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What the Hell Is That Accent?: Difference between revisions
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== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' has a few in the original English dub. Most notably, Molly/Naru's inexplicable Boston/New York hybrid. '''In the middle of Japan.''' Note that ''her mother'' has no trace of this accent at all.
** This is a not-uncommon [[Cultural Translation]] of an Osakan accent, which Naru possessed in the original Japanese.
** Amy/Ami has something that sounds like [[Mid-Atlantic Accent|Mid-Atlantic]] meets generic Eastern European meets generic British.
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* [[Angelina Jolie]] as Olympias in [[Oliver Stone]]'s ''[[Film/Alexander|Alexander]]''. The intent was for her to have a vaguely foreign accent in order to accentuate her exotic "barbarian" nature. Historically, she came from Epirus, which is right near modern-day southern Albania, making this rather well-researched in terms of transferring accents.
* Poor [[Christian Bale]] in ''[[Newsies]]'' actually does a pretty decent New York accent. Only, New York has a lot of accents. Bale doesn't so much not pick one as pick all of them. Most of the other actors don't pick any of them at all.
* ''[[Star Wars]]'': Darth Vader. As Anakin Skywalker he sounds either Midwestern American (childhood) or upper-crust New England (adolescence). Once in the black armor, he sounds like a roboticized [[Scary Black Man]] (courtesy of [[James Earl Jones]]) speaking in a [[Mid-Atlantic
** Princess Leia in ''[[A New Hope]]''. [[Carrie Fisher]] later admitted she had been trying to do a British RP accent but [[Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping|but couldn't keep it up properly]] and it ended up drifting into Mid-Atlantic territory. She gave up on it starting with ''[[The Empire Strikes Back]]''.
* Ernest Stavro Blofeld when he was played by Donald Pleasance in ''[[You Only Live Twice]]''.
* [[Nicolas Cage]] in ''[[Vampire's Kiss]]'' appears to affecting [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfcJUl39iiA something between California surfer accent and that of an English gentleman] (when it's not [[Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping|slipping]]). What it ''actually'' is meant to be is hotly contested. Cage explained that the accent is supposed to be a nonsensical affectation that Loew uses to seem cultured and to impress others.
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* Russell Crowe gives us a strange blend of Welsh, Irish and a bit of Scottish in the 2010 ''[[Robin Hood (2010 film)]]''. He's been known to stop interviews when asked about it.
* Kate Beckinsale and her apparently Transylvanian accent in ''[[Van Helsing]]''. Strangely we hear some American pronunciations in there when Beckinsale herself is British.
* Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' adopts a weird sort of
* ''[[Belizaire The Cajun]]'' (a 1986 low-budget film starring Armand Assante) has this problem for purely historical reasons. Most of the characters are Cajuns (Louisianans of French-Canadian descent) in 1850s Louisiana, but their accents evoke an unlikely mishmash of ethnicities from all over Europe and the Americas (one of the characters sounds almost Hispanic/Latino at one point, while Belizaire himself edges close to what sounds like a Scottish accent in one scene). This discrepancy can be attributed to two things: one, most North Americans have never heard an authentic Cajun accent and/or have a stereotyped idea of what it sounds like; and two, the Cajuns really ''were'' a multi-ethnic and even multi-racial people, despite primarily speaking French.
* Peter MacNicol as Janosz Poha in ''[[Ghostbusters|Ghostbusters II]]'' provides the page quote. He's supposedly Hungarian, but his accent lurches all over Eastern Europe like a drunk in a Yugo. Since his name doesn't have any real country of origin, it's just a nonspecific wacky accent, which MacNicol developed by hanging out at the Romanian consulate in New York.
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** Delenn might count too, but that's technically the actress' own Croatian accent.
** The Centauri and Minbari in particular seem to have a selection of accents. Turhan Bey used his native Austrian accent when portraying the Centauri Emperor, lending some credence to the quasi-Eastern European accent affected by Jurasik as Londo. Theodore Bikel used his native Yiddish accent when playing a Minbari, Reiner Schone as Dukhat used his native German accent, and John Vickery affected a pronounced upper class British purr as Neroon.
*** There's also the Centauri maid from the framing scenes of "In the Beginning," who has a French accent. She's a major character in the [[Expanded Universe|Centauri Prime trilogy]], where her accent is described as "Northern."<ref>Evidence that, as [[Doctor Who|The Doctor]] once claimed, lots of planets have a North.</ref>
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'':
** In "Nightmare of Eden", the character Tryst has an utterly incredible accent, which the actor developed deliberately on the grounds that people on other planets in the future won't have the same accents as people on Earth in the present. It might have worked better if he hadn't been the only person in the story doing it. (And Tom Baker didn't keep visibly cracking up whenever Tryst spoke.)
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