Berryz Koubou Fan no Tsudoi 2008 Subtitle Release

By: The Incredible He-Hulk



The Berryz Koubou Fan no Tsudoi is the millionaire’s club of Berryz events. Only for loyal fan club members, it’s half-theater, half-farce, half-performance piece, half-fan interactive.

The premise is simple: The event is a stage play in which Berryz Koubou’s super-hero alter-ego’s, The Berryz Kamen (think Power Rangers minus the power), hold a meeting to discuss their TV show’s (Yes, they have a TV show) sagging ratings compared to C-utie Ranger (Yes, that’s also a fake TV show), their generally horrible performance as heroes, and how they can possibly turn it all around. But, in a deliciously avant-garde twist, the Berryz frequently break character, talk to the audience, make snide comments about each other’s acting, and generally screw around a bunch, much to the delight of the fans in attendance. Basically, the 4th wall doesn’t just get broken, it gets obliterated. They even somehow find the time to sneak in a few musical numbers, and then end things with a shocking, hair-raising…not the least bit surprising if you’re a Berryz fan… cliff-hanger of a surprise ending. Truthfully, if you know your Berryz, you’ll realize that it just couldn’t have possibly ended any other way, and since the 2009 Fan no Tsudoi is a direct sequel to this event, you’ll get plenty more madness soon enough…

And now, for the 3 people who care, some methodology...
When, taking on a release like this you often have to go with what works, even if you don't really want to. Case in point: I don't like having each girl's subtitled text color-coded based on her merchandise color. Generally it's an annoyance, and everyone's subtitle being the same color is preferable. But, with the Tsudoi there was simply just way too much off-screen dialogue and too much of the girl's talking over one another to do anything else but color-code the girl's dialogue. So, in order to have a bit of fun with it, we decided to color-code it based, not on their merchandise colors, but on their Berryz Kamen colors. Thus, you'll see Maasa's dialogue as red & yellow, and Risako's as blue & green, etc. Overall, I think it worked rather well, and it adds a bit of flair to the proceedings.

Another consideration was the tongue-twister segment as there simply never appeared to be a great way to subtitle it. The nature of a tongue-twister is that it only really makes sense in the actual language it is being spoken in and so translation into English sort of diminishes how it sounds and it's difficulty. Eventually, we decided to translate it into Romaji while it was on screen, so people could get a look at the actual phonetic nature of the tongue-twister first, then we literally translated it into English when Maasa demoed the tongue-twister for the girls. After that, each girl attempted the twister themselves, and we decided to simply leave it untranslated on subsequent girls' attempts, as you already knew what they were saying and the point of the segment is how badly they stumble over the words, something that constantly repeating the same translation over and over didn't accentuate and simply obscured. Overall, I think we handled this difficult section rather well.

Anyway, click here to grab it.