The puzzle of foreign visual wordplay
Not that the cartoons back then were wrong or should’ve catered to foreign audiences: they were made for english-speaking adults, and they worked perfectly fine for them. And I sympathize with the poor spanish localization crew, that probably considered explaining the joke “on the fly”, but that would’ve killed the joke anyway, so they didn’t touch it. So I’m not ragging on them. It’s just this memory of something that as a kid drove me nuts that I couldn’t figure out, and would only make sense decades later.
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I hadn’t thought of that but yes, seeing that sign as a non-English speaking kid would have been extremely confusing. I can only imagine what else would have been incomprehensible. What did you make of Bugs Bunny changing into all those different characters, for instance?
As someone from one of those weird countries that speak English but are not the USA, I can say that quite a few of the jokes passed over me as a kid and I only get them now after more exposure to US media.
While we are at it… WHAT the hell is the deal with the “Log and Saw” image for when someone is sleeping?? Never understood that one…
Tigerojo: The sound of snoring has been compared to the sound of logs being sawn, and it’s a not-so-common-anymore euphemism to refer to sleeping as “sawing logs.” Hope that helps!