Columbo post.

Columbo post?

Columbo post.

As many people reading this blog are probably aware, the American detective series Columbo became a smash hit in Japan very soon after its original broadcast. The series began airing on NHK in 1972, and was broadcast regularly until 1981 and then sporadically throughout the 1980s and later, remaining popular today. Columbo was voiced by Asao Koike until his death in 1985, at which time the role was taken over by Taro Ishida.

So I've got other things to say, but first let's talk about Columbo. The episode we're looking at here is season 7, episode 4, "How to Dial a Murder", broadcast in Japan as 攻撃命令 [Attack Order]. This is one of the rare cases in which everything I'm talking about is readily accessible: for Americans, the episode is streaming on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and [opens my trench coat to offer you an archive.org link] here if you hate streaming services. In Japan, if you have a Hulu account, you can access the episode there. Unfortunately, Hulu Japan is region-locked, and the only other place to watch it is as a 22-minute clip on NicoNico, which I guess is better than nothing. Here you go. I watched the original episode and then the clip of the dub, which was really fun. Hirata dubs the killer, and it reminded me a little of his guest role in episode 20 of Operation: Mystery.

The Japanese dub of Columbo is one of Hirata's two voice acting roles. The other was a 1968 French/Italian/Mexican production called Le Rapace (known in English as Birds of Prey, released in Japan as ベラクルスの男 [Man of Vera Cruz]). Hirata dubs the lead role, originally played by Lino Ventura. I would love to make a separate post about Le Rapace, but I don't think there's enough info about it to constitute its own post. The dub was made for a broadcast of the film on Nippon Television sometime in November 1974, and I doubt it ever received a home media release. There are some VHS tapes for sale or rental online, but they're all subbed, not dubbed. I actually watched the film for research purposes (in the original French and Spanish, with English subtitles) and it was surprisingly good. Ventura's character is a French hitman who arrives in Mexico to carry out a political assassination, and as he doesn't speak Spanish, he has no lines for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's not the kind of thing I typically watch, but it was interesting.

It's surprising to me that these two things were Hirata's only voice acting roles. In my opinion he had a very recognizable, distinctive voice and manner of speaking, but I admit some bias there due to having seen nearly 100 of his films at this point. 

I'm creating a new tag for voice acting/dubbing in the hopes that I might turn up that dub of Le Rapace (or anything else) in the future.