Introducing…

I have seen every episode of family guy at least 50 times. You might call this insanity, but I have been a fan of the series creator, Seth Macfarlane, since I was in my teens. When I started to think about how I could incorporate one of my favorite shows into my DTP showcase, I began to think about how this TV series is shown in many languages, including my second language of Russian. Humor is said to be a universal language, yet how can someone in Russia understand jokes that are based on cultural references of another country?? With that question in mind, I set out to determine if in fact the comedy of family guy is understood when localized to the Russian language.

Why Family Guy and not the Simpsons?

Maybe it’s my generation, the infamous millennial’s, but ask anyone and they will tell you that they have a favorite animated series. For me it was always Family Guy, not the Simpsons. It’s not that I have anything against the show or the fans, I honestly simply never watched it. It my teens when I started to watch different shows, I always found it on and laughed at all the jokes. I never watched the Simpsons much and thus, it passed me by.

Dubbing vs. Subtitling

Depending where in the world you are, people have come to expect one of the two choices when watching TV series and movies. As I have only traveled abroad to Europe and Russia, I know that these places prefer content dubbed into the native language of the viewer. Growing up in the US, I always watched movies in the source language, whether it was a kung-fu film, or a French thriller, or one right from Hollywood. When I went abroad, I found it strange the locals preferred dubs. In Russia, they even have famous voice actors who almost religiously cover the voices of specific actors in Hollywood. From what I have heard, people from Asian countries prefer the original with subtitles. I will almost always prefer watching in the original, with the help of subtitles if I do not know the language being spoken.

Analysis of Russian Dub

My goal was to record myself discussing and analyzing several examples of jokes and references from the show. With 17 seasons and 20 episodes per season, there is a ton of Family Guy material to choose from, so I stuck with one of my favorite episodes: Season 11 episode 1 Into Fat Air. This title nods at the famous 1997 movie Into Thin Air: Death on Everest. In the episode, Lois Griffin runs into an old boyfriend at the grocery store. As we come to find out, him and his family are the best at everything, and after embarrassing themselves at dinner, Lois and the Griffins accept the challenge to climb Mt. Everest in a competition against the other family, of course only in classic Family Guy fashion with references and jokes the whole way.

Video Project

I decided that it would be more interesting to put my new Adobe suite experience to the test and showcase my findings in a video. In the video, I interviewed myself and discussed my analysis of the described episode above. I included several clips and each clip’s respective Russian dub to showcase and discuss how the comedy of each joke, and the entire show, translates from the source English to Russian.

I have included a link where you can find the video posted on YouTube.

After Action Review

I sought to make this project challenging, yet rewarding, in order to satisfy the difficulty requirement, as well as find some joy in my work. Much of the challenge of this project was compiling, organizing, and editing the video in Adobe Premiere Pro, though having completed a smaller and shorter project in Premiere Pro just weeks before definitely assisted me in my task. Finding the content, namely examples of the Russian dub of the show was an unexpected challenge I faced. I was not able to find access to Russian dubbed version of any episodes of Family Guy through any streaming service, neither could I find a portal to pay and watch episodes. Thankfully YouTube exists, and I was able to source all my needed content from various videos. See my video for my final thoughts on the project. Overall, it was an interesting analysis into how comedy transfers between languages.