Voices
Lupin III -- Let's get one thing straight off the bat. No one will ever have the ability to play this character in any language that even comes close to matching the late Yasuo Yamada. A career voice-over actor in japan, Yamada was Lupin III. Mannerisms, speech patterns, attitude, emotion. (Yamada also did a large amount of dubbing of american films, as he was the japanese voice of Clint Eastwood, and also played King Arthur in Monty Python & The Holy Grail.)
Given the circumstances, the english voice of Lupin is well suited for the task. While not quite succeeding with the complete range of the character, the voice does lend a bit more of a feel of experience to the role. The character is in his early 30s in the movie, not the seemingly barely pre-pubescent Jimmy Flinders voice of the Streamline dub.
Jigen -- I like this voice a bit better than earlier versions. An only slightly-fakey gruffness to the voice, he plays a bit older than the Streamline version, but has no where near the baritone levels of the original japanese voice.
Goemon -- Quite good. Fits the character of the strong, silent type well. Beats hearing that Sergeant Dante Robotech voice, yech :(
Fujiko -- Good. I had no problems with her voice, acted well in character.
Clarisse -- Almost the right mix of despair & whiny-ness in the voice, maybe a touch too much whiny :)
Count Cagliostro -- Pretty standard fare. Nothing exciting, but does play a few of the more devious scenes of Cagliostro well.
Zenigata -- well acted but missing something. Portrayed the character well, especially in my favorite scene of his, the bad acting/finding the printing presses on tv scene. Unfortunately though well acted, the voice just sounds pretty lousy. Needed a more gruff sounding actor than one trying to hard to force the gruff voice.
Jodo -- Now this is my favorite voice in the entire dub. A very, very good character voice that fits well within the context of the film, and doesn't sound forced at all.
Other voices -- Karl the dog was fine, maybe a bit too much of a Husky accent; I liked Gustav played with the German (but not too overbearing/Ahnold parodying-like) accent. Most of the minor voices I didn't have a problem with, though in a masochistic sort of way I caught myself pining for the gardener to spew out "Destroy the micronians!" in that Dolza/Streamliney kinda way.
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The Hypnotic Eye Contest:
Congratulations, we have a winnah! More precisely two winners in my contest to decipher the origins of this column's title "The Hypnotic Eye". First is the email sent in from John F. Martin:
It's easy! From the cheesy movie of the same name. Bad, *bad* ('50's?) schlock of the nth degree! >_< The only place I've ever actually seen it was in "It Came From Hollywood!" which had people like Dan Ackroyd and Cheech and Chong basically doing an early version of MST3K. Funny stuff.
Nice magazine. I'll be stopping by every issue. Ja!
and our second winner is Jeff Tatarek:
"The Hypnotic Eye" gets its name from a classic piece of badfilm--one of those 1950's crapfests that tried to distract the audience from the sleazy cheese on the screen by having them make hand gestures (no, not THAT one, although some may have done it without ill effect) at certain points of the movie. The classic "It Came From Hollywood" contains a clip from the trailer for the film, including some weird Svengali-type magician exhorting us to look into "Dee Heepnotic Eye!", and posing in exactly the same way as your column's artwork.
To prove everything, here's a couple of still images from that very trailer for "The Hypnotic Eye"! For the two winners I have...well, I shall come up with some very cool and unique prizes, unfortunately I've already run out Saint Seiya pencil cases and Nadia toothbrush sets, so they shall have to make do with what Gavv finds in his amazing bag o stuff!
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