Inside the MOTHER 3 Translation

February 15th, 2008 | MOTHER 3, Uncommon Knowledge, Videos

Today’s video is cheesy and lame, but maybe that’s because I’m a young-ish gaijin know-nothing. But the video is also noteworthy because it’s related to MOTHER 3 and the MOTHER 3 translation. First, the video, which is of a song called “Wanted”. I believe it came out in 1977 or so, I don’t know.

Japanese 70s and 80s stuff is always so strange. We have our own 70s and 80s culture and stuff, but they have completely different bands, trends, famous stuff, etc. So it’s like having to re-learn decades all over sometimes.

Anyway, there’s a reference to this song in MOTHER 3. There’s a wanted poster you can read, and because the name of the song is “Wanted”, a little reference is included in the wanted poster text, and then it says something like, “It appears to be a rather old poster” or the like.

So I’ve been trying to think of what to replace it with, while making it still seem kind of a not-super-obvious reference. Right now I have the poster say, “WANTED! Where’s the beef?!” as a placeholder, but it’s so bad that I don’t care where the beef is anymore. Anyways, been especially looking into bands and musicians from the 60s and 70s that might fit the bill. Been reading up in more detail on Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Who, etc. blah blah blah. I still haven’t found anything I REALLY like, but right now I’m leaning toward a couple things from The Who. Something like My Generation? Maybe the wanted poster could say something like

– “WANTED!
  My Generation!”
– It appears to be an old concert poster put up by someone.
– But… who?

I dunno, this is one of those things in translation that’s always fun to try to toy around with, but you also gotta use discipline or else you wind up making things sound stupid and in this case, like it was poorly translated by over-eager fanboys who’re trying too hard to make the text funnier/wittier than it was originally 😉

Of course it’s funny that I say that, when I was the translator for FUNimation’s Shin-chan episodes on Adult Swim, heh.

Anyway, watch the video and bask in the cheesy Japanese 70s cheesiness!