The Mighty Ducks

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We heard from Jeremy Dick in Victoria, Australia, and he wrote us with a question that he says has been driving him crazy, Grant.

He grew up loving the movie The Mighty Ducks. You remember the hockey movie?

Yeah, sure.

But then he moved to Australia, and he found there that this movie isn’t called The Mighty Ducks. It’s called Champions.

He had the same experience with a 2004 movie starring Jennifer Garner. Here it was called 13 Going on 30, but in Australia it’s called Suddenly 30.

And he asks, why are movie titles changed depending on where you live? He says it doesn’t happen all the time, and for the occasions it does happen, it seems completely arbitrary and nonsensical.

I can’t find a shred of evidence as to why these decisions are made to change the title if it’s not offensive or hard to understand. And, I mean, I feel his pain. I’m baffled by those two as well. I don’t see any good reason to change those.

Do you?

I do. If you go to TVTropes.org, and don’t do that because it’s a black hole of a site, you’ll lose your day there. That’s where you work.

TV Tropes is the site that’s about all the things that happen in the entertainment business that seem repetitive to us. Like it consistently happens that a plot goes a certain way or actors are consistently cast in certain kinds of roles.

And they have a page where they talk about why titles are changed. A lot of it has to do with anime changing where the Japanese name is badly translated into English and it just kind of sticks.

But they do mention that, for one thing, the idiom might not translate. Even across different Englishes, what maybe is acceptable in the U.S. might be different in another country.

Well, yeah, exactly. Like Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. I mean, that’s not going to work in the U.K., right? They changed that to Harold and Kumar get the munchies.

Or Madonna, truth or dare? In the U.K., that was in bed with Madonna.

Yeah, and Captain America was called the first Avenger in some countries.

Yeah, yeah. Because they want to kind of de-emphasize the Americanness for better or worse.

But there’s another thing as well. Sometimes the trademark is already spoken for. And just to avoid any kind of confusion, even if they think that they’re going to be okay, they’ll just change it.

And then, and I think this may be the biggest factor, and I think this is what Jeremy is hinting, there are a large number of meddlers in the world who think that they know better than everyone else.

That’s what I’m thinking. That’s what I’m thinking.

So you’ve got this whole different marketing, right?

Yeah.

And all this other distribution. Every person along the line has an opinion.

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Money and test audiences, just like everything else in Hollywood, right?

I’m not even sure they test it. I think they just want to put their stamp on it. I named that film. I’m the reason I’ve got another $20 million at the box office.

Well, that was the only thing I could figure for The Mighty Ducks. What’s wrong with The Mighty Ducks? Is there some duck thing in Australia that we don’t know about?

I don’t know. Maybe there’s some rhyming slang that we’re not familiar with.

Oh, hey! I think we have an answer. How about that, Jeremy?

But maybe they don’t have a tradition of naming their school sports teams in the way that we do.

Well, that would be interesting to me. I don’t know.

Surely they do. The fighting kangaroos or the go emus? Give me an E. Give me an M. Give me a U.

I don’t know.

Well, you know, we have a lot of listeners who work in Hollywood. And hey, hello, L.A. Give us a ring. Tell us if you had a role in the naming of a film and tell us what you went through to get that to happen.

Yeah, yeah. Or if you’ve seen a film in another country and it has a weird title that you wouldn’t see here. We want to know about it, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.