Oh God, I remember that version đ One of the bootleg VHS tapes which I had before the first official VHS release. Iâm glad that the times of voiceover dubs is long gone and I hope it will never come back.
History? Well that would need a bigger history lesson. Short version - we (Czechoslovakia) used to be a typical communist country, a satellite of the USSR. Between the end of the second world war and 1968 we were officially a communist country, but at the same time we were pretty âopenâ, In 1968 we were invaded, sorry, I meant ârescued from the contrarevolutionâ by our friends (mostly Soviets) who were so kind and left her âprotective armed forcesâ in our country to steal our property and rape our women, sorry I meant âto protect usâ. Our regime changed into a full tyranny, but started to be more open during the 80âs, thanks to Gorbiâs perestroika. From a cultural point of view it meant that suddenly we could watch ideologically correct American movies, but only if they were approved by a censorship commission. For example we could watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, because Indy fought the Nazis, but at the same time every, and I mean EVERY religious reference was taken out, which left us with a totally nonsensical plot, but at the same time we couldnât watch movies like Star Wars, I guess the censors didnât like a story about a group of rebels fighting a dictatorship. In the late 80âs I had a pretty nice collection of bootleg VHS tapes of American movies, and all of them had the voiceover, so called ârychlodabingâ, usually done by one person only, or one man doing all men characters and one woman doing all women characters. This was kind of âsemi-legalâ, I mean it was pretty often done by people who already were or later became known actors but you wonât find any information about that work on their official bios.
Communism fell (at least officially) in November 1989, and we started to transform to capitalism (and to splitting into 2 countries in 1993), which means that first private TV stations appeared. These TV stations needed stuff to air, so they bought cheap âwesternâ movies and TV shows and because they needed it quickly, they pretty often used ârychlodabingâ, this was of course official and the era was something like 1990-1995 if I remember correctly. Because most of the people hated it, the TV stations started to do âproperâ dubbing very soon, it was pretty normal to see the same movie first with the voiceover dub and 6 months - 1 year later the same movie on the same station with a normal dub.
By the way dubbing was in 90âs normal on VHS tapes, but not included on DVDs of the same movies, I think the first Star Wars release with czech and slovak dubs was the release of ROTJ.
And yes, there are different fora where people search for these voiceover dubs, but only as a historical curiosity