Backstroke of the West

I was very much amused by learning of Star War: The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West, but I also thought at the time that it had its strong points. (It remains a desire of mine to create a work in which an Anakin-equivalent says, "I was just made an elder in the Presbyterian Church," and means it.)

It turns out that it has more than just that moment. You can watch the movie using a subtitles kit here; this is better than looking for it online, as it ensures that you own the original movie's DVD. (Lucas looked on The Phantom Edit somewhat benignly, but I don't want to promote pirating his works, or anyone's, even unintentionally.)

So, to get to my main point: underneath the TranslationTrainWreck (for which this movie is the TropeCodifier) lurks a substantial improvement over the original script. (TVTropes doesn't have a trope for that, before you ask; AdaptationDecay is the closest. This is not a Woolseyism, since a Woolseyism is a comprehensive re-working of a product for a new audience, while this is an upgrade of the original on the original's terms.)

I've not watched much of the movie so far, but consider the difference in tone between the original's and Backstroke of the West's dialogue in the duel between Anakin and Obi-wan on the one hand and Count Chocula on the other.

Original script:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Chancellor."
ANAKIN: "You all right?"
PALPATINE: "Count Dooku."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "This time we will do it together."
OBI-WAN: "I was about to say that."

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "Get help, you're no match for him, he's a Sith Lord!"
OBI-WAN: "Chancellor Palpatine, Sith Lords are our specialty."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Your swords, please. We don't want to make a mess of things in front of the Chancellor."
OBI-WAN: "You won't get away this time, Dooku."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I've been looking forward to this."
ANAKIN: "My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count."
CHOCULA: "Good. Twice the pride, double the fall."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: [incomprehensible]

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "I sense great fear in you, Skywalker. You have hate; you have anger; but you don't use them."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Good, Anakin, good!" [Palpatine laughs.] "Kill him. ... (Whimsically:) Kill him now."
ANAKIN: "I shouldn't..."
PALPATINE: "Do it!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You did well, Anakin. He was too dangerous to be kept alive."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "Yes, but he was an unarmed prisoner. I shouldn't have done that; it's not the Jedi way."
PALPATINE: "It is only natural. He cut off your arm, and you wanted revenge. It wasn't the first time, Anakin. Remember what you told me about your mother, and the sand-people? ... Now we must leave, before more security droids arrive."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Anakin. There's no time. We must get off this ship before it's too late."
ANAKIN: "He seems to be all right."
PALPATINE: "Leave him, or we'll never make it."
ANAKIN: "His fate will be the same as ours."


Backstroke of the West:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Speaker."
ANAKIN: "Does you is all good?"
PALPATINE: "We are very good."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "Is a time that we cooperated."
OBI-WAN: "I an individual beats not is all right." ["If I don't defeat him single-handed, it's all right"?]

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "You two careful, he is a big." [大 'dà', Japanese On 'dai', is a common element in the titles of rulers, generals, famous figures, elemental forces of evil, and those few -- like CHOCULA -- who are all of the above.]
OBI-WAN: "Mr. Speaker, we are for the big."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Pull out your sword. Dedicate the body for your Speaker."
OBI-WAN: "You this time ran to do not drop."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I always at wait for this day."
ANAKIN: "Even since the last time fights with you hereafter. My force has promoted two times."
CHOCULA: "Very good, give me surprised and pleased."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: "Good!"

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "Even since you I separate. I has been hating you; you are a sacrifice article that I cut up rough now."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Very good, the ratio is prosperous, very good." [According to Wookiepedia, Obi-Wan is rendered 歐比瓦 ("Oubiwa," lit. "Ratio Tile") or 歐比旺 ("Oubiwang," lit. "The Ratio is Prosperous) in this translation. For reference, his official transliteration is 歐比王 "Oubiwang," which means, approximately, "King Ou of Belgium." Palpatine's praising Obi-wan here instead of Anakin is a typo.]

[Palpatine laughs.]

PALPATINE: "Killed him, now killed him."
ANAKIN: "I can't."
PALPATINE: "Hurry!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You make out quite good. Make him on the hoof very dangerous."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "To, but he is not just a prisoner. I should not kill him; this not agree with."
PALPATINE: "This very nature. He hewed away your hand; you also kill certainly he revenge. The business of the vengeance is very familiar. Remember you to have ever tolded me your mother's, still there are those pathetic people?" [One theory: the translator, making his initial transcription, heard "sad" for "sand."]
PALPATINE: "We must leave here now; otherwise they all at worry."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Gold." [The translation renders "Anakin" as "Gold," "Anakin Skywalker" as "Allah Gold."]
ANAKIN: "He big in nothing important in good elephant." ["Good elephant" is the character-by-character translation of the phrase "it looks like" or "it looks like".]
PALPATINE: "Do not take care of him otherwise and too late."
ANAKIN: "We can't throw down him."


Which of these two sounds like the characters know that they're in an action movie, and which of these sounds plausible for the warrior monks of a pagan civilization from a galaxy far, far away? Even Count Chocula can be taken seriously in Backstroke (and the previous scene, Anakin and Obi-wan approaching the Trade FederationMandalorian spaceship, is even more comprehensively improved.) Just let Ted Woolsey (in one of his rare serious moods) or Neil Gaiman at the script as it currently exists, and Backstroke of the West would come out extremely good.

Pronunciation note: In "Word-Processor Romanizations" of Japanese ("Wāpuro rōmaji"), a long vowel is often indicated by a "u" after the main vowel: so "ojou" for "ojō", "youkai" for "yōkai", etc. I think the same is in effect for all the "ou" syllables above.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with getting Windows, or especially C++, to handle macrons correctly will appreciate the merits of the less confrontational, although much more confusing, Wāpuro rōmaji approach...

Fourteen-Ni!-ty-One

I've been reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus recently; it's an endlessly fascinating book, and while it has its dry moments -- and while the overall picture it paints is a grim one, of the Indians devastated by disease not because of European malice, but because of sheer dumb evolutionary luck -- there are moments in the book that are nothing short of comedy.

The biggest one is the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It's not just that Plymouth was founded in a manner completely unlike the conventional narrative; it's that Plymouth was founded in a manner that reads like the Monty Python version of the conventional narrative.

To set the tone of all this, remember: France, Spain and Portugal approached the New World as a military enterprise; England approached it like the Dot-Com Boom. There were a couple of Amazons created in the process, but there are an awful lot of Pets.com ventures littering this period, which we never seem to hear about.

John Smith was indeed saved by Pocahontas (her name means "hell-raiser," but she was a priestess in training; it's probably a good thing for the Powhatan gods that she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe) -- moreover, he was saved, from his point of view, twice, once in a mock-execution that everyone except Smith knew was mock-, and again when she tipped off Jamestown that one of the leaders of the Powhatan Confederacy was going to attack them _somewhat_ behind its leader's back. He later returned to England to recuperate from minor injuries -- not inflicted by the Indians, not inflicted by a fellow colonist, but inflicted when he blew up a bag of gunpowder that he was wearing around his neck.

While he was in England, he wrote a book, including maps, on his adventures in Jamestown. He offered his services to the Pilgrims, to get them to Jamestown too, but with classical Puritan thrift, they declined, thinking they could rely on the maps in his book. They ended up in Massachusetts and spent three months (in which half their expedition died) trying to figure out a safe place to land. Smith crowed about this perhaps more than he should have.

Every bit of this sounds hard to believe -- and Smith's earlier life was even crazier -- but this was Captain John Smith (whose rank was in the self-established Army of Smith); he was one of those historical figures who come along from time to time to remind us that fiction is less interesting than reality, because fiction at least has to be plausible.

Squanto, along with about twenty other Indians, had been kidnapped by English traders who intended to sell him as a slave back in Europe. They made the mistake of trying to sell them as slaves in Spain -- and sailed straight into the arms of the Inquisition, who had been charged with prohibiting precisely that for the past hundred and ten years. (Imagine some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley having the brilliant, never-before-seen idea of invading the Philippines.)

Some of the Indians had already been sold as slaves; hopefully the Inquisition managed to track them down and free them. They offered those who hadn't been sold, Squanto included, safe passage to any point of their choosing; having picked up English on the voyage (and I think having some connections there), Squanto decided to go to England. He spent several years as a walking conversation piece for a London aristocrat, and finally managed to get back to Massachusetts (by way of a series of misadventures, even involving one captain so incompetent that he basically wrapped a fishing barque around a tree), just in the nick of time to greet the Pilgrims.

He served as the translator for a formal embassy from the Massachusett tribe, who wanted the Pilgrims' help to oppose another tribal confederation to their west; while he was with the Pilgrims, he taught them the ancient indigenous farming technique of burying fish with their seeds to ensure a greater harvest, which was entirely unknown in Massachusetts but which he had picked up from the Spanish.

And I haven't even mentioned how the Inca Empire was really destroyed by a zombie apocalypse...