’Shanghai knights’ selling like hot cakes

Butt and Bhatti to take on Titanic
by FAHAD BAIG

The idea of dubbing scenes of English movies into Punjabi or Urdu is not a new one but implementing it for a whole film was never attempted before. Jackie Chan's movie 'Shanghai knights' dubbed into hilarious Punjabi is selling like hot cakes. Now its creators plan to dub hit movies 'Titanic', 'Rush hour 2' and 'Evil dead'.
M Ateeq Shah wrote the script for dubbing the film. He also did the voice-over for the character of Butt. Sajjad Ali did the voice-over for Bhatti while Samina did it for character of Sughran. M Ali Azizi dubbed the film into Punjabi.
Ateeq has acted in a number of stage plays. As a writer he has written plays 'Baadsha da Ghulam', 'Begum Dish Antenna' and 'Long Nak Da' for theatre. He began writing comedy scripts when he did some skits for schools and stage shows. While talking to The Nation Plus on Friday Ateeq said besides the English movies they plan to dub one of Sultan Rahi's movies into Pushto. "We have been asked to write some comedy scripts for dubbing by a television channel. Our first project has clicked and now we will dub some other English movies. We will however do the marketing ourselves," he said.
Ateeq said that he and Azizi sold the dubbed film for Rs 150,000 to a CD company. According to rough estimates of a distributor the film may have done more than Rs 3 million business. The dubbed Punjabi version is a huge hit in big cities as well as small towns. Ateeq said the idea of dubbing a complete movie was very challenging. "It took us four months to dub this film. We had to create our own humorous story. We ensured that the film could be viewed by the whole family. There is no element of vulgarity in the dialogues.
"We had to watch every scene many times to come up with funny words that matched the movement of actors' lips. We carefully studied the face expressions of the actors and then proceeded with the voice-over job," Ateeq said.