Fleece Me, Man!

Last week, E! showed The Big Lebowski several times, and I watched it twice. When I saw that it was going to be on, I wondered how the censors were going to manage to show that movie without completely butchering it. If you've seen the movie, you know the language in it is, er...colorful. If you haven't seen it or need a reminder, check out some sample dialogue. The answer is, they didn't. I'd even say, they can't...the movie is just too full of profanity to gracefully dub for TV. But it was a valiant effort, and when you're not looking at the TV it doesn't sound obviously dubbed. However, the rewritten lines were completely silly! Besides that, the plot was irreparably damaged by the cutting of a large number of entire scenes, including the confrontation in the bowling alley to the accompaniment of the Gipsy Kings' version of Hotel California and, for no good reason that I can fathom, Aimee Mann's brief cameo as a German nihilist with nine toes.

The dubbed dialogue was amusing in its ridiculousness; here is a sampling of my favorite lines. According to IMDB, the F-bomb was dropped more than 280 times in the film, so you don't have to have seen it to guess what the original lines were:

Fleece me, man! The kid spent all the money!

You don't like my music, get out of my peaceful cab!

They killed my Ford car!

You see what happens, Donny? You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!?

We chop you up, man! I chop you! I chop you! / I kick you! I kick you!
and my favorite:

They peed on my valued rug! -That's right, Dude. They peed on your valued rug.