I’m glad to see Alec Guinness had a little fun on the set. From what I’ve heard he didn’t enjoy working on Star Wars, and at one point offered Mark Hamill £20 to leave him alone.
Stormtroopers on Ice!
Did you notice Peter Cushing doing the German accent?
In WW2 movies, there were at least four approaches to handling the German dialogue:
- Speak German with subtitles
- Speak English and ignore the issue (Valkyrie)
- Whole cast speaks English with an accent (das boot)
- Have only the “Germans” speak with a German accent, and in Hollywood these were almost always English actors.
- I think there were also Hollywood war movies where the Germans were played by English actors using English accents.
…and here’s Cushing making Nazi aqua-zombies
Now THATS is a movie Robert Rodriguez would love to remake!
Holy crap!
How do you pronounce ‘Supernova’?
Ahhh, the good old days. Before the greenscreens, before the PREQUELS.
I don’t understand what was a blooper about that — seemed like pretty standard Stormtrooper behavior.
Das Boot was shot in German and dubbed in English (by the original cast!) for the Anglospheric theatrical releases.
There’s at least one movie where the Germans start out speaking in subtitled German and then through some plot contrivance (practicing for an espionage mission or something) agree amongst themselves to speak English. Another that I remember only vaguely uses the device of the English-speaking narrator essentially saying “You know what, just pretend they’re speaking German, okay?”
I once saw a whole feature-length blooper reel version of the original trilogy! Some of the hilarious goof-ups included:
- Greedo’s prop gun accidentally went off, startling Harrison Ford so that his weapon accidentally shot OVER the table.
- Soon afterward, Harrison Ford stepping on the tail of a ruthless gangster just as the gangster was in the middle of threatening Solo’s life.
- Pranksters switched the beast in the Sarlaac pit with “Audrey II” from Little Shop of Horrors.
- At the finale of Return of the Jedi, some kid appeared in the spot where the ghost of Anakin Skywalker was supposed to be.
I was laughing out loud at the start of Inglourious Bastards when the German says to the French farmer, “Let’s speak English”. Of course, when you realise how cruel this is… yeeek!
That was a rotten film with a fantastic poster.
I think he knew, just the sentence it was in was a mouthful that washes out towards the end, leaving you with the choice to either over-emphasise Super or Nova, both of which sounds corny, but it’s hard to maintain the rhythm of the sentence unless you default to an under-emphasised and softer “supernova”, which sounds surprising to the ear because it’s important to the dialogue.
Scpipt err.
those are not the movies you are looking for.
Here’s Richard Burton as a Nazi
Kevin Branaugh’s Nazis can’t quite pick an accent and stick with it.
Band of Brothers used a character to translate
Supernova.
Duh.
So storm troopers are like Archie and Meathead going through a door?
thank goodness for Harmy.
Awful line of dialogue anyway. Hopefully we had Marcia Lucas to thank for that bit of editing.
Y’know, almost all the outtakes I’ve seen (and also the screen tests) have featured dialogue that was not only slightly worse, but actually much worse than what ended up in the final cut.
Even the added scene between Biggs, Luke, and Red Leader in the hangar from the Special Edition should have stayed on the cutting room floor. It’s genuinely weird how every bit of performance on either side of that little scene is so much better by comparison.
