story

I get really bothered when George Lucas mispronounces names of Star Wars characters. He calls Qui-Gon "Kwee-Gohn." He calls Boba Fett "Bahba Fett." Jabba is "Jah-buh." If he wants them pronounced that way, why aren't they pronounced like that in the films?

I hate listening to Roy Scheider talk about Jaws and consistently misquote the "You're going to need a bigger boat..." line. He never gets it right. One would think he would research it, or something.

The one thing I cannot stand about the Simpsons DVD commentaries is when someone asks the group if it's the first appearance of so-and-so or whatever, and they all agree it must be, even though two episodes earlier, they decided the same thing and were right.

These simple things irk me. Someone make them stop, please. Anyone agree? Anyone else have director/actor rememberence pet peeves?

Cygnet74

on the commentary track for The Conversation, Coppola keeps referring to the mime as a "meem". maybe its a legitimate, alternate, pronunciation, i dont know. took me a while to figure out what the fuck he was talking about.

Abob Teff

Speaking of the Simpsons, on one of the early commentaries in the first season the creators comment that despite all the T-shirts and merchandise, Bart never said "Cowabunga, dude." (I think that is the right line). He either says it in the episode right before or right after. (You'd think that I'd research this.)

Legolas

This was probably done on pupose, but in Sleep With Me, Quentin Tarantino has a cameo where he talks about Top Gun being a gay movie, and misquotes Maverick and Iceman's lines of "You can be my wingman anytime" and "Bullshit, you can be mine" as "You can ride my tail anytime" and "You can ride mine!"

Cameron

i like commentaries...gives people a chance to screw with you. they say it wrong just to piss you off

story

I think that may be true for the Simpsons writers at this point, who are all pretty savvy about internet fandom's opinion, but I doubt it's true for George Lucas. He's been mispronouncing everything in his galaxy for decades.

scott shelton

The FLASH GORDON commentary with Mike Hodges is all about incorrect memories.

UAIOE

My all time favorite was when Quentin Tarantino was going on about "From Russia with Love" and saying to Jay Leno (i think) that the movie took place in Russia.

Mondo Kane

Another "Curious" George Lucas moment:
He refers to Gun-gans as Goon-guns.

Duder

I always cringe when Tarantino butchers Japanese or Chinese titles of movies he loves. Granted, they're not his movies (getting your own stuff wrong makes you look like a fool, unless it's a small detail and you admit that you may not be remembering it properly), but still... you'd think that such a big fan of Asian cinema would learn to pronounce things correctly.

pdinosaur

to defend both Q and lucas.

lucas first. are gun-gans *pronounced* gun-gans and he says "goon-guns"?
it seems reasonable that it could be just as easily pronounced his way, and gun-gans is the wrong pronunciation.

Q part one - chinese is incredibly hard to pronounce at times. i thought it would be fun to learn how to count in chinese to 10. and you know what? there's a tonguetwister just for counting: 4 is 4, 10 is 10. and the pronunciation of "is" sounds to me virtually identical to "10". it's quite possible he has undiscerning ears for intricate chinese pronunications just like i do. don't underrate the difficulty of pronounciation.

Q part two - the sleep with me misquote has to be intentional. the connotations of riding someone's tail..... yeah.

sigh. this is all really nitpicky.

i thought this was gonna be more like thinking robert duvall was gunned down in his car in the godfather, not mr. caan.

fryinpan1

I recently listened to the Species commentary with director Roger Donaldson, Michael Madsen, and Natasha Henstridge. I knew this was a fun joking commentary, but still none of them knew when the movie was released, how much money it made, or whether it was rated R.

Also, Scott Speedman on the Underworld Extended commentary was hilarious. Even though he was in the movie, he basically had no idea what the film was about.

story

I do want to say that the very opposite of the Simpsons commentaries of not remembering debuts, etc. is the Futurama commentaries - the nerds that make the show are the nerdiest Futurama nerds ever!

BizRodian

Lucas says Han the same way Lando does, everyone else says it like "Hon."

This doesn't bother me the least bit. People say words differently all the time. It doesn't matter, obviously. If Lucas wanted Boba Fett to be pronounced the way he says it, it'd be pronounced that way in the new movies, if not in the old ones.

mllefoo

In the defense of the Simpsons guys, they've just given us season five on DVD. They're now working on six.

That was TEN years ago. I'd be willing to bet a number of them haven't seen the episodes since they worked on them.

I actually find it worse when an author is inconsistent when they write books. L.Frank Baum was famous for being inconsistent from book to book, and even inconsistent several times within the same book (Oz series).

Rizor

I remember listening to the commentary on Interview with the Vampire and the director Neil Jordan confuses Once Upon a Time in the West for Once Upon a Time in America.

BizRodian

The further you go back in time, the more inconsistent authors seem to be in novels. I was actually today reading about some old novels from the 1700s that actually had a characters name seemingly change as the novel progressed. It's an interesting phenomenon, probably caused by, in part, the lack of word processing technology and us, in the present day, not having all the information.

jough

I remember one year at the MTV Movie Awards when Tarantino introduced his favourite actor, "Jackie Chon".

Then they showed a clip of Chan's work, and then when he came back QT said it right "Jackie Chan!!!"

I guess during the clip someone told him how to pronounce it. But really, if he's your favourite actor, wouldn't you know how to pronounce his frikkin' name?

UAIOE

Quentin Teranteno likes Jackie Chan? Wow!

bboisvert

LEE-AH / LAY-AH
HAAN / HAHN

The names are even pronounced consistently in the films themselves.

SFranke

Actually, I think the rule for pronouncing Asian words written in the Latin alphabet is to use the Romantic pronunciation for vowels and the English pronunciation for consonants. Using that rule, Tarantino would've been correct the first time. Of course, I could be incorrect regarding the usage of the pronunciation rule.

DRG

I've seen and read several interviews with different actors and actresses who claim they've never seen some of the movies they've starred in. And we're not talking about rare indie cameos, we're talking big mainstream movies they were the leads in. Maybe they're just bluffing so they don't have to give an honest opinion on how bad the movie was, but who knows...

majorjoe23

I can see an actor doing that. I hardly ever read newspaper articles I've written.

story

It's been a year and change. Any new examples?

Robert

I remember watching Mel Gibson on Jay Leno a few years ago saying he had never done a nude scene, when in fact he was naked at the beginning of Lethal Weapon.