China’s Dimming Its Biggest Stars

Bloomberg | September 13, 2018, 10:30 PM CDT | Adam Minter

[ifinnegan]

That’s not what I mean. Of course they’re going to be speaking Mandarin.

I’m talking about the subtitles, who made it.

What I mean is for decades these old time dramas were made in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but were verboten in China.

Now the communist TV, after people moving to US from China and seeing the Taiwanese dramas, and bootlegs being available, decides to imitate Taiwan and Hong Kong.

[Zhang Fei]

[That’s not what I mean. Of course they’re going to be speaking Mandarin.

I’m talking about the subtitles, who made it.

What I mean is for decades these old time dramas were made in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but were verboten in China.

Now the communist TV, after people moving to US from China and seeing the Taiwanese dramas, and bootlegs being available, decides to imitate Taiwan and Hong Kong.]

---

I expect the subs are in simplified Chinese for the same reason as the dialogue is in Mandarin - the primary audience is domestic, i.e. Chinese. There’s another anachronism - the costumes are too colorful for any period prior to the late 20th century. Given that the period covered was the 5th century, most of the dyes necessary probably hadn’t been invented. The Three Kingdoms on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNHnX4xsplo - which features excellent English subs, although I have no idea as to their accuracy, given my very rudimentary store-bought Mandarin - has what are probably more historically-accurate drab colors, but it’s a bit of a downer. While more accurate, it’s also less pleasing to watch despite a superior script. I might have also seen the characters in Princess Wei Young dine on cassava or sweet potato, which obviously did not exist outside of the Americas until a thousand years later, with the advent of Columbus’s discovery of the New World.

[Zhang Fei]

[Any possible method to turn OFF the voice track and listen to the music? For me, the music adds and the Chinese voices distract.]

Not that I know of. Sorry. But I got used to them. I always have the audio on - while I can’t tell what they’re saying due to language issues, it gives me an idea as to who’s talking. After a while, you recognize the voices even when it’s not clear whose lips are moving.

[The Autocad adverts? Are they a contributor to this production? Do the Chinese still eat chicken feet at the movies(claws to the drumstick, watermelon seeds?... many years ago...)?]

I think the producers of the show put it up on Youtube and get paid for the ads that are run when viewers watch them. There’s another way to watch them if you have a Smart TV or one of those Roku or Apple TV boxes that plugs into a TV. I use my phone to look up a show on the Youtube app on my Android phone and broadcast it to the Roku box.

Re chicken feet - it brings back a memory fragment that somehow remains vivid for some reason I don’t quite understand. I’ve never seen anyone eating chicken feet in public stateside except in a dim sum restaurant. But during my first visit to (and experience of) China, on a budget tour of the Great Wall, I saw some kid contentedly gnawing on what seemed to be soy braised webbed feet (presumably a duck), with no related adults that I could see in sight. Brought back memories of childhood, when kids were trusted to do whatever and head back in at meal times.

[Thank you, I will return.]

I hope you found this somewhat entertaining. If you go in for palace intrigue, there’s a great series chronicling the period of the Three Kingdoms, when the fall of the Han dynasty triggered a century-long scramble for power that consolidated, for a while, into a struggle between the titular three kingdoms. The subs are just very well done, although an excess of realism may render the production a little dull. I thought the script was great - high officials going toe-to-toe through vicious schemes that ended up with most of them dead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNHnX4xsplo C’est la guerre.