Yeah, that's the one. He was throwing snowballs as baseballs. Yes, Battleground is very impressive.
Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles
- Thread starter Maurice
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Williams Schallert and Windom play dueling bad accents on an episode of Mission: Impossible.
Speaking of Montalban, I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet. One of the stranger make-up and accent combinations I've seen as he plays a Japanese crime boss in a first season Hawaii Five-O:
That's nothing; the character of Adam Noshimuri (a Japanese version of Michael Corleone) in the new version is played by a white guy as well, Ian Anthony Dale.
^ 
I have to see that!
I have to see that!
Speaking of Montalban, I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet. One of the stranger make-up and accent combinations I've seen as he plays a Japanese crime boss in a first season Hawaii Five-O:
Hell, that's not even the first time Montalban played a Japanese character. He played a Japanese Noh actor in the 1957 Marlon Brando film "Sayonara."
The actor is of Japanese and European ancestry.That's nothing; the character of Adam Noshimuri (a Japanese version of Michael Corleone) in the new version is played by a white guy as well, Ian Anthony Dale.
Speaking of Montalban, I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet. One of the stranger make-up and accent combinations I've seen as he plays a Japanese crime boss in a first season Hawaii Five-O:
I definitely saw that, and I may have posted a screen grab in this thread. But a lot of them disappeared when I changed website providers.
I think I duplicated your Takei/Colicos "Five-O" screencap. But the thread is 2½ years old after all!
Speaking of Montalban, I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet. One of the stranger make-up and accent combinations I've seen as he plays a Japanese crime boss in a first season Hawaii Five-O:
That's nothing; the character of Adam Noshimuri (a Japanese version of Michael Corleone) in the new version is played by a white guy as well, Ian Anthony Dale.
To be fair, Dale is half Japanese.
Kor
^Well, Kobayashi's a fairly common Japanese name. There's a graphic designer named Alan Kobayashi who worked on TNG, ENT, and a couple of the TNG movies.
Although the Japanese pronunciation of Kobayashi is very different from the one used in the Trek movies. There was a character of that name in a Godzilla movie, and it took me a while to realize that was the name they were saying. It's more like "Koh-bye-ah-see" (with a sharp and slightly aspirated S sound, sort of halfway between S and SH, and with the third syllable elided almost to nonexistence) than "Koe-buh-yah-shee," let alone Nimoy's rather ghastly "Koe-bee-yah-shee." And of course "Maru" should be stressed on the first syllable, not the second; the U sound tends to be barely pronounced at all in Japanese, and when it is pronounced, it's more like a British "er" than an "oo."
Although the Japanese pronunciation of Kobayashi is very different from the one used in the Trek movies. There was a character of that name in a Godzilla movie, and it took me a while to realize that was the name they were saying. It's more like "Koh-bye-ah-see" (with a sharp and slightly aspirated S sound, sort of halfway between S and SH, and with the third syllable elided almost to nonexistence) than "Koe-buh-yah-shee," let alone Nimoy's rather ghastly "Koe-bee-yah-shee." And of course "Maru" should be stressed on the first syllable, not the second; the U sound tends to be barely pronounced at all in Japanese, and when it is pronounced, it's more like a British "er" than an "oo."
The Japanese pronunciation thing is interesting when trying to transliterate to English. Best example: You mentioned a Godzilla movie, well in Japan he's called Gojira - go-hee-ra - so that got Americanized to 'Godzilla'.(I can't watch the Raymond Burr version of the first one anymore, once I saw the original Japanese version, the other one looks totally bogus and Bowdlerized.)
Do you speak Japanese yourself, Christopher, or are you just going by how you've heard "Kobayashi" spoken by native speakers? Just curious.
Sorry, but that's not how it's pronounced. The second consonant is about halfway between a J sound and a DZ sound, and the final consonant is about halfway between an R and an L. In the Romanization scheme that was preferred in the 1950s, the syllables of the name would be transliterated go-zi-la or go-dzi-la. The choice was made to spell it "Godzilla," perhaps for aesthetics, and probably because the name was partly derived from "gorilla."
These days, a different Romanization scheme has become standard, and in that scheme, the exact same sounds are transliterated as go-ji-ra. But that's not a more "correct" Romanization than Godzilla; the true sound is about halfway between, so both renderings are equally imprecise. It's like Peking vs. Beijing.
But Godzilla is the official English spelling used by Toho itself. In Godzilla movies where signage and graphics are written in English, the character's name is almost always rendered as Godzilla. And when characters speak English in the original audio tracks of the films, they pronounce it "God-zill-uh" the way Americans do. So the filmmakers themselves consider that the correct English rendering of the name.
The spelling Gojira is used for modern video releases of the original film's title, but the subtitles within that film still render the character's name as Godzilla. I assume the movie's title is rendered as Gojira to distinguish it from the Raymond Burr version.
(The sound "go-hee-ra" would be spelled Gohira in Romanized Japanese. It's actually a Japanese surname.)
Do you speak Japanese yourself, Christopher, or are you just going by how you've heard "Kobayashi" spoken by native speakers? Just curious.
I took four semesters of Japanese in college before realizing that I'd already earned my language credit through AP Spanish in high school. I never really got the hang of using the language, but pronunciation is the part that comes most easily to me in language studies. And I've watched plenty of Japanese films and shows over the years to refresh my memory of what I learned.
Like that Gallifreyan villain the Fourth Doctor went up against, "Oh-mih-Ger"?
I sat through the entire run of that four or five part 'episode' to read the end credits, only to find that 'Oh-mih-Ger' was Omega!
In the film Midway (1976), you can hear one or more Japanese-American actors pronounce the name of Lt. Kobayashi. Or maybe they're Japanese-Canadian, e.g. if Robert Ito says it. It's been a while, and I'm not exactly sure who says his name, but someone does among the Japanese in the context of the battle using different pronunciation from TWOK.
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The actor is of Japanese and European ancestry.That's nothing; the character of Adam Noshimuri (a Japanese version of Michael Corleone) in the new version is played by a white guy as well, Ian Anthony Dale.
Thanks for the info/correction.
If I watch an anime or Samurai film in Japanese with English subtitles, I often can't even tell when they're saying a name that's written onscreen. The English phonetic writing is approximate, I guess, and our pronunciation from the phonetic can be way different than the proper.
I learned long ago when working for a video company, that "Matsushita" (who made VCRs) was pronounced something like "Mah-TSU-shta." And I was surprised to learn that Tokyo is really only two syllables: "To-kyo," not "To-kee-oh."
I'm fascinated by languages, but I'm terrible at learning to speak them.
I learned long ago when working for a video company, that "Matsushita" (who made VCRs) was pronounced something like "Mah-TSU-shta." And I was surprised to learn that Tokyo is really only two syllables: "To-kyo," not "To-kee-oh."
I'm fascinated by languages, but I'm terrible at learning to speak them.
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