Hong Kong 97 Music Loop

[Aiko Bartels]

Thecombination of action and colour, a story laced with revenge and violence and set in exotic ancient China was popular with audiences around the world, especially, I was told, in South America and the Middle East.

The core members of the group had been dubbing films for several years, and were uncannily adept at matching the English words on the script to the Chinese lip movements on the screen. Many of the dubbers were, and still are, working for television or radio stations in Hongkong and moonlighting in various seedy dubbing studios to make a bit of extra cash. And also to have a few laughs. Film dubbing is tiring, but given the right bunch of people it can be a lot of fun.

Every minute or so, in the middle of scenes or at strategic points in longer scenes, there would be a loud beep, indicating the end of a loop. I drew a line across the page and gave the loop a number. When it was finished, I took a tape of the soundtrack home and set to work writing out the English dialogue in long-hand, a job which took several hours, but got easier as I went along.

The key to dubbing is lip-flaps, as they are known in the trade. The English script must match as closely as possible the lip movements of the actors on the screen. This causes more problems with Chinese movies than I imagine it would with a European language film being dubbed into English, because of the huge differences between the two languages. Not only are words, and therefore lip movements different, but also sentence structure and sentence length can vary enormously. For the script writer, the challenge was to take a Chinese phrase, and match it with an English phrase of the same number of syllables and also (hopefully) with a similar meaning.

As most of the movies were set in Imperial China, the dialogue also sometimes included long strings of formalities for which there is no satisfactory English translation. It was always a great relief when actors spoke from off-screen or with their backs turned to the camera, because it meant their lines could be written in proper English, instead of being bludgeoned to fit Chinese sentence structure.

In some cases where the Chinese was just too obscure for any foreign audience to understand, it was possible to change the script altogether, sometimes for whole scenes. As long as the English dialogue did not contradict anything happening on the screen, the script writer could conceivably invent a whole new story.

The chart was also important in order to cut down on the amount of time any one dubber had to spend cooped up in the claustrophobic and icy-cold studio. The idea was to dub all the loops requiring the presence of the minor dubbers first, so that they could leave early, or even miss the second session altogether. Ted was especially keen on this as it meant he could pay them less.

A couple of hours rolled by, and then there was a brief stop for dinner, take-away Chinese food brought in from a nearby restaurant. After the meal, dubbing became very difficult because of stomach rumbling. Your stomach is making noises all the time, but you are rarely aware of it because of all the other noises around you. But in a sound-proofed dubbing studio, a trickle of gastric juices gurgling its way through the alimentary canal can ruin a loop.

One kung fu epic called Killer Clans, we did in one all-night marathon session in a large studio owned by Shaw Brothers, the biggest movie-making organisation in the Far East. It was well after dawn before we finished, and the experience left me bleary-eyed for days.

Finally after a dozen or so movies, Ron returned from holiday. There was some talk of a second dubbing group being started with me as script-writer, but Ron was clearly jealous of his source of unofficial income, and it never came to anything.

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Hong Kong 97[a] is an unlicensed shoot 'em up video game developed and published by HappySoft, a doujin game developer, for the Super Famicom. It was released in Japan in 1995, being sold as floppy disks. Designed by the Japanese game journalist Kowloon Kurosawa, who said the game is a satire of the video game industry, Hong Kong 97 was made in seven days with the help of his friend.

The game takes place in China in 1997, during the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom. Facing an increased crime rate due to immigration from Mainland China, the Hong Kong government hires Chin, a super-powerful relative of Bruce Lee, to kill the entire population of China. At the same time, the deceased Tong Shau Ping is resurrected by a secret project conducted by the Chinese government as an "ultimate weapon".[b] After defeating Tong Shau Ping, the game is repeated indefinitely until Chin dies. Hong Kong 97 sold around 30 copies due to its underground bootleg release, and it has since gained a cult following for its notoriously poor quality. In retrospect, it is considered by critics and journalists to be among the worst games ever made.

The player controls Chin, who must shoot and evade the Chinese populace moving downwards from the top of the screen. When shot, the enemies explode in mushroom clouds, leaving behind a flashing corpse and items for instant death or temporary invincibility. After a while, cars start appearing from the sides, moving horizontally across the screen as obstacles. After thirty enemies have been defeated by the player, the final boss, the "ultimate weapon" Tong Shau Ping[b] appears. He is depicted as a large, severed, floating head that will attempt to land on top of the player. Once he is defeated, the game repeats itself. The game shows static photos as the background, which alternate between pictures of Maoist propaganda, Guilin, the logo for Asia Television, the logo for Chinese Coca-Cola, or Mao Zedong in monochrome.

Sporadically, a syringe appears as a power-up, which grants Chin temporary invincibility. Rotating green disks will also appear that can instantly kill Chin. The player has no health points: if Chin is hit by anything other than the syringe, the game is immediately over, unless he is under invincibility. The game over screen contains the superimposed words "Chin IS DEAD!!" in English and grammatically incorrect Chinese "陳死亡" (pinyin: Chn sǐ wng)[c] over a still graphic image of a corpse dated to 1992.[4] The game then goes to the credits (listing the Embassy of Canada as a cooperation partner) and back to the title screen.

Upon turning on the game, the first three measures of the chorus of an upbeat rock-style rendition of "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" can be heard, which loops indefinitely throughout the game. The game has no other music or sound effects. The game can be played in English, Japanese or traditional Chinese.

Hong Kong 97 begins with a short cutscene which places the game around the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. People from Mainland China (described in the English script as "fuckin' ugly reds" and in the Japanese script as "dirty people spitting sputum"[5]) started immigrating to Hong Kong, causing a large increase in the crime rate. As a countermeasure, the Hong Kong government (represented in-game by Governor Chris Patten) hires Chin (portrayed by Jackie Chan), an unspecified relative of Bruce Lee, to "wipe out" all 1.2 billion of the "red communists" in China. Meanwhile, a secret project in Mainland China has succeeded in resurrecting Tong Shau Ping as the "ultimate weapon".

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