Today's Video Link

In the early days of talking pictures, they hadn't quite perfected the technique of dubbing movies for foreign release. So as not to lose that lucrative overseas market, some studios took to shooting their movies in English, then going back with (usually) a slightly different cast and refilming the same material in Spanish and/or French and/or some other tongue.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made several movies this way. Stan and Ollie only spoke English but they worked with a tutor who taught them their dialogue in other languages and they had a big blackboard just off-camera with the words spelled out phonetically. They could get away with this because, first of all, their films didn't have that much dialogue and also because given the nature of their characters, audiences didn't expect perfect diction.

This is La Vida Nocturna, the Spanish remake of their 1930 short, Blotto. In America, Blotto starred Anita Garvin as Mrs. Laurel. For the Spanish version, they brought in an actress named Linda Loredo. The scenes in the nightclub feature different entertainers than were in the U.S. version and the film runs a bit longer.

After a while, they stopped doing multiple versions of their films because dubbing became more practical but a few of these remain. If you don't understand Spanish, you might not want to watch the whole short…but you could. Their humor was so visual that you can still follow the story. At least, you might want to watch a little of The Boys performing in this odd way, reading dialogue they didn't really understand…

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