>>Unfortunately, most Americans' early experiences with subtitling (I'm talking late 60's - mid 70's) were Hong Kong Action or "Artsy" European. Given the quality of film that most of these were on, subtitles were VERY difficult to read, so Americans tended to stay away from them in droves. This lead the movie making world to decide that Americans didn't like subtitles and so we had voice-dubbing (hate-shiver).
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>I'd guess (and risk being right for the wrong reasons) that it was intentionally done wrong - done bad, on a wrong example, just to convince everybody that they won't like it, so to have an excuse to give it up.
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>Had this tactics succeeded in our country, it would mean we'd never hear how Bogart really sounds, for instance.
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>>Plus, I think some of the emotional input from the actors gets lost on over-dubbing.
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>I've seen a few minutes (and heard almost half an hour) of some movie dubbed in Hungarian. I couldn't believe the characters onscreen were in a life-or-death-or-do-something situation. The voices sounded like reading the news from a phonebook, with reading studio echo.
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>Or... watching an Italian movie, I sincerely doubt that any dubbing actors can be equally loud, talking all at the same time, and yet not sound like they'll kill each other any minute now. The art of acting is so much more than just moving and having your text spoken... it's how you speak it. Any film can be thoroughly ruined by dubbing. But then, who cares about the integrity of the movies? They get stuffed with ads andedited for content
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>Too bad you can't get the stimmung from the jokes about this, but... John Wayne comes to a saloon, lays his rifle over his left elbow, slams his right fist on the bar and says "Ein Schnapps, bitte" (or in Slovenian, "prosim eno ljutico").
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>>Now, as for the 'why only UK', I can't answer that - except maybe the Brits sell the re-broadcast rights to their shows a lot cheaper than anyone else? Well, that and the fact that most Americans don't want to work that hard for their mindless entertainment
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>I bet these are coming free or near that, but that's not considered propaganda as it would be if it were coming from anywhere else.

I got to spend a week in the Netherlands in '81 and since I spoke/read German, I understood/read enough Dutch to get by. There were several American movies with Dutch subtitles that they watched - it was kind of interesting to hear the English and read the Dutch and translate in my head, a sort of double feature, if you will.