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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