Mishearing Dialogue

[johnnybear]

Marlena's seduction skills were top class! Or so I've heard!
JB

 

[ED-209]

"Take your Vulcan hands off me!" - i can't be the only one...

 

[Kor]

"Take your Vulcan hands off me!" - i can't be the only one...

There's a story that James Doohan purposefully pronounced "Vulcan" in a way that might vaguely resemble a different word.

Kor

 

[Noname Given]

There's a story that James Doohan purposefully pronounced "Vulcan" in a way that might vaguely resemble a different word.

Kor

I would have enjoyed an F-Bomb on TOS.

 

[Talos IV]

When sword-wielding Sulu grabs Uhura on the bridge in The Naked Time, I always heard the dialogue exchange as this:

SULU: "I'll take you, fair lady."
UHURA: "Sorry, (indecipherable)."

I couldn't make out Uhura's line, "Sorry, neither." And I misheard Sulu's "protect you" as "take you."

To this day, Sulu's line still sounds like "fair lady" to me -- though apparently it's "fair maiden" :

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[ZapBrannigan]

There's a story that James Doohan purposefully pronounced "Vulcan" in a way that might vaguely resemble a different word.

DeForest Kelley used Vulcan as a deliberate pun, and the production was clearly on board with it. You can't miss it in lines like, "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" It didn't need to be mispronounced to have effect.

 

[NCC-73515]

That's like Bashir pretty much giving Sloan the finger XD

 

[Qonundrum]

There's a story that James Doohan purposefully pronounced "Vulcan" in a way that might vaguely resemble a different word.

Kor

Likewise for Gamesters of Triskeleon with McCoy's "Are you out of your Vulcan mind!"

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It's where really good dialogue comes in; anyone can scribble in a swear. That in itself is not always funny. TOS baked a cake and got to eat it too and that's what worked. The critics of the time should have looked it up in their Funk and Wagnalls... Ah, the dated Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In show!

At the 22 seconds mark:

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(there's a far bigger joke in there about succeeding that you know they wouldn't try to be clever with nowadays...)

Then Buck Rogers did the same dictionary call-out shtick, nigh on a decade later and pretending he was from 1987, and with only a tenth of a tenth the tact!

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(never mind that Funk and Wagnalls joke was years' passe at that time already, and not in a good Harold T Stone sort of way...)

That said, I still have my Funk and Wagnalls dictionary set... though a few words, and even non-words, have been added to the English language since...

 

[WildManWizard]

@hofner yeah that was me.

Also:

“Dagger of the Mind” when Van Gelder says “you smug button pushing brass hat” to Kirk, I actually had to buy the VHS tape and hit closed captioning to figure out he wasn’t saying “your smug button pushing breath!”

i would think brass hat would sound more like ass hat than breath

 

[Ssosmcin]

i would think brass hat would sound more like ass hat than breath

I was a kid with a crummy TV

 

[WildManWizard]

I was watching The Deadly Years the other day, and noticed that Dr Wallace says to Kirk she only heard from him once during her previous marriage - a stargram.

Up until I read the subtitles, I always assumed she said a 'star cry'. My interpretation being he sent her a condolences message, and she poetically calls it a star cry - as in a cross-galaxy message figuratively 'weeping/mourning' for her loss. Either my poor hearing of it, or perhaps the delivery of the line...

Interestingly we never hear about stargrams again, but this was the 60s future version of a telegram I suppose.

Anyhow, does anyone else have any other recollections of mishearing dialogue, and only later either through subtitles, transcripts or better quality DVD/Blu Ray, discovering the accurate version?

till I was eight I thought it was vulcan mind melt.

 

[johnnybear]

I love the use of how long it is for friendships between the characters in this series! It's never four years or two years but four years, seven months and an odd number of days for Kirk and Areel Shaw in Court Martial! The same happens with Dr.Janet Wallace in The Deadly Years and in other places!
JB