Thursday, May 15, 2008
In an obscure corner of the cable TV universe, "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack" is giving Asian B movies a hilarious new life.
Oct 13, 2005 | "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack," which just finished its first season on the ImaginAsian cable network, is the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" of bad Asian films, and like its predecessor with the then-unknown Comedy Central, it could help put the obscure iaTV on the map. The conceit of the show is that four loser friends -- Trevor, Aladdin, Jimbo and John -- earn a little extra cash dubbing martial arts, action and Bollywood films into English at the Dub Shack, run by an old crank named Morty. Uncle Morty doesn't have the translated scripts, so the friends turn the movie scenes into sketch comedy. For those of us who didn't warm to MST3K, "Uncle Morty's" is easier to love, because it's only half an hour long (the films are significantly, and mercifully, edited down), and the writers create believable alternate narratives for the flicks instead of merely smirking at them.
For example, in "Blowback 2," a 1991 Japanese action film, a wannabe vigilante completely botches his revenge fantasy. The dubbers play the scene for laughs but keep the story going:
"So your plan didn't go so well, huh?" the vigilante's girlfriend says.
"No, it didn't."
"Well, maybe you should think of a different strategy, or something like --"
"No, I think I just need a bigger gun. A bigger gun, a partner, and really cool-looking dress suits. Yeah, that should do it."
And then the film cuts to the protagonist with a new partner, both of them wearing white suits. (The bigger gun makes its appearance in the last scene.)
But what surprised me was the consistent hilariousness of the between-dubbing skits, where Trevor, Aladdin, Jimbo and John step away from their roles as behind-the-scenes voices and become silly, B-movie-worthy characters themselves. The friends stave off global financial collapse by accidentally inventing a hug-based currency, join a cult with ties to the oil industry, and, one time, accidentally turn into women (it's a long story). In the cliffhanger first-season finale, the four losers try to get jobs at a rival recording studio, but the required drug test poses an obstacle -- because of Trevor's addiction to Reddi-wip.
ImaginAsian starts rerunning shows from the first season on Friday, Oct. 14, at 11 p.m., and on Halloween, iaTV will feature a marathon of four favorite first-season episodes starting at 9 p.m. The second season will start in February. (Watch the clips on the iaTV Web site, and you'll see why it's worth the space on your TiVo.) Salon spoke by e-mail with the Dub Shack's Jimbo Matison, who does double duty as the creative director at iaTV, and Trevor Moore, who also writes and produces for the show, both of whom live in New York.
How did you two get to do "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack"?
Jimbo: We don't have a lot of money to produce original content; it's not that we're cheap, we just don't have it. I noticed we had a great deal of B kung fu and Bollywood movies, some we just couldn't air. I had made a pilot for a show a couple years earlier, when I lived in San Francisco, that was similar to the "Shack," where I stripped the sound out and added my own stuff. I showed it to the other guys at the network and we decided we could make a funny show for cheap. Trevor and I came up with the whole Dub Shack scenario and we ran with it. Really, the great thing about ImaginAsian is that we are small, and an idea like this gets the "OK" much quicker than at regular networks.
Why couldn't you air those old kung fu and Bollywood movies? Were there copyright issues?
Jimbo: No copyright issues, they just lacked quality. They stank on the shelf. There were a couple that were so bad, we couldn't even goof on them. We have some Japanese B action films that are just wrong. Truly painful to watch.
What differentiates a film that you can't even goof on from a film that you can chop down to a goofable 20 minutes?
Jimbo: I think it's the actors. In some of the movies the writing might not be the best but the actors are great character actors, so their performances are really big and exaggerated. They're like cartoons without the proper voices. We give them the servicing they've been needing. [Laughs] But some movies, oh, the acting is so bad and the plots are so thin, there's just not much to work with. In "Blow Back 2," we really didn't change the plot much. The big running scheme was, the main guy just wanted a bigger gun to beat the bad guy. "Blow Back 2" was pretty hard to goof on, but we like that one for what it is.
Trevor: I like the films that have a lot of scenes with just two or three characters having a conversation, because then you can just throw whatever words you want into their mouths and completely twist the story's plotline. The films that are tricky are the ones with a lot of action and not a lot of dialogue. There's a difference between "bad/funny movies" and "bad/bad movies." We've had to scrap movies a week before our deadline because we didn't realize it was a "bad/bad movie" until we were halfway done writing it.
Is it easier to write funny commentary for Chinese kung fu/action movies or Bollywood musicals?
Trevor: I think they each have their advantages. The kung fu films tend to have these great, expressive, comic-relief characters that are just so easy to write jokes and come up with voices for. And the Bollywood films have all of those musical numbers that you can write songs for.
Jimbo: I love writing new songs for the Bollywood musicals. It's great to watch with the sound off and think, "What are they just not singing about?" and then have them sing about it. With the kung fu films it's fun to figure out the most absurd reasons for them to fight each other. It's also dang fun to throw on the goofiest sound effects when they hit each other. Usually it starts with lots of fart sound effects, just to get it out of our system, and then on to better sound effects like foghorns that sound like really big farts. We've really been aching to get our teeth into some bad anime. I think we're getting some for the next season. Oh, it's gonna be so nice.
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