Miscellaneous Musings

There's a part in the ground portion of chapter 7 where you ride an elevator. All the characters perform a bit as you ride:

It's also separated into three audio files which is kind of annoying.

To be honest, I can't recall the last time I've been in a voiced elevator. At least, not in the US! Because in Japan? Those elevators be yappin'. Of course, the Japanese version of this scene mimics typical Japanese elevator voiceovers. I'll translate each individual file below and then discuss the whole thing afterwards:

Pit: Oh, this is an elevator, isn't it? Palutena: Going up.

Palutena: This is the second floor. Pit: There's no need to share the ride!

Thanatos: This is the third floor. Pit and Palutena: ... Thanatos: Are you ignoring me?

Alright, well, this translation sounds awfully mundane, but what's fun about it is the characters are using the very polite and humble speech, just like those Japanese elevator voiceovers would.

I was talking with my coworkers during lunchtime, and I think the Mario Galaxy movie came up in conversation because it just came out in Japan at that point. No I don't know why the Mario Galaxy movie came out in Japan a month after it did in the US. I think at that point I mentioned thinking about attempting to see Hoppers dubbed in theaters just for fun (never ended up happening) and pointed out that the titles were different between languages. This then got us talking about like a possible lesson we could make where we could have the students compare the English and Japanese versions of a TV show or something. Wow! That's something I'm... decent at, I think. So I brought up how there's this game I like (Kid Icarus Uprising, duh) and I'm really into the differences between the language versions. I reminded one of my coworkers that I actually brought up this game before.

Okay, so, quick flashback. My coworker and I were shopping and I think we were in an elevator at some point so I brought up how I find it interesting that nearly all of the elevators in Japan are narrated. That's not terribly common in the US, at least in my experience. So I brought up how there's this game I like (still Kid Icarus Uprising) and there's this one scene where they make a joke about Japanese elevators, and the English version tries to recreate that same kind of elevator narration, but I don't think it lands as well considering, again, narrated elevators aren't too common in the US as far as I'm aware (maybe they're common in the UK or Australia or something idk).

And she like... vaguely remembered. I did explain this scene very poorly in my horrendous Japanese to be fair. So I whipped out this post and played the audio files which would... better convey what I was trying to get at, I think. I became all giddy and was like "ooh look it's so different" but eh, obviously one of the coworkers I was talking to didn't know any English so the English audio might as well have been gibberish to her, and the other one (same gal whom I brought up the scene to earlier) found that the speech was too fast for her to really understand. She was also more interested in what シカト (shikato) equated to in English than anything related to elevators.

So, like, whatever, the conversation ends and it was very stupid of me to bring this up anyway. Of course they wouldn't care. It's not terribly special to them and I don't have the Japanese skills to convey why I think it's interesting. But! Something... mildly funny happens. Sorry, all this setup and the whole point of this story isn't that crazy.

Lunchtime ends and my coworkers lead me to the elevator so they could take me to where they want me to clean (in Japan the teachers and students have to clean the school after lunch). And, okay, now, to stress how kind of insane this is, I must preface that not all of elevator narration is identical. Typically I hear the standard polite になります (ni narimasu) and です (desu) when used to describe the direction and floor respectively. The scene in chapter 7 of KIU uses the hyper formal に参ります (ni mairimasu) and でございます (de gozaimasu) instead. Well, by golly, this elevator used the same hyper formal language. And whaddya know, the elevator stops at the second floor before finally arriving at the third one.

No idea why it shows up now and why it never showed up in the upcoming movies list or why when I went to the movie's official website it only ever said the closest theater was this random one in Tokyo.

Obviously it's Japanese dubbed and I have indeed attempted to watch the show in Japanese and, well, yeah I'm nowhere near a high enough level to follow along that well. I was following pretty okay for like the first three episodes but once the fourth one hit I started to struggle to understand.