Apple, just like Netflix and Prime Video, doesn’t just make original content for its streaming platform in English – in fact, it has a burgeoning collection of shows and movies in other languages too.
Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese have been a strong suits, with various intriguing options, but a new show looks like it’s demonstrating a certain lack of faith in German – the first trailer for Where’s Wanda? has raised eyebrows in many viewers.
The trailer makes it clear that this show is going for an interesting mixture of genres, with a fairly standard crime show setup that sees the titular character, Wanda, a free-thinking girl, go missing in a small town.
The tone is very offbeat, though, and the show obviously intends to satirise crime shows to some degree, as her family set about to surveil the town to figure out who might have abducted Wanda… or worse. That’s all par for the course, but one big detail has been the talk of the comments section underneath the video.
It becomes incredibly obvious early on in the trailer that Apple has chosen to dub the show into English, and we wouldn’t describe that dubbing as particularly, um, expert – it’s fairly cheesy. In a time when films and shows that aren’t in English are proving hugely popular, it’s a weird move in our view.
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As one YouTube commenter said: “The English dubbing is absolutely atrocious FFS!!” Another was more reasonable: “Let’s hope Apple releases with the original language with subs and not just the dubbed version.”
We’re feeling optimistic that their hope will be fulfilled, too, since Apple’s description of the show calls it “German-language” – despite the dubbed trailer. This makes it most likely that some marketing brains decided an English trailer would draw more viewers and potential subscribers in than the German version would have.
That might feel a little cynical, but we don’t have to wait too long to find out how Where’s Wanda? actually fares. The show arrives on 2 October with its first two episodes on Apple TV+, after which there will be a weekly drop – a structure that all the best streaming services seem to have adopted at this point.
