Wanted to watch Darby O'Gill and the Little People last Thursday

Banshee scared me big time as a kid, awesome movie.

Didn't watch it long enough to see if they changed the Gaelic words in it, but I assume they did. I assume they left Sir Sean Connery's part alone, don't know about Janet Munro. The whole thing just seemed off.

Criminal, really. Walt had fallen in love with the Irish people and wanted the film to be a loving tribute to their heritage and tradition, which it was in the original version.

This is worse than the censoring of "objectionable content". I wonder if they cut out the drinking parts as well.

The accents were "racist". LINK

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Darby O'Gill and the Little People The scene where Darby O’Gill speaks with a racist accent was modified for the Disney+ release.

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The accents were "racist".

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Imagine that, actors born in Ireland appearing in a movie about Ireland sound "too Irish"

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The accents were "racist".

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not according to IMDB

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After the modest returns during its first run, it was felt that younger viewers had trouble understanding the thick Irish accents. The film was redubbed, replacing some of the Irish with English and softening the Irish accents, for reissues.

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A minor difference between the two laserdisc versions: in the second (Re-Mastered) version, King Brian orders the Strativarius fetched in Irish whereas it was in English in the first version.

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LINK

If they've had different versions confirmed to be floating around since laserdisc I highly doubt it was due to anyone thinking it was racist. Far more likely is the explanation that Walt Disney himself thought Americans couldn't understand what they were saying and had it changed to boost returns.

BleedingCool did an article on it a couple of years ago. Sad...

Even contains voice track comparisons.

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The Disney+ Version of "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" is Garbage
Posted on March 15, 2020 by Andy Wilson|Comments
Crappy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. If you were planning to stream Darby O'Gill and the Little People on Disney+, I have some bad news. The version available to stream is terrible. And there's no reason for it, similar to their (ongoing) problem with The Simpsons on the platform.

It's a tragedy on top of so many other troubles. Even with parades being cancelled, and going on a pub crawl being the opposite of "social distancing," I was really looking forward to this year's St. Patrick's Day and that I could sit down and enjoy Darby O'Gill. But upon partaking, I was hit with a cold grim reality. This was not the Darby I remembered from my childhood.


The voices of Albert Sharpe as Darby and Jimmy O'Dea as King Brian were somehow just. . . different. Sean Connery was just as I remember him. Janet Munro was the same, too. But somehow the main characters had lost some of their edge, even their Irishness in some sense. It felt blander, more dumbed down.

At first, I thought this was some strange Mandela Effect, or perhaps just the worst impulses of nostalgia. Of course things are never as good as we remember them from our childhood. And maybe it was just my terrible VHS copy that was, in fact, the defective version.

But, no, as I did some internet sleuthing, it did indeed turn out that Disney+ had used dubbed over voice tracks for Darby and King Brian. I got my hands on the most recent DVD version of Darby O'Gill and the Little People and listened to its audio. This was what I remembered.

Here's an example of how the original actors' voices sounded, ripped from the DVD:

In this scene, Darby is telling the story of how he trapped King Brian in the ruins on the top of Knocknasheega, the fairy mountain, and forced him to grant him three wishes.

And just listen to this bastardized version of the same scene from Disney+:

King Brian sounds like he just came from protecting his marshmallow breakfast cereal from small children. It sounds weirdly not Irish, like how an American would want an Irish person to talk. Darby has a lot of the age and the whisky taken from his voice. It's not as gruff, as lispy, as guttural.

All of this begs the question: Who exactly is this for? Who asked for this? Where are the rampaging hordes complaining that somehow the one thing wrong with this Disney classic is sometimes the dialogue is too hard to understand? Ok, maybe sometimes that's true, but that's also because several lines or just random phrases are in Gaelic, but that isn't changed in the new version.

All of this continues a terrible instinct on the part of the Disney Corporation to sand off all of the rough edges of their intellectual property. It's not surprising that the company who wouldn't put up their library of cartoon shorts from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's, many of them in all their problematic glory, would feel the need to dub over the main Irish actors with the thickest brogues of the cast.

The saddest thing in all of this is it wouldn't be hard to fix. Simply offer the original audio, undubbed, as an audio selection just like anything else.

I get it. We Americans are dumb and don't like anything that is different from us. But, we've also embraced Darby O'Gill and the Little People for decades now with no outcry. We're the same American film community that just gave Parasite the Best Picture Oscar, despite our country's hatred of having to read.

But this gem of a film didn't deserve this. So if you're going to watch Darby O'Gill and the Little People this year, don't watch it on Disney+. Get the DVD and honor these original actors for their work.

And if you happen to find a four leaf clover or a leprechaun, wish for Disney+ to get their $#!% together and release the original audio for Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

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