MovieChat Forums > Satellite in the Sky (1956) Discussion > Why the American pronunciations and spel...

Why the American pronunciations and spellings?

posted 16 years ago by hobnob53
11 replies | jump to latest

Though released by the US company Warner Bros., SATELLITE IN THE SKY is a British film. So why do various characters, all British, pronounce "schedule" the American way -- with an "sk" sound -- instead of in the normal British manner -- with an "sh" sound?

Also, the credits spell certain words using American spelling -- "color" and "license" -- instead of the British "colour" and "licence". Normally, even when released by a US company, a British film would be British in all respects, including its spelling and, certainly, the pronunciation of the dialogue by its actors.

And before someone says there might be different credits on US and UK versions of the film -- there aren't; it's the same film -- this doesn't address the pronunciation issue.

Anyway, it's all a bit curious.

[–] Woodyanders 16 years ago

I'm sure the spelling and pronunciations were both done to ensure this film would appeal more to an American audience. I'm assuming that the British spellings and pronunciations of words might have alienated American audiences back in the 50's. I found this film to be quite good and enjoyable, if a touch slow and talky.

"We're all part Shatner/And part James Dean/Part Warren Oates/And Steven McQueen"

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

Maybe, but then mightn't they alienate the British audience? Especially if it were felt that the cast was taking on "American" airs or something. The producers, the Danzigers, were actually American brothers who moved to Britain a few years after the war and churned out generally lousy, cheaply-made films as second features, and were held in low esteem by the British film community. Maybe it was they who insisted on the American pronunciations and spellings. Satellite in the Sky, whatever its flaws, was certainly way above their usual efforts.

[–] Iridescent_Phantom 16 years ago

I remember seeing this in my local theatre when I was ten. After that, it just seemed to vanish off the planet and I did not see it listed on late night tv (at least when I was around) for over a half century.

I've just purchased the dvd double with "World Without End," so I basically saw "Satellite" through new eyes after a fifty year hiatus. To say I was floored to discover that this movie was made by the Danzigers is an understatement. The Danzigers were responsible for making "Devil Girl From Mars," a claustrophobic stage play turned into a claustrophobic moving picture. Compared to "Devil Girl," SITS is a photographic epic.

I can see why the movie is not high on any anyone's discussion list. While there are some very well done visuals (and some not so well done), the film is less concerned with florid special effects than the character driven narrative. Character driven stories, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genre, have been relegated to the dust bin of history by cgi artists and screenwriters who get their ideas from sitcom television rather than classic science fiction literature and pulp science fiction magazines.

Most of the first half of the film is taken up with the various characters and their personal lives. Soap opera in the sky, if you will. And what was new and fresh in 1956, testing a nuclear weapon in space to protect earthly populations, is now old and cliche. The movie is slow moving even if you are interested in the lives of the characters, agonizingly dull if you are not.

It is only in the last fifteen minutes of so, when the bomb attaches itself to the ship that the film achieves any kind of kinetic energy.

As to the science involved in getting them up there and back, fagettaboutittt. Every bit of intellegent science fact is thrown out the window. Prior to blasting off, the propellant rockets are turned on and continue to roar full blast for a good ten minutes before the men actually allow the rocket to race up an incline and rise toward space. Once they are in orbit, they walk about the ship as though still weighted by earth gravity, yet the bomb refuses to drift away from the rocket because its small mass is attracted to the larger mass of the ship in non-gravity space. Or, something like that. A woman reporter stows away on the rocket and is discovered once they are in space....well, you get the picture.

And there is Satanic faced Donald Wolfit, who also appeared as the villainous Dr. Callistratus in "Blood of the Vampire" a couple of years later. Wolfit is one of those larger than life actors whose chief asset on film is a good helping of ham, but ham of a distinctly superior quality. The film is good for at least one look, if for no other reason than Wolfit's ripe and energetic good guy/bad guy performance, and a rather neat method of getting that pesky explosive away from the ship (which I won't mention here).

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

While not exactly on the thread topic, I mostly agree with your assessments. I saw this film first on late night TV in the 60s, then not for another 20 years in a dreadful, nearly unwatchable VHS knock-off. Both times the print was in black-and-white, so I was surprised years later to learn this had been shot in color. And, of course, those prints were pan-and-scan, not widescreen.

Your comments largely echo most reviewers of this film, and when I went looking for the new DVD with World Without End (one of my favorites, and a film I'd wanted on DVD and in widescreen for many years), I had no idea what the double feature film on the disc was. I was pleasantly surprised to see it was Satellite, not only because it had nearly been forgotten, but because it would afford me my first opportunity to see the film in color and in its correct aspect ratio. Perhaps it was finally seeing it properly, after an additional 20 years more had passed, that made me look at this film a bit more sympathetically. Talky in many parts, with some silly subplots, inaccurate science and mixed special effects, I nevertheless found it better than I had remembered from my two or three long-ago encounters with poor quality prints of the movie. At least the film is earnest and tries to be about something, and has a few sequences of tension and some good effects amid the less-good parts.

Overall, what you say is pretty accurate, but my experience with never having seen this film properly has probably let me view it a bit more indulgently, now that I can see it the way it was first shown in 1956. No classic, and overlooked due to its decades of virtual unavailability, but no worse than many other still-enjoyable 50s sci-fi films, and better than some.

[–] scribe1270 11 years ago

It's possible that there are different prints with the words pronounced differently for different markets. You see different prints all the time depending on where the film will be shown. Theater of Blood with Vincent Price is an example. It has a good amount of simulated gore in a full print but some copies have the gore toned down. And going back a ways when Dracula was made in 1931 with Bela Lugosi they also filmed a Spanish version for Non-English speaking theater patrons. And some countries don't even like kissing in their films so alternate prints that don't show such are marketed in such countries.

[–] hobnob53 11 years ago

No, the same print was used everywhere. They didn't film separate scenes just to pronounce basically one word differently in American vs. British versions. To put it mildly, that would be a hell of a waste of money. They weren't dubbing a foreign language. The film shown in the UK is the same as in the US.

The two stars, Kieron Moore and Lois Maxwell, were respectively Irish and Canadian. Both had made brief stabs at Hollywood (Moore had gone there after making some impact in Britain) before going (or returning, in Moore's case) to Britain, where they made their careers. It's possible their backgrounds may have led them to pronounce "schedule" with an American "sk" sound, but even so, having been in the UK for years, and the film being British, it's odd they'd use a non-British pronunication. (And their characters weren't supposed to be American.) Incidentally, Kieron Moore had been born in the remote west of Ireland, where Gaelic was the dominant language, and didn't begin to learn English until his teens!

Before dubbing was invented a few years after talkies came in, it was not uncommon to have mutliple versions of a film made for audiences in different countries -- sometimes as many as three different versions, all filmed on the same sets but at different times, with different casts. Dracula is a good example, though it was intended specifically for Spanish-speaking audiences abroad (Latin America and Spain), and recieved little if any domestic release. But the practice of making multiple versions of one film for foreign release basically ended after about 1932.

[–] Ambak 10 years ago

I am British born (in the '50s) and bred and I have never pronounced schedule as anything other than skedule. I don't know why you attribute one particular pronunciation to the entire nation, pronunciation varies all over the UK. As far as colour is concerned, processes like Technicolor and Warnercolor would always use the American spelling wherever the film was made.

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

Well, first as to spelling. Yes, copyrighted trade names like Technicolor and Warnercolor would use the American-spelled suffix "-color" because those terms are proper names, not separate, individual common words. So obviously they would be spelled without a "u".

However, most films' credits usually read "Color by Technicolor" (or Warnercolor or whatever), and in a British film this was always spelled (or spelt) "Colour by Technicolor". I wrote that it was the word color -- not the trade names "Technicolor" or "Warnercolor" -- that used the American spelling. This was not absolutely unheard-of in a British film but it was extremely rare and unusual.

As to schedule, I do not "attribute one particular pronunciation to the entire nation", and am well aware that pronunciation varies all over the UK -- as pronunciation varies all over most countries. I cannot of course speak to your personal experience but the fact remains that the most common pronunciation of the word in Britain uses the sh- instead of the sk- sound. This is also demonstrated by the fact that in most British films and television programs, particularly of the period, the sh- sound is heard, not sk-.

Now it so happens my wife is English and I have spent a lot of time in the UK over the years. (I'm about the same age you are, born in the US in the 50s.) No one has ever pronounced the word to me personally using anything other than the sh- sound. In fact, several people have jokingly uttered the word as "shed-ule", then looked at me, laughed and said, "Or should I say sked-ule?" I do know that the sk- sound is sometimes used in Britain (I've very occasionally heard someone use it on TV or radio) and that this may be a bit more common in some areas than others. But broadly speaking it is not the most common or received pronunciation across the UK, and I don't see how you can claim otherwise.

My wife was an executive at a major international corporation based in London and told me that because of their worldwide business dealings they alternated the pronunciation of the word depending on which country they were dealing with, but that domestically they nearly always used sh-. Her mother taught English and also taught the language itself to foreign students, and says she never used anything other than sh- in her life, and rarely encountered sk-.

As I said, I have occasionally heard sk- used in British media, and apparently that pronunciation has become somewhat more common today than it was sixty years ago, as Americanisms more and more infiltrate British English. I'm sure there are people in the UK who like you normally use the sk- pronunciation. I never said otherwise. But sh- is the sound most commonly used and accepted, and was even more so decades ago. So it was very unusual for a British film of the mid-50s to have British characters saying "sked-ule". Not impossible, just very unusual.

As an aside, I've read remarks by British and Australian actors who said they had to re-learn how to pronounce many words, including schedule, when they came to Hollywood. There are many other pronunciation differences even today between American and British English, such as differences in which syllables are accented ("CEL-e-bra-to-ry" rather than "cel-e-BRA-to-ry"), pronouncing or not pronouncing some letters (like the h in herbs or homage), all these apart from spelling differences and differences in names for some objects (the "hood" of a car vs. its "bonnet", "zucchini" instead of "courgette"). The very word "schedule" seems to be used a bit more commonly in the US than in the UK. You would say "railway timetable", for instance, where an American would say "railroad schedule". But this isn't a big difference.

[–] escalera-2 9 years ago

(*an aside for HOB with respect to this title: I have the Double-Feature copy of Satellite in the Sky on order and ought to be here in a few days. Someday I'll get to view I again and then write a post. Looking forward to it since it has been years and years since I saw it last)

Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors.

[–] hobnob53 9 years ago

Great! When you watch and post, PM me so I can come here to read it.

I presume the double-feature copy is the one with World Without End. How come not the four-pack with Them! and The Beast From 20,0000 Fathoms? They're about the same price.

[–] escalera-2 9 years ago

In fact, it arrived in the mail today. It is a used disc from an auction site that I procured for a song (no other bids). The other titles will have to wait.

Thanks for your interest, HOB. I'll let you know.

Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors.