29 Oct.08--More on Italy

Dear Readers, I’m not getting to the net as much as I thought I would, what with all the gales they’re having here in the West Country of England this winter. I’d like to talk about a couple more things about Italy before I go on to Geneva. I was fascinated by the way English has infected the Italian language. My conversational Italian teacher explained that anything new and up-to-date is likely to be named in English. This was borne out by the products I bought--toothpaste tubes with everything else in Italian but ‘fresh’ and ‘whitening,’ TP with ‘soft and gentle,’ laundry soap with ‘fresh’ and ‘clean.’ All the other product info was in Italian, but the advertising catchwords were in English. Not all products were like this but very many were.
I’ve already commented previously on the oddness of watching American programs dubbed. They dub virtually everything there, giving much work to voice actors. The weirdest part is watching an actor whose voice you know perfectly well sounding different. Sometimes they get close to the actor’s voice, other times they are way off. Interestingly enough, the guy who does Robert’s voice on Everybody Loves Raymond is very good. He even talks with that weird slow, stuffy-nosed voice that Brad Garrett does. One thing I absolutely could not stand to watch was a movie about Abraham Lincoln. Abe talking Italian I could not take, especially since they gave him a deep Italian basso voice when, as I understand, the written records indicate that Lincoln had a rather high, reedy voice, more like George Bush the elder. Another fun thing was watching a Speedy Gonzales cartoon and hearing Speedy speak Italian with a Mexican accent.
People make fun of Italians for putting a vowel on the end of everything, and I thought that was an exaggeration because there are some words in Italian that end in consonants and they usually keep the consonant endings when they do borrow English--sport, fresh (as opposed to fresco or fresca), computer, etc. However, I did see videos of Stanlio & Ollio--yes, Laurel and Hardy.
On to what I thought was the weirdest thing about Italian popular culture--their game shows. Can you imagine the American public standing for a game show where the contestant wins something only about one in 60 times? That’s about how often someone wins on L’Eredita (Inheritance). They start out with about 8 people. If they get 2 questions wrong, they pick another contestant to answer a question. If person #2 gets the answer wrong, he or she is out. If he or she gets it right, person #1 is out. Therefore, you can get your own questions right in the round and still get knocked out by some dope who didn’t get his/her question right, and the dope gets to stay. Every round has more difficult questions, and one by one, all but two contestants get knocked out. Then the two remaining play against each other, accumulating thousands of Euros until one wins it all. (When one gets his/her question wrong, all the money accumulated reverts to the other player). If the game ended there, it would make sense to us, sort of like The Weakest Link. But noooo, the person who wins the up-to-100,000E has to do more. First, he/she must pick one word of a pair 5 different times. Each time he/she picks the wrong word, the purse money is halved. Then after the 5 correct words are left, the person has to guess what word relates to all five of these words.
I was in Italy all of September, October, and about 3 weeks in November, and I think I saw 3 people win some money. The program is on 6 days a week. Hardly anybody wins the money because the thing at the end is so hard. I understood anywhere from 7% to 70% of what was being said, but the poor Italians who understood 100% STILL WON NO MONEY. No wonder Berlusconi is so rich. His station gets all that ad money and he doesn’t give away nothing! Also they make a big deal out of the person who gets to the end and call him “Campione” (Champion) or her “Campionessa” even if they win no money. And they’re introduced that way the next evening when they have the distinct privilege of trying again to win NO MONEY! Although I watched this particular show regularly, the other quiz shows had similar most-people-walk-away-with-nothing formats. Come on Italy! The war was over 60 years ago! You're a prosperous EU country now. Spread the wealth around a little to your poor quiz show contestants.