Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Dr. Horrible captions

I don't know if you've watched Dr. Horrible with the captions on yet, but they're hilariously inaccurate. Here are some examples (captions first, actual spoken words second):
Act I:
A heinous crime, a show of course
A heinous crime, a show of force

I don't know.
It's not a no.

Act III:
I hate the homeless.
This problem that plagues our city.
I hate the homeless
-ness problem that plagues our city.

Everyone can blaze a hero's drill.
Everyone can blaze a hero's trail.
(A hero's WHAT?)

Hammer me nail.
Hammer, meet nail.
(I suspect the captioner is not a native English speaker)

Why?
Way!
(Hammer finishes the lyric after he comes out of being frozen. How is this not obvious?)

Captain Hammer would say that.
Captain Hammer will save us.
(Capstone line of the series, ruined in the caption)
So, I e-mailed Hulu and asked them wtf and where'd they get the captions from? Their response was:
I'm not certain what our source is -- I believe that we had found some open-content subtitles and performed some verification that they were correct before putting them up. I've watched the first few minutes of Dr. Horrible with the subtitles after we had put them up, and remember seeing that they were ever so slightly off in terms of timing, perhaps about a half a second too early, but I hadn't noticed anything actually being seriously inaccurate. If there's an obvious error somewhere please let me know and I'll send that information to our quality control folks.
So, mystery solved. They took someone else's captions, and didn't bother to check them. Because that would take effort.

Lazy, lazy.

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