Spanglish - The english only movie

So last night gaba and i watched spanglish a Hollywood romantic comedy. We had low expectations and it wasn’t that bad given the low bar we’d set. The weirdest thing was the dvd options. See the movie switched between spanish and english, the spanish parts didn’t include subtitles, so I’m guessing the audience wasn’t supposed to understand it.

But the amazing thing was the DVD. See it had full voice dubbed in to French, along with subtitles in both french and english. There was no option for spanish. It seems that the makers of the film Spanglish didn’t think of including a spanish version. This is a film which focused on interactions between english and spanish speaking residents of Los Angeles, a city which is, as mentioned in the movie, %48 latino.

We were dumbfounded. We expected stereotypes and bad humor. If there were no translation then that would have been at least understandable, they were being cheap. Dubbing everything in to spanish would have ruined the jokes. But to include french and not spanish borders on racism. There was enough space on the DVD, and they had plenty of spanish translators around, they just didn’t think it was worth including spanish subtitles. The market wasn’t there.