Digenis.org

Walk into any DVD shop around Moscow and you’re bound to come across the work of Dmitry Puchkov. He’s neither an actor nor a director, but you’ll more than likely find credit given to him on the front of every film on which he’s worked, usually in the form of a red and black stamp with his picture.

Puchkov - better known to Russians as Goblin - has gained a reputation and fame for his unauthorized translations of popular Hollywood films like Snatch, The Matrix, Shrek, and the Lord of the Rings series. He’s been at it for about ten years, but it’s only in the last four years that his pseudonym has become so well known.

Goblin is especially loved by the young teenage crowd due to the fact that his translations don’t censor or soften profanity in the way that the official studio dubbings typically do. In fact, according to this 2003 Moscow Times article on Puchkov, one of the reasons he began translating films was because he didn’t like the censored versions of his favorite Hollywood movies.

However, vulgarity isn’t the only change found in Goblin translations. Puchkov has also taken liberty with characters and storyline to give his version a twist of parody. For example, here are a few changes that he makes to Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy:

-The titles of the films have become Bratva i Koltso (The Posse and the Ring), Dve Sorvanniye Bashni (Two Toppled Towers), and Vozvrascheniye Bomzha (Return of the Bum).

- Goblin renames Frodo Baggins as Fyodor Mikhailovich Sumkin (sumka means bag in Russian), Gandalf becomes Gandalf-Pendelf (Gandalf the kicker), and Gollum becomes Goly (naked), Boromir and Faramir are called Baralgin and Efferalgan (medicinal drugs), and Gimli becomes Givi and speaks with a Georgian accent.

-As the fellowship is escaping from the Mines of Moriah in the first film, Goblin adds the Tatu song Nas ne dogonyat (They’re not gonna catch us).

- In a scene where Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving, who was Agent Smith in the Matrix) is speaking with Arwen (played by Liv Tyler, daughter of Steven Tyler from Aerosmith), Arwen says, “You aren’t my father! You’re Agent Smith. My father is Aerosmith.”

- In the awesome scene where Gollum get schizophrenic and argues with himself while Frodo and Sam are sleeping nearby, the ‘bad’ Gollum takes on a Ukrainian accent and argues with the Russian ‘good’ Gollum claiming that the Ukranian Dynamo will most certainly beat the Russian Spartak football team.

Interestingly enough, even though the studios were originally pissed off at Puchkov for his unauthorized translations of their films, it seems that they’ve recently decided to use his popularity to their advantage.

First, the Russian TV company STV brought him on board to write and direct Anti-Bumer, a humorous version of their own film Bumer. Shortly after, REN TV hired him to create accurately obscene Russian translations of 31 South Park episodes.

Most recently, Puchkov has been in the news for his second collaboration with the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone: United Pictures International, the distributors of Parker’s Team America, hired Puchkov to translate the film for the big-screen in Russia.

As Puchkov himself admits, his name sells things. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that a local radio station has put the Goblin logo on their ad, even though Goblin has nothing to do with the station:

So, now that Puchkov has been snatched up by the studios to create legitimate translations of their films, will he stop altogether creating spoofs like the ones that built up his popularity? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, Puchkov announced that he will continue to make these hilarious translations under the project called Bozhya Iskra (The Divine Spark), a side project of his main company Polny P.

For the most part, the public loves him. Even Leonid Volodarsky, arguably the most famous translator of modern films into Russian, thinks well of Goblin. My guess is that we’ll see Puchkov doing a lot more official dubbings of films - perhaps he’ll even expand into some different genres.