Word: villainizing
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Most of the familiar spy-story elements are there: an inexplicable but obviously treacherous plot against the national welfare of jolly old England, an equally enigmatic and treacherous villain, and a beautiful girl. All the events necessary for a good thriller occur with surprising regularity: a snappy, bone-crunching fight, an amusing seduction, and a sadistically satisfying torture...
With such unpredictable performances from the animals, the film's villain, former Olympic Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson, chickened out on a scheduled wrestling scene with a leopard. "It was chained to a tree," explained Rafer, "and it was ripping the bark right off with its claws. I told the director: 'You get yourself another boy.' " Johnson was not the only recalcitrant actor. On the day Tarzan returned to the set, he was directed to ambush three Indian extras. Mike out-Tarzaned his thirteen predecessors, played it like a red-dogging linebacker, taking out all three with...
...keep hundreds of new cars in Hollywood, lend them to studios for a year in return for a guarantee that they will be used in movies and TV shows. A new Lincoln was squeezed into a tiny cube by a giant press in the James Bond movie Goldfinger; the villain who arranged the crush-out to get rid of a rival carted off the metal remains in, of all things, a Ford "Ranchero" pickup truck! Chrysler has signed agreements with no less than 17 TV shows to use its cars, among them Peyton Place, Dr. Kildare, the Beverly Hillbillies...
...Subtitles come much cheaper, but audiences in the richer nations like Germany won't abide them, viewers in the poorer ones can't read them. Not that a lot does not get lost in the translations. In the original version of a Zane Grey Theater episode, the villain burst into a saloon, hammered his fist on the bar and growled: "Gimme a redeye!" The French version: "Donnez-moi un Dubonnet...
Other times the mistranslations are on purpose. In Moslem Kuwait, government censors changed the villain's order to: "Give me a glass of milk." Kissing scenes are also deleted outright in Kuwait, limited to a wham-bam five seconds in Lebanon. At the same time, a Danish programmer complains that "American shows are too Victorian in their morals...