2025-11-24 08:00:00
I mentioned in my last post that I bought the complete series Home Improvement, which (translated back to English) is called Look who's hammering in German (I originally said Listen who's hammering which is a more literal translation, but look is probably better English). That caused some amusement on Mastodon, and it made me think about other badly translated movie titles, because there are a lot of them. If you don't speak German, buckle up, because you have no idea what we have to put up with here.
To make this a bit more interactive, let's do it like this: I'll translate the German title back to English as literally as possible, and you can try and guess which movie is hiding behind it. Before we get started I'd like to point out that Germany likes to call itself Das Land der Dichter und Denker (the Land of Poets and Thinkers). I'll leave it up to you to decide if we are worthy of this title.
Starting off with something easy. The first Star Wars movie from 1977 was called Krieg der Sterne when it was released in Germany. It's a pretty cool sounding title actually, I like it. Since the prequels started in 1999, the movies were called Star Wars: Episode ... and then a German translation of the subtitle (episode is the same in German and English).
Got it? No? Come one, it's so obvious! You'll feel stupid when I tell you. Ready? Ok, it's Cruel Intentions (1999). Didn't I tell you? It's basically the same, if "the same" means "completely different". To be fair, Cruel Intentions doesn't translate very well into German and Eiskalte Engel, while meaning something complete different, is a memorable title and it evokes a certain feeling that fits the theme of the movie. This is one of the better ones.
Here we see something that happens quite frequently, especially with titles that consist of only one or two words. Apparently German distributors hate short titles, and so when they encounter one, they will just bolt on another half dozen words or so. This is of course Ridley Scott's Alien (1977). To the distributor's credit, the word Alien probably wasn't known in German at the time (it is now, thanks to this and other SciFi movies), and the additional paragraph they added actually has something to do with the movie, which isn't always the case:
This one is infuriating. It's the title of Carrie (1976), the adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. What's so bad about it is that Carrie has nothing to do with Satan. She isn't even evil. She's relentlessly bullied and abused by almost everyone in her life, and when she's humiliated in front of the whole school, she snaps and takes revenge on her bullies in one of the greatest sequences in horror cinema. She is definitely not the devil's daughter.
Buffy isn't treated quite as badly as Carrie is, thankfully. There are demons in the show, and sometimes they put spells on people. So far, so good, but still, the title completely misses the mark. In the original title Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) she is actively slaying vampires, while in Germany she is passively under someone else's spell. I'm sure they could have found a better title if they had stopped to think about it for more than a second or so.
This one's totally off. It's Once upon a time in America. I guess they're alluding to the harmonica playing character in the movie, played by Charles Bronson. It's puzzling, because the phrase "Once upon a time... (Es war einmal...)" comes form Grimm's fairy tales. It not only exists in German, but it originated here! So why didn't they just use it? We'll never know.
Well the original movie title is at least included in this ridiculous nonsense: It's the disaster movie spoof Airplane! (1980). It's not a serious movie by any means, and I guess they really wanted to make sure audiences understood that. It's a funny movie, do you get it??
Which movie has knights and coconuts in it? Can you guess? Come on, you got this! Of course, this is Monty Python and the holy Grail (1975). Remember the scene where the guy doesn't have a horse and so he's followed by another guy making clacking sounds with a pair of coconut shells? See, the title is relevant to the movie! Of course they could have just translated the original title word for word and we would have understood it just fine, but hey. Why take the easy route!
If you thought that badly translated or downright made up titles are bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because there is also the head-scratching category "movies with an English title which received a different English title in Germany". I never understood the reasoning behind this. Either translate it into German or leave the original English title, but why the hell make up a different English title?
Okay, here the renaming makes at least a little bit of sense. The original title is Bend it like Beckham (2002), and they correctly identified that nobody would have understood what "bend it" means, so they replaced it with the widely understood word "kick" instead. Still weird that they kept the title in English. I think this was the first time I encountered this phenomenon after I saw this movie with a few friends in the cinema, and we lost our shit when we discovered that that was in fact the movie's German title.
The train of thought of the movie distributor must have been something like this: So we have a movie about Captain America here. There was another movie about him a few years ago, so this is number two. The first movie was called "the first avenger", and he's returning here. What could we name this thing? Hmmmm.... Obviously, the original title Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) wasn't good enough. Fun fact: The next one was renamed from Captain America: Civil War to The First Avenger: Civil War. I guess they really, really wanted to hammer home the fact that Captain America is, in fact, the first Avenger.
This one is Thor - The Dark World (2013). I guess maybe the dark world was a little too much darkness for us sensitive Germans, so they scaled it down to merely a dark kingdom instead? Well you know what, it's working. I feel much less anxious already. Thanks, Mr Movie-title-from-English-to-English-translator!
What could be hiding behind this title? Maybe a documentary which explores how long pizza dough needs to rest to produce the best pizza? Maybe another insufferable Hangover sequel? Nope, it's the movie Taken (2008) starring Liam Neeson. You know, the one where he has a very particular set of skills that enables him to find his kidnapped daughter, and he only has (I guess) 96 hours to do so before she's sold into slavery or something, I don't quite remember. The sequels were named 97 Hours and 98 Hours. No, I'm kidding. They were called 96 Hours - Taken 2 and 96 Hours - Taken 3. Which is very confusing if you don't know the original title of the first movie, but that's obviously your problem and not the problem of the person who comes up with these titles.
2025-11-23 08:00:00
Recently I've been ill and so I spent a lot of time at home on the couch with nothing to do and not a lot of energy to do anything anyway. And what do you do in 2025 in a situation like this?
Of course. I got my phone and my laptop and spent an ungodly amount of time online, watching YouTube, scrolling social media, surfing the internet and reading online news.
How did that make me feel?
Worse.
Great.
So I decided to switch gears. I went on eBay and started looking for things that would cheer me up. Something that was easy to follow along, not too deep, maybe a little funny and overall just wholesome and enjoyable and not soul crushing and infuriating. And I found just what I needed.
I got a complete collection of all 8 seasons of the 90s Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement (called Hör mal wer da Hämmert in German, which means Listen who's hammering - it's a play on the title of the movie Look who's talking from the 80s).
And I also got something that I've wanted for a long time: The complete Calvin and Hobbes. I love Calvin and Hobbes, and this collection of the entire run of this comic strip is just an absolutely beautiful product.
So now I'm spending my time watching Tim Taylor grunt and make an idiot of himself, and read about Calvin driving his parents mad. And you know what? I feel better.
2025-11-21 08:00:00
This week was kind of weird. I didn't really come across a lot of interesting stuff online, even though I was online a lot way too much. Maybe the Cloudflare outage killed all the interesting things on the internet? This site is not behind Cloudflare btw, nor is it hosted on Amazon AWS, so when these services go down next time, my site will be one of the 5 remaining websites on the internet ;)
Speaking of being online too much, I'm still kind of not well and mostly at home as a result, and I fell into the absolutely terrible habit of killing my time by just staring into my laptop for 12 hours a day, every day. It's so easy to develop bad habits and so difficult to keep up the good ones sometimes, it's maddening. Jon recently wrote about turning off the computer and picking up a notebook instead. I think I'll try that.
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2025-11-14 08:00:00
Today I saw a video of David Coverdale announcing his retirement. Coverdale used to sing for Deep Purple in the 70s before starting his own band Whitesnake, which became hugely successful in the 80s. I'm sure you've heard "Here I Go Again" on the radio a million times. Coverdale is easily one of my favourite singers from back then; his voice has both a lot of soul and a lot of power, which is a rare combination. Something happened to it though and he hasn't sounded all that good anymore for years, if not decades, but still. My favourite music is from the 70s and 80s, and it's quite sad to see all my old musical heroes retiring if not dying in recent years. Thankfully Coverdale seems to be doing well, and he definitely earned his retirement. Time to play some Whitesnake tonight!
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2025-11-07 08:00:00
Thank god October is over. Usually I really like it - the trees are turning all kinds of beautiful colours, the leaves are falling, the wind is blowing the leaves around etc. But this October was terrible, because I was sick for most of it. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was excited to go to the Retro Computer Festival. Well, I couldn't make it. There are some chronic issues that have been bothering me for a long time and they flared up again last month, and on top of it I seem to have caught some weird virus last week which knocked me out pretty good. I still haven't recovered from it and I'm spending most of my time on the sofa as a result.
I had some ideas for things I wanted to write on here, but they have to wait until I'm feeling better. Still, I wouldn't want to miss putting together a new Friday linkdump, so here we go! And fingers crossed November will be better.
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2025-10-31 08:00:00
Hey everyone, it's Halloween! Except it's not, because I live in Germany and we don't have Halloween, even though the media has relentlessly and with some success tried to introduce it over here as well in recent years. When I was a kid, Halloween wasn't a thing at all. We had a different tradition though in the area where I grew up which is Swabia, basically the South West of Germany. It went like this:
In the fall we would collect (in other words, steal) sugar beets from the fields, hollow them out, carve a scary face in them, put a candle inside and then walk with them from house to house, set them down in front of the door, ring the doorbell and hide and then say a small rhyme when the people opened the door. Then we'd usually get sweets. These hollowed out beets are called "Rübengeister" (Root Ghosts). This article has a picture of what the ghosts look like. Sounds familiar?
I always wondered if Halloween had some of our tradition mixed in that was brought over to America by German emigrants. Except they chose pumpkins instead of beets, because that's what grows over there. Pumpkins are also much easier to hollow out; roots are hard as hell and it was always a pain to carve into them, we hacked away at them with spoons and knifes and screwdrivers for hours. Still a ton of fun though. So, happy Rübengeister, everyone!
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