Föreign länguaje

I’ve been watching some of the highest rated episodes of the original Mission: Impossible television series. I was watching part 2 of “The Bunker.” This episode is set in an unspecified foreign country, where a rocket scientist is being held hostage.

Everyone in this foreign, presumably non-English speaking, country speaks English with an eastern European accent to show that they are not in the United States. It’s much easier than teaching actors to speak a foreign language and sub-titling everything.

What language are they supposed to be speaking? I didn’t pick it up on this ignition button...

But a few minutes later, when they showed this, I noticed that the signs were not exactly convincing...

I thought, “Wait... did ‘Master control’ just become ‘Master kontröl’?”

And as the episode progressed, I spotted more “foreign” signage that looked a lot like misspelled English with surplus diacritics.

By the time we were near the end of the show, I was laughing out loud at this:

There’s more umlauts in this episode than in a heavy metal festival! (Though, come to think of it, “Füel Mix Dänjer” wouldn’t be a half bad name for a heavy metal band...)