The Spreading Wasteland

In the golden days of the silver screen, the rest of the world had it pretty well figured out that the U.S. was cowboy-and-Indian country except for a patch of gang turf called Chicago, and that the populace was all Tom Mixes, Bogarts and Harlows. Now the world knows better: it realizes that the U.S. is, in fact, a vast Ponderosa peopled by dashing doctors and defense counsels and hard-nosed Combatants, all of whom love a dunderhead named Lucy. At a time when there are 1,400 times as many television sets (173 million) as movie houses on earth, the TV series has replaced the film on the Great Image Conveyor Belt, and the U.S. TV packagers for some years now have ruled the air waves far more firmly than Hollywood ever controlled the cinema.

Combat, for instance, is so popular in the Far East that when its star, Vic Morrow, visited Manila, several schools just surrendered and declared a holiday. Perry Mason is so well known in Italy that his name has become a synonym for lawyer; in certain circles in Portugal, you don't call a Cabinet minister a clunkhead but a "Mr. Ed." Dr. Kildare is top-rated in places as far afield as Poland and Southern Rhodesia. And Bonanza, which is seen in no fewer than 59 countries, tots up a weekly world audience of 350 million.

Demand & Supply. The reasons behind the extraordinary use of the U.S. shows are simple. The first is public demand. Even the Yugoslav government, not known for knuckling under to popular opinion in other spheres, canceled its scrubbing of what it calls Dennis, the Naughty Boy in the face of mounting protest. The second reason: the U.S. price is right, a small fraction of the cost of producing from scratch. Which is not to say that foreign syndication is a giveaway program. Estimated annual take on the part of U.S. packagers for foreign replay rights: $75 million; and many a show that was a disaster domestically, like The Reporter (killed by CBS last year after 13 episodes), is a winner worldwide.

Such idiosyncrasies of taste make the export business as tricky as it is lucrative. The Flintstones are No. 1 in Sweden and the favorite viewing of Rhodesia's Sir Roy Welensky, but they were ignominiously reduced to background characters in a fly-spray commercial in Italy. Perry Como hit a clinker on Germany's Infratest ratings, Andy Williams on Britain's TAM's. And even blockbuster Bonanza was clobbered by Rawhide in Korea. Another complication in foreign-syndication sales is that U.S. shows come in awkward lengths (a half-hour program has only 26 minutes of action) for nations banning commercials. Kenya, which doesn't ban them but just doesn't sell many, adapts by interspersing public-service announcements like: "There's a rustler's moon tonight--watch your cattle." Argentina, on the other hand, has no limitations. As a result, The Untouchables, a U.S. one-hour show, is stretched to an hour and a half, with the audience sitting through 38 minutes of commercials.

Milk in Kuwait. The language barrier, thanks to expert dubbing, is the most readily surmounted. Japan uses classic Kabuki actors to speak for Bonanza's Cartwrights, although their services often cost as much as the purchase price of the tape. Subtitles come much cheaper, but audiences in the richer nations like Germany won't abide them, viewers in the poorer ones can't read them. Not that a lot does not get lost in the translations. In the original version of a Zane Grey Theater episode, the villain burst into a saloon, hammered his fist on the bar and growled: "Gimme a redeye!" The French version: "Donnez-moi un Dubonnet."

Other times the mistranslations are on purpose. In Moslem Kuwait, government censors changed the villain's order to: "Give me a glass of milk." Kissing scenes are also deleted outright in Kuwait, limited to a wham-bam five seconds in Lebanon. At the same time, a Danish programmer complains that "American shows are too Victorian in their morals."

Praqmatic Swiss. There are indications that the U.S. TV exports are in for increasing challenge. The Portuguese network, which imports more than 75% of its fare from the U.S., is currently under fire from the semiofficial, daily Diario da Manha for "de-Portugalizing" the nation's youth. Ottawa requires a minimum 55% "Canadian content." Britain restricts the imports to a mere 14% of viewing time, and just this season blew the whistle on the commercial channels for bunching that percentage into the prime viewing hours--even so, five of London's top ten are still U.S. imports including the third place Addams Family. Charles de Gaulle's "francization" campaign has rolled back U.S. penetration to less than 10% of viewing time. But the Swiss, characteristically more pragmatic, just watch the profit sheet and keep on buying American. Explains Procurement Chief Georg Ambuehl: "A bad European show can be even worse than a bad U.S. program --which is saying something."

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