Question for foreign posters

[Eirik]

I was recently abroad and I saw the movie Lethal Weapon on TV dubbed into German.  I watched about ten minutes of the movie and then went out.  A few days later, I saw another Mel Gibson movie on TV (I think it was Payback), and I noticed that the German guy doing Gibson sounded an awful lot like the German guy who did Gibson in Lethal Weapon.  When dubbing movies into other languages, do they actually try to get the same voice actor who has done a particular actor's voice in earlier movies?

[Neville]

The answer is yes. I live in Spain, where almost 100% of foreign movies on TV are dubbed. They always try to get the same person to dub the same actor / actress, but this is only done when that actor is a big star, otherwise it would be insane. Most of the job is done by real actors, and they are very good at it.

[Flangepart]

Nev : A lot of us Kaiju fans prefer to hear the actual actors of the films, so we love original soundtracks. I've noticed the Japanese actors for the U.S. leads in, say, "King Kong Escapes", sounded a lot, regards voice quality, like the American actors they dubbed for. Is that the same in Spain, to your knowlage?

[Neville]

Well, real movie lovers also prefer subtitled films here, but unless you live in a big city with lots of theatres you won't be able to watch original versions. At least we have DVDs and some TV channels have DUAL System, which means you can select the original language if you have a modern TV.

About the voices of the actors, they don't necessarily reproduce faithfully the originals, and this is one of the reasons I prefer subtitled versions. Just imagine: the same actor that dubs James Earl Jones does Clint Eastwood. Another problem is that  some accents (for instance, UK English or different US accents) are completely erradicated.