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Originally Posted by Bilbo1967
I remember when this first came out with the alternative US spelling that somebody told me that, as well as this, the film, "The Madness of King George III" was renamed just, "The Madness of King George" for the American market. The reasoning being it was assumed that Americans would say to themselves that they hadn't seen "The Madness of King George I" or "II" so wouldn't bother to watch it.
I've always assumed that this was apocryphal. Is it? |
Yes I read about that. On a similar note, when "Licence to Kill" was changed to "Licence Revoked" because Americans wouldn't know what 'revoked' meant.
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Two of the key individuals working on "Licence Revoked" – Timothy Dalton and director John Glen – identify MGM as the driver for the title change. Glen writes in his autobiography, For My Eyes Only, that the marketing people protested that American audiences wouldn't know what revoked meant. Dalton supports this, telling Bill Desowitz in James Bond Unmasked that MGM thought that no one would understand it.
The emphasis switched from MGM's marketing people to US test audiences. It was their apparent incomprehension at the word 'revoked' that convinced the producers (or MGM) to go for the title change. Still with the onus on audiences, Pfeiffer and Worrall offer another reason – that 'it was discovered that US audiences associated the term with losing a driving licence'.
More recently, though, the MGM marketing people have returned to the spotlight. In a caption for a Licence Revoked concept poster reproduced in his poster book, Alastair Dougall describes a 'fear' that audiences wouldn't know what revoked meant, and Mark O'Connell writes in his brilliant book, Catching Bullets (2012) about a 'belief' that revoked was unfamiliar with US audiences.
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