善 - Shan4 - Good, Friendly
In The Legend of the Sacred Stone, the evil ghostly demon bad guys are called, if you translate literallly, 非善類 - Fei1 Shan4 Lei4 - Not Good Kind. When we first saw the movie I thought it was so cool that the bad guys were called “The Not Good Kind” that I repeated it over and over to Jenny and it became one of our catch phrases. DSL isn’t working? Not good kind! Your sisters are having a fight? Not good kind! Sorry, I have to stay late at work tonight. Hey! Not good kind!
About The Not Good Kind in English and Chinese.
From the Taiwanese version of the movie, I learned that “The Not Good Kind” are “Not To Be Messed With”. The movie opens with one set of puppets who are reallly good at kung fu teaming up to beat this one other puppet who is really really really good at kung fu. Then the “Not Good Kind” show up and completely tear ALL the puppets apart, with puppet blood shooting everywhere (yes, puppets bleed). They speak in these altered, raspy, scary voices and can burrow underground and fly and assume human form and are generally really menacing. When they show up, puppets die. Even the strange name “Not Good Kind” sort of added to their evil mystique.
Today we finally watched the subtitled version of the movie that I picked up recently, and guess what: “The Not Good Kind” are actually the COMIC RELIEF! As scary as they are during the fight scenes, all their lines, spoken in those scary demonic voices, are jokes and puns and other gags. They are actually clumsy and stupid. Everything else in the movie is dead serious except for The Not Good Kind. And they aren’t even The Not Good Kind: the subtitles call them the much less menacing “THE UNFRIENDLY”.
This changes EVERYTHING! Not good kind!
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