Who is Irina Nistor? (real person) -- & What does she have in common with J.R. Ewing?
5 Things You Only Know If You Grew Up in a Communist Regime (Romania)
http://www.cracked.com/article_21045_5-things-you-only-know-if-you-grew-up-in-communist-regime.html
Pictured here: Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Lon Cheney, John Wayne ...
#4. One Random Woman Was Responsible for Almost All of Our Entertainment
Ceausescu banned all non-Texan soap opera TV shows, as well as other movies, video games, music, and really anything else that resembled fun if you squinted your eyes and looked at it funny. Most of us couldn't afford a VCR, although it's not like Romanian TV had much we wanted to record anyway. There are only so many times you can watch a man chase a goat in grainy black and white before you switch back to Dallas reruns. Luckily, us Romanians had thousands of illegal films to choose from, thanks almost entirely to one woman.
In 1986, Irina Nistor, then an official translator for state-run TV, was tapped by underground pirates to translate Hollywood films that other people had smuggled into the country. But she didn't translate scripts and then hand them over to a varied cast of skilled voice actors -- what was this, Rollywood? Who had that kind of time or money? Certainly not Irina, so she just dubbed herself over every single English-speaking voice in every single movie. She was quite literally the voice of Romanian media. By the time communism fell and sitting down to enjoy The Breakfast Club wasn't punishable by death, she had translated and dubbed over 3,000 movies, all by her lonesome.
And she did much of this work blindly. She had never seen the banned movies before and was obviously far too busy to sit down and watch thousands and thousands of hours of film before also recording their thousands and thousands of hours of voice-overs. There wasn't a lot of room for pacing, or informed nuance, or intricate impressions for each character -- there was just a middle-aged Romanian woman speaking in her own voice, in her own cadence, filling in for every single role in every single film that came our way. She was Bruce Lee. She was Chuck Norris. She was everything: All of our heroes, our villains, our sultry seductresses, and our Sylvester Stallones were Irina Nistor.
Yes, even our Tony Montanas.
#5. It Was Dallas' J.R. Ewing Who First Introduced Us to Freedom
That was the theory, anyway. In reality, we watched Dallas and fell in love with everything it showed us. Instead of recoiling in disgust over proof of American greed, we marveled at all the cool stuff Americans had -- even the peripheral characters that were supposedly "poor" or "exploited." And the mere idea that people could come from nothing and actually become rich? That blew our minds completely. Most of us didn't even consider wealth a thing that was possible before a misguided dictator came in and went "See? There are downsides to being magnificently rich!" After several seasons of witnessing the good life, we all collectively asked ourselves, "Why not us, too?" A few flying logical leaps later, we had ourselves a bloody and violent uprising.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ewing remained so popular that they used him to hawk Russian oil. In 1999.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_21045_5-things-you-only-know-if-you-grew-up-in-communist-regime.html#ixzz3Plp567mS
