criterionforum.org

Interestingly, the 2nd English dub (the one that is on the HKL and Columbia DVDs, and Eureka's BD) appears to have been done in England in the mid 80s, same time as Project A - I think Burk Kwouk is in both dubs.

Quite why Drunken Master needed a new dub so soon after the original is a mystery. In the 70s it wasn't uncommon for American distrubutors to reject Japanese/HK produced English dubs and make their own - see DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and THE BIG BOSS for just two of many examples - so maybe someone felt the first dub wasn't up to snuff.

Here are samples of the two dubs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVXES7FGU8g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVXES7FGU8g

Orlac wrote: Sat Dec 24, 2016 1:15 pm A Bey Logan commentary would be great!

This aged well...

Eureka wanted to include both dubs, and I’d even started work on SDH subs for the older dub, but they couldn’t find out who owned it and they had a Sony-mandated release date deadline, so it was reluctantly dropped.

(I see I wrote a more detailed answer to this years ago - scroll up a few posts!)

88 ran into a similar issue with SNAKE IN THE EAGLE'S SHADOW - there are two English versions of that, one with the score of cues from John Barry, John Williams, Jean Michel-Jarre etc, the other done for the US theatrical release with a different electronic score. They were only able to get the former, I think as they were dealing with Sony/Destination rather than Seasonal. The German Blu-ray has both English soundtracks, and the older HKL DVD has the US soundtrack for the English option.

Speaking of music, turns out the main training music in Drunken Master is from THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE!