What’s the point of watching a show like Desperate Housewives if zealous Chinese censors cut out all the fun parts?
CHINESE broadcasters have cleaned up Wisteria Lane, the fictional suburban setting for the US TV series Desperate Housewives, cutting out some of the sex and violence it is famous for.
Click to see larger imageA Mandarin-dubbed version of the show made its debut on China’s state-run CCTV8 channel on Monday.
The first episode was about three minutes shorter than the US version, with some lingering shots of a crime scene snipped out and a love scene played out on a dining room table cut altogether.
At least one direct reference to male genitalia was softened to a vague euphemism and some of the show’s double entendres were simply lost in translation.
The sanitisation left some viewers yawning.
Mr Sun Songjie, a 24-year-old communications undergraduate at Peking University, who had watched it on Internet TV on Monday, said: ‘I really didn’t like it at all. It was really boring… Maybe it was the translation. Given the choice, there are a lot of other programmes I’d much rather watch.’
Everything’s relative, I guess; some viewers still found it shocking, even with the edits.
Ms Liu Zhichao, 49, an administrator at a power supply station in the Inner Mongolia region, said after watching the first episode: ‘It made me laugh, but it was also embarrassing to watch it. There was too much sex.’
Hopefully she’ll recover from the shock in good time.
1
By Tacanio
You know, the cut part is really not an issue, because of all those illegal copies of DVDs. I don’t know where they got them, but those DVDs are complete. The issue is really the translation, it can be boring and even wrong as translators are not used to slangs and some customs in the US.
December 20, 2005 @ 10:50 pm | Comment
2
By Danfried
From what I’ve seen, the DVD episodes were captured off of hi-def broadcasts in the U.S. — you can occasionally catch a network logo.
They were then perhaps spread by Bittorrent. I have to say I was truly amazed at the quality of the DVDs I’ve seen, since they obviously did not have the disk masters. I never checked out the Chinese subtitles, but yeah, I’ve generally found on other disks the subbers have a lot of trouble with American slang.
December 21, 2005 @ 7:20 pm | Comment