The A-Zs that rocked 2021: Squid Game's tentacles
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While it is a shame that Squid Game's English dub was poorly done, without it, it's likely that, like K-pop or K-drama, the show would remain a cult favourite.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
SINGAPORE - In early November, the cast of Netflix's South Korean hit Squid Game were on a publicity tour of the United States when a journalist asked the show's lead actor, Lee Jung-jae, what it felt like to be suddenly famous.
Lee is a star in South Korea, having grown from young heart-throb to character actor in a career that spans decades. So the journalist's solipsistic assumption - that anyone with a fan base outside of her bubble has no fan base at all - upset fans of South Korean entertainment but for everyone else, served as reminder that the Anglosphere considers its own entertainment to be the default option, not just for the members, but for the world.
That assumption might not hold for long.
The South Korean invasion has been going on for years in pop music and in romantic drama serials. In other words, their global fandom is mainly among women and it is a sad reflection on the world that anything women enjoy is viewed as a niche product.
Squid Game and Hellbound are thrillers, so by breaking out of the "women's ghetto", made the world aware that the South Korean film and television industry is every bit as good as Hollywood's.
The famous "one-inch barrier of subtitles" that Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho spoke of, the one that stops audiences from enjoying "foreign" films, was not an issue with Squid Game because Netflix allowed viewers to choose dubbed languages, including English.
There was an outcry about mistranslations in the English dub, causing Korean speakers to beg viewers to use the subtitled version, but that appeal is likely to - pardon the pun - fall on deaf ears.
While it is a shame that Squid Game's English dub was poorly done, without it, it's likely that, like K-pop or K-drama, the show would remain a cult favourite.
Westerners are so subtitle-averse that it is interesting to speculate just how the most popular South Korean films, such as the drama Parasite (2019) and zombie thriller Train To Busan (2016), might have fared in the Anglosphere if they had been released with English dubs.
Maybe if they had been, there would not have been a need for an American remake of Train, to be titled Train To New York.
