#which actually removes all ambiguity from Katya's scene in the dinner car (she did get the letter she just chose not to open it)

[jyou-no-sonoko19]

I guess I should tell my Goncharov origin story because honestly I took one hell of a route.

The first thing you need to know is that (unsurprisingly) Gonch was huge in Japan, known as ゴンチャロブ: 憂鬱な冬 (”Goncharov: Melancholic Winter”). 

The second thing you need to know is that I first came across the film in a drive-sharing LAN at some point early in uni (this was eDonkey/eMULE days, very early 2000s), which was mostly anime but a bunch of live action films made it in too. And it was a dub.

A very brief history of the Gonch in Japan: December 1973: Theatrical release  November 1983: 10 year anniversary of the film, released on ~*~laserdisc~*~, with a very functional, stock-standard dub. Then came December 1997, DVDs were very shiny and very new, and distributors were clambering for the titles to re-release and motivate regular people to spend that sort of money when their video tapes seemed perfectly fine.

The folks behind the laserdisc release had bellied-up, and Osaka’s SukinaBANG! (who mostly put out dubbed Spaghetti Westerns at the time) picked up the rights and put in a ton of effort on re-dubbing, using popular voices in the 90s pop and anime scene. Including Kaoru Akimoto -- yes, as in “Dress Down” Kaoru Akimoto! -- who was cast as Sofia. And you’d best believe that meant she wrote a brand new song to tie-in to the release of the dub. 

And the thing is, they didn’t just put a different track over the credits. Anything throughout the film that could properly be called a song was replaced, with glorious abandon. I mean, it’s no more anachronistic than the original, right? When you get down to the nitt and the gritt? It’s not like there was an entire lack of synths used in “Mia Cara Sposa”, now was there?

Anyway, long story short, the first (second, third, etc) time I saw The Tango Scene, they were dancing to an incredible electro-pop number called “BE MY BABY”, which Akimoto released as an extremely limited single, available through Tower Records (apparently stock didn’t make it far outside of Tokyo, so pretty much the Shinjuku/ Shibuya/ Ikebukuro hub) paired with the DVD. And when I tell you that song haunts my dreams to this day...

“Be my baby, soko ni odotteru! Be my baby, kono yoru, owatteru!”

It charges me rent at this point. And when I finally saw the scene in English it was like... a) okay well this is an EXTREMELY DIFFERENT VIBE, and b) you’re telling me the original song is basically revealing the entire finale, while I was over here singing about how the champagne is sparkling off the dark waters of the bay??

And honestly? I recommend this experience. It’s not the first time I’ve watched a film/series dubbed before the original, and it gives a really interesting dual experience, because you get to see it through a foreign interpretation first -- the difference in archetypes/ voice casting across cultures is hugely interesting! -- and then go into the original as if it’s just another version, it doesn’t hold the same ‘holy’ weight to it, and I think that’s neat. Especially with a film as culturally distinct as Goncharov.