Okay, I’ve finished syncing the Cantonese dubs, and they’ll be ready do download shortly for those who are interested.
They were 97SE dubs, and I’m no aficionado of the various Special Editions, so I never know which version of the SE I’m syncing until I get to key parts. And every time I hear the Emperor scream when Luke falls into the chasm, I laugh. It is just so ridiculously wrong every single time. And the dubbers rarely if ever dub over the scream, probably because they can’t agree which voice actor should do the yelling. It’s clearly not Luke or Vader, so which dubber would scream? Same with the “No! Nooo!” added to ROTJ – the Thai dub has a completely different actor otherwise not in the scene doing it (which makes it authentic to the English, at least). Who’s yelling? How does it make sense for them to yell as opposed to someone else in the scene? These are really difficult questions, and I don’t envy dubbing outfits trying to make sense of these scenes.
Anyway, although the sound effects were off from the dialog by up to almost half a second, the voice delay was generally consistent within a scene, and I was able to bring the sync back enough that it at least appears that both sound effects and voices are in sync, even if I cheated a bit to make it happen. These may also be the only mono Special Edition dubs we have, but they’re good quality, albeit with pretty compressed dynamics. And they’re despecialized, so there’s no screaming Emperor in ESB anymore.
One more oddity about these dubs: I think these dubs may contain the first line I’ve found that wasn’t dubbed due to the dubbers not realizing it needed to be dubbed (as opposed to being an incomplete/damaged recording of the dub). In ROTJ, when C-3PO is doing story-time with the Ewoks, he says one line in English in the middle of otherwise Ewokese gibberish: “Yes, R2, I was just coming to that.” Well, the gibberish was identical to the English track, but that one line is still in English! So in the next Project Threepio, there will be Cantonese titles-only subtitles to accompany these new dubs, which also subtitle that one line.
Give them a listen. And if you happen to know someone with access to the Mandarin dubs, you know who to contact.