. This is glaringly obvious when you hear the Spanish voice actors. Why is the grandpa sexy and mysterious sounding? This totally threw me off and also threw me into hysterics a couple of times. Pistachio’s voice actor is simply boring and nowhere close to being able to live up to Dana Carvey’s characters. The turtle scene in particular is a sad shell of itself! Just don’t watch it.
I am pleased to have ventured into this dark territory to prevent you from ever having to watch the dubbed version of this film. Next time I’ll watch it in French to see if it improves anything.
LEVEL UP! I am now a 3,600 Fine Artisan of Disguise!
