I like the show......i do. But please if you're gonna do a show with German speaking characters, hire proper German actors.
The serious tone of the entire episode was gone when they started speaking German. It almost was a comedy after this.
I don't speak German, so maybe someone who does can answer this. Would the way he spoke German be obvious that he was an American?
shareWyatt, Flynn and Garcia?
Yeah, they would have been found out with the first sentence spoken.
That said the actors playing Germans seemed to be actual Germans which was a welcome surprise considering what some other network shows try to pass as native speakers.
As paranoid as the Nazis were about spies I would have thought their German would have been a give away but I am no expert on German. Sometimes actors can pull of a good foreign accent. I couldn't tell who pulled it off better, Wyatt or Fleming. And yes that was good if they were real Germans instead of obvious extras like in some productions.
shareThe only one I thought was an actual German was the landlord and Von Braun. The rest (like the Nazi who captures them) had a foreign accent when they spoke German.
Or else they grew up in the foothills of Piz Palü of course. :)
Well, I don't think that you would automatically recognize them as Americans, but you could not NOT hear the accent ;)
I'm a native german speaker and so maybe I could help with this:
The best german was spoken by Wernher von Braun, there was no discernible accent - well, he's a german actor, mainly working in Germany, so no surprise there ;)
I looked up the barkeeper, because his german was very good - it wasn't so much of an accent, more like a native speaker who isn't used to speak German any more. And actually he was played by a guy whose name is Manfred Maretzki. This name sounds sooo typically German that I would think he is a German living in Canada for a while.
and now from best to worst (imho)
- The guy playing Albert Speer
- Wyatt (congrats to him saying "Wir wollen keine Schwierigkeiten")
- all other roles
- people on the set trying to speak German
- other non native german speakers
- Ian Fleming
;)
how many German actors are there in hollywood?
are there many unknown type of German actors that would have lept at the chance to have 7 lines in an episode of Timeless?
I would prefer that they have germans playing Germans but considering this show is probably filmed in LA or Vancouver we may only ever get a few Germans (or a few French actors if they're doing an episode on Louis XII)
I speak German. Yeah, their accents were not great. But if you want bad German accents, like, crazy bad accents, watch Legends of Tomorrow s2e1. I cringed the whole way through.
Other than that, I liked this episode a lot.
TV can't even get southern US accents right, so I guess it's inevitable that they would mess up German accents.
I read an article on the movie CASABLANCA. They had a big advantage in casting: all the German characters were played by war refugees from Germany.
With regard to Casablanca, it was ironic that Conrad Veidt, who fled Nazi Germany became best known for playing the Nazi's Major Heinrich Strasser.
One thing I notice with accents in general, is that it's possible to do a passably convincing accent when speaking in a normal tone of voice. But when people raise their voices and yell, their true accents come through.
___________________________________
Never say never...
If you have to stop the show every minute to go look something up in a two language dictionary, nobody's going to want to watch it. Sure, it's not as 'realistic'. But to assume that the whole watching audience understands German, so that they can follow the story, is simply asinine. We run into this problem often in video entertainment. It's fiction. It's a story. To fill it with people speaking foreign languages will make it less enjoyable for a lot of people, because we will have no idea of what the actors are saying. That will cut deeply into the ratings, and the show will be cancelled because no one but people who understand the foreign languages will want to watch it.
TV & movies aren't reality. They're entertainment. A show. Sit back and enjoy it for christ's sake and stop being a friggin' rivit counter.
They should get a real Time Machine also.
The dialog doesn't sound like sentences Germans would utter. It sounded like American sentences literally translated online.
share