She's Meanness Set to Music

Just finished watching Mad Max on DVD. When I first saw this movie in 1980 or so it had been dubbed with American voice-overs because the American distributor thought people would have problems understanding the Australian accents. Being slanted to the historical and being a librarian/archivist type, I generally think you should leave things the way they were. For example, the great film hypocrite Spielberg drives me crazy with his diatribes against colorizing and then he goes and removes guns from the policemen's hands in ET. I see both as the same thing. I'm really not even that much of a purist. Let's just have them both available. Star Wars is the same thing. I'm still upset that the original movie was doctored up 20 years later and is now called A New Hope as though the first one never existed. That's fine if Lucas wants to do that, but why can't I still buy the 1977 version if I want to. It's freakin' Orwellian is what it is. I know Overcoat and some others think it's ridiculous that I think this way, but you never saw Steinbeck come out 20 years after Grapes of Wrath and say maybe I was a little hard on California and take out all the beatings the Okies got. Or he is criticised because he didn't deal with Mexican migrants, so he goes back in 1962 and adds a chapter on them in the middle of his novel. And if they do anything like that in books they call it a second edition and tell you what changes they made, but they don't remove all copies of the first edition from the planet as though they never existed. And by the way anyone who tells me that I can go on eBay and buy some VCR version someone taped off of TV in 1983 gets their ip blocked.

Well, anyway, in the case of Mad Max, the American distributor was right. The dubbed version was actually a lot cooler. Today we would call Mad Max an indie movie. And it definitely had that feel. When I saw it as a young teen it was so amazingly cool. It wasn't released in the theaters where I lived and I saw it at a friends house on HBO back when HBO was only on from like 5pm to 3am. We saw it at about 8pm and then stayed up to watch it again at 1 or 2 am. It was rated R, but I got to see it because my quasi-fundie parents didn't care what I saw as long as it didn't have sex. Violence was no problem; shoot, that was just part of life. I could see a baby mown down by a truck in the middle of a highway, but if the movie had a pair of boobs, it was definitely off limits. But the dubbing made it feel so much cooler. Mel Gibson's character had a voice like Clint Eastwood and in fact I wouldn't doubt if the distributor based his alterations on the success of the dubbing in spaghetti westerns. I mean you know it's dubbed and the mouths don't fit the sound, but those movies are still amazingly raw and cool. And that's how the American release of Mad Max was.

In the Australian version the accents are just so strong it really does lose it's feel. Australians kind of have that golly-gee exuberance that we had 50 years ago and it comes through in this movie that's supposed to be dark and apocalyptic. They also seem kind of hickish in this movie. So the result is that you feel like you're watching an episode of Andy Griffith, except Andy and Barney drive turbo fuel-injected nitro-infused V8 pursuit cars. And Otis and Ernest T. Bass have names like Nightrider and Toecutter. Mel Gibson sounds like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future and squeaks and squeals throughout the movie. I so much prefer the monosyllabic Marlboro Man Mel I saw first. Another thing they fixed were some of the minor dialog things like windscreen and windshield, and some major things like, and I don't remember the line for certain from the American versions (BECAUSE I CAN'T GO BACK AND WATCH IT), but when Max gets his new pursuit car his friend says something like, "It's a real Mother****er, Max" or something like that, but in the original they say, "You can shut the gate on this one, Max. She's the duck's guts." Somehow I don't hear Steve McQueen saying that in Bullitt. I still love this movie, though, and won't strike it from my favorites list. Maybe someday there will be a boxed set with the American release on it.

I have finished YHWH's second winter bag, this being the brown outfit version, but will wait to post until it is felted. However, since the sewing portion is completed, let the royal sockmaking begin! Here is the Queen's cuff: