Are there any spaghetti westerns that came out only in Italian or do they all have English dubs? Are there any English dubs that have been lost since the time of their release?
Thanks!
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Hmmm…Another interesting question put to this fine community. I’m not 100% certain on this, but I do recall reading that there were some SW’s that never saw a legitimate release for English speaking audiences and thus no English dub was ever recorded. Corbucci’s Gli Specialisti (The Specialists) is a very good example of an English dub having been recorded, but either lost or heavily damaged due to a lack of TLC. Thompson 1880 with George Martin & Gordon Mitchell and Tinto Brass’ Yankee with Philippe Leroy never saw a release in the States or the UK, and is only available in Italian with translated subtitles.
Now many fans of the genre have done what is called fandubs in which a group of people are brought in and are given the best possible translation of the script and record an English track. Usually these versions are only available via bootleg DVDs and sometimes on YouTube. I’ve never personally seen a fandub of an SW so I can’t comment on how they are, but I have heard from some fans who’ve taken the plunge and tried them out that some of them are pretty good quality.
A ‘Fandub’ is actually using the legit original English audio dub (usually from a VHS source) and synchronizing it with a superior quality DVD or Blu Ray rip from a non English friendly version.
Home dubbing new audio is a very very bad idea … Wild East have attempted it on a few releases for partially incomplete scenes … They don’t have access to the original music / sound effects track … and it sounds like crap.
The most acceptable option is to create subtitles and revert to Italian or whichever is the most complete audio track.
Thanks Aldo for that extra bit of info, usually if ever I hear something with the word fan in front of it I tend to believe its entirely fan made. The Wild East guys did their own audio sometimes, eh? I guess that was another black mark for them in quality work, which isn’t too surprising anymore.
I tend to prefer that myself too, but sometimes I think it’s a rights issue or what a company can afford. I remember two different Blu Ray releases of Fernando Di Leo’s Horror Thriller Cold Blooded Beast aka Slaughter Hotel, the US Blu Ray had the option of the full Italian soundtrack with English subtitles or the English dub and the UK release had an English dub audio only with sections of the film in German with English subtitles. This I found very head scratching as an Italian audio does exist and was surprised that the UK company couldn’t get it, leading me to believe it has to do with rights or maybe the cost from whoever owns it has too high a price tag smaller companies can’t afford.
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I’m slightly sceptical about these rights issues … they’ve been mentioned here many times before … but what we have are 50 year old movies which most mainstream TV channels wouldn’t touch even if they were free to broadcast. When you consider that in the last 2 years we’ve had pristine English language versions turn up on Youtube, via the Gringo channel and Film and Clips, of films thought to have no English version … usually 2 or 3 per week!
The prints are out there, so I believe it’s laziness or apathy on the part of the distributors. 
How about if we go with it’s a combination of all the stuff we mentioned, we’re both right 
Not really a question of being right … I’m just offering an opinion. 
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