Sunday, May 25, 2008

Turkey's Answer to Brad Pitt


I’ve been spending a lot of time at my parents’ place lately where I’ve been exposed to ungodly amounts of Arabic satellite tv. Besides learning that virtually every single American hit show has been purchased by Arabic stations and repackaged for an Arab audience giving us Arabic versions of American Idol (called “Superstar”), The Biggest Loser, Project Runway (sponsored by the Lebanese crown jewel Elie Saab), Friends, and yes, even The View, there’s a new soap opera that’s been causing quite the sensation in the Arab world right now, and this one isn’t of American origins…

It should be clarified that soap operas in the Arab world run more along the Mexican ‘telenovela’ model, with a run of about 3 to 4 months, than the American version which goes on forever and probably into the next world.

My mother introduced this soap to me like so: “It’s worse than those American soap operas, with this woman having a child from that man, and being separated from this one, and that one having a dubious past… it’s terrible. But the hero is quite an eyeful.”

See for yourselves…

PS: I can’t wait for the Arabic version of “The Bachelor”.

2 comments:

Marilyn Brant said...

Oh, my--he IS a hottie :). Do you happen to know the name of this soap and/or what the rough translation would be? I'm curious to know what they'd title it.

Nadine said...

In Arabic they call it "Noor" which is the heroine's name. I guess that's theArabic translation of the original "Gumus" which is easily Youtube-able. The funniest thing about watching this soap is that it was a Syrian network that did the translating, so you have a really heavy Syrian dialect coming out of these actors' mouths. It's really funny if your ear is tuned to different Arabic accents...