You probably had the situation when you mention to someone your favourite movie, song, book and they just say: never heard of it. But it’s a very famous song/movie/book, you say, everybody knows about it. You try by citing directly from the source to remind the person But the other person just won’t give in – never heard means just that. The cultural icon of yours has never caught on in that person’s field of interest… or in that person’s country in general.
When i was a kid, i couldn’t understand that some of the popular media considered to be cult items in Serbia/Yugoslavia were in fact popular almost solely in Serbia/Yugoslavia. Most prominent example of such artifacts is definitely the comic book Alan Ford. At first i thought that the comic is in fact made in Croatia and that somehow explained the fact that nobody outside Yugoslavia has heard of it, despite the fact that every kid in Belgrade could quote almost every recurring joke from the comic. Then later i found out that the comic is actually Italian and that it does in fact have a cult status in Italy – thank god, at least we are not alone in this, i thought.
But it only made matters more complicated in my head. Italy is a well-branded nation, i thought, they have pizza, mafia, canzone, calzone, and what not! Surely Alan Ford must be one of the world famous brands then? But alas, no British, American, or any other European, Indian or Russian fellow i talked to has ever heard of Bob Rock, Number One, or any of the characters by Italian cartoonist Magnus Bunker. So where’s the catch then?
One of the reasons Alan Ford was popular in ex-Yu, and still is in today’s Serbia/Croatia/Montenegro/Macedonia/Slovenia/Bosnia is the great catchy Croatian translation by Nenad Brixy – it was so great and natural sounding that this was the reason I actually thought at first that the comic was made by some Croatian comic book artist. Most of the catchphrases are even today used as a sort of running gags, as the slogans on the Grunf’s (goofy scientist guy whose inventions never work) shirt:
Drink less oil and more milk!
He who flies is worthy, he who is worthy flies, he does not fly is not worthy.
If you intend to win, you must not lose.
It’s better to retreat tactically than die heroically.
etc, etc.
Even the authors of the original admitted that the translation worked even better than the original text and Nenad Brixy was officially acknowledged as one of the authors!
But the linguistic appeal is just one part of the answer to why AF is so popular in these areas. Aleksandar Zograf, a well known comic artist from Serbia offers here another aspect:
One of the factors could be its ironic approach, as both the authorities and the representatives of the law were presented as corrupt and far from perfect. Or maybe it was connected with fairly good distribution of the books, in a market which was at least not THAT overwhelmed by comic books like some other places.
I too think that the readers found something compelling in the fact that the detective group TNT always had to fight the bad guys, but at the same time the corrupt system to solve some mystery (and get the money) – and the communist system at the time Alan Ford became popular was really corrupt in so many ways.
This is also one of the reasons behind the great popularity of British sitcom Only Fools and Horses – Yugoslavia was one of the rare countries besides Great Britain where this comedy achieved cult status – but I’ll write more about Del Boy and Rodney in one of the following posts.
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It’s funny, but I always expected things that were cultish in the UK to be incomprehensible outside- the opposite of the way you thought when you were a kid. I find the popularity of Only Fools.. in former Yugoslavia to be a bit perplexing. It’s full of slang and sarf London jokes. So much of the humour comes from the accent and the stereotypes it both lampoons and celebrates at the same time. It is also about time as well as place- they’re all unemployed and flogging rubbish because its set in Thatchers Britain of the 1980’s.
Ian: “they’re all unemployed and flogging rubbish”
And there you have it – Serbia of the 1990’s in a nutshell.
Do you know where I could buy any of those 1990′s comics??
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