“He’s a sponge, and that’s different”
Apparently Viacom wants to push Spongebob Squarepants on the Japanese market, and they’re having some success. I used to be a big Spongebob fan, although that kind of tapered off after the movie came out, and I also watched Japanese children’s shows for my Japanese class in college. Thus, I feel qualified to point out what you already know: Spongebob and Japan are kind of a weird match. I like their strategy, though:
- Appeal to trend-setting young women
- By saying, basically, “Look at this whacked-out character from America”
That’s the way it looks, anyway. The article mentions parents using the show as an introduction to English, which is totally not what I care about: I want to hear Spongebob dubbed in Japanese. YouTube is no help.
Last year I went to Ecuador with my girlfriend to visit her family there, and not knowing much about South American culture, I was most surprised by the proliferation of Spongebob (”Bob Esponja”). He’s huge! Sometimes literally, in the case of Año Viejos (papier-mâché dummies burned on New Year’s Eve) we saw that ranged from small to colossal. The fascinating part is not the exported products — this is America, of course we’ll push our culture on anyone who doesn’t specifically forbid it — but the fact that people were making their own unlicensed stuff. I didn’t get a good picture of any of the Spongebob dummies, but here’s a bunch of kids loading a giant Mumra into the back of a pickup. Apparently even retro is an international language. Just to be clear: those kids are going to burn Mumra later.
Then there’s the matter of the actual show, which was dubbed, and it seemed to maintain its charm in the process. While I was down there I also saw dubbed versions of two of my favorite shows, Mythbusters and Home Movies, which was interesting since neither of those shows is scripted. That means that whenever Adam Savage singes himself on camera, some Spanish-speaking voiceover actor has to dub the yelp. On the downside, the Spanish version of the show is re-edited in a way that manages to take all the fun out of the proceedings: only one myth per show, and the peppy music is replaced with placid acoustic guitar. Also, the episode I saw did not have Kari Byron in it.