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. (Edit: I wonder if anybody has subtitled that.)

The Japanese dub of Columbo is one of Hirata's two dubbing gigs. 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. The dub was made for the "Wednesday Roadshow" timeslot on NTV and was aired on December 13th, 1972. I actually watched the film for research purposes (in its original French and Spanish, with English subtitles) and it was quite 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. I do wonder why he dubbed this film specifically. Given that it was his only other dubbing role outside of Columbo, I would hazard a guess that personal interest in the film was involved in some capacity.

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 the amount of his films that I've seen. It is worth mentioning that he would have had ample experience dubbing his own roles, since audio was often not recorded on-set in movies of this era and was dubbed in in post, but these are the only examples where he dubs somebody else.

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.