“Ich bin dein schlimmster Alptraum.”
I don’t know if you know this, dear reader, but ze Germans have a longstanding tradition of dubbing every single foreign movie and TV show. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, over there, they all speak German. John Cleese! Yes, even Clint Eastwood… Can you imagine? Yeah… The reasons for this are all very boring and unimportant, but it just so happens that those Germans, way back when, always used to broadcast big American action movies much earlier than Dutch TV did. And since the village I was born in was right on the German border, my parents loved German schlager music, and we went on holiday in Germany, I basically grew up half German. So, watching American movies on German TV was something I was used to from a very young age.
This ended, very suddenly, one day when I was about thirteen years old. It ended all with Rambo III. And I never watched another movie in German again. Ever.
Back then, like just about every other teenage knucklehead on the planet, I loved Rambo—and every other big, sweaty hero from the infamous 80s action catalog. First, of course, those movies came out in theaters. Then, you’d have to wait. A long, long, long, long time. And then, finally: VHS! Yes! (For the younger generations among you: in the olden days, kids, movies came out on something like videocassettes. They were these big, plastic boxes full of tape, the size of books. These cassettes would then be displayed in a place called a video store. These were actual physical shops that rented out said cassettes for a fixed fee. You could then take them home with you, where you played them on big, bulky things called VCRs. These were the size of suitcases and would normally reside somewhere near your TV, to which they were connected via all manner of intricate cableworks. Then, after one to three days, you had to return it to the store. And if it then turned out you committed the cardinal sin of NOT rewinding them, you had to pay a fine of five bucks. Ah, those good old days…)
Anyway, I did see Rambo III first on VHS, in English. Then, after I and every other kid in my neighborhood had waited another exceptionally long time, it would come on German TV! And we would gather around, all of us, in anxious anticipation… And then, everything went horribly wrong.
As you, avid movie fans out there, probably know, in the final battle of that movie, Rambo drives a tank straight toward the Russian general, who’s piloting that big-ass helicopter gunship. Now, in the English version, the general says to Rambo over the radio, with a thick Russian accent, “Who are you?” To which Rambo, in his deep baritone voice, replies, “I’m your worst nightmare.” They then, of course, clash head-on into each other. Awesome.
In the German version, however, this becomes “Ich bin dein schlimmster Alptraum.”
And it was gone. Right then and there. When I heard one of my favorite action heroes of all time utter that sentence, that horrible, ridiculous sentence, something inside me broke, irreversibly and forever, and it was there I swore myself that solemnest of vows: never again.
The Knight Rider, he spoke German. The A-Team. MacGyver, too. MacGyver! The Dukes of Hazzard. ALF. ALF spoke German, man…! Mickey Mouse… Speedy Gonzalez! Yeah… Now, YOU go and translate “¡Árriba! ¡Árriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!” in German, and ask yourself then why I ended up an insane addict.
It was ze Germans, man…
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