Andrew Dice Clay’s Notorious Bomb Became a Hit Overseas by Recasting Andrew Dice Clay
It was recently announced that controversial comedian/sad TikTok prankster Andrew Dice Clay has been cast in the upcoming heist movie The Pickup, also starring Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson. So kind of like Ocean’s 11, but instead of safe-crackers and explosives experts, it’s a team of guys whose special skill is telling homophobic jokes?
Dice’s acting career has been going pretty well of late, he’s had parts in shows like Vinyl and Pam & Tommy, as well as a supporting role in the Oscar-nominated musical A Star Is Born. Sadly, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga didn’t need a third voice on “Shallow.”
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But Andrew Dice Clay’s cinematic acting career got off to a pretty rocky start. His first big starring role in a major motion picture was playing a rock-and-roll private detective who acts just like Andrew Dice Clay in the 1990 noir spoof The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. The movie also starred Priscilla Presley, Gilbert Gottfried and, somewhat inexplicably, legendary lounge lizard Wayne Newton.
Helmed by Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane was an embarrassing flop at the time, barely making its budget back at the box office and taking an absolute pummeling from critics. Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two thumbs down, calling it an “utter waste of time.” The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote that “the person most likely to be entertained by The Adventures of Ford Fairlane need not be made aware of the film's existence. He’s already on the screen.”
But while most of us forgot that this movie ever existed and moved on with our lives, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane became a low-key phenomenon overseas, specifically in “post-communist Hungary” where it had a second life thanks to the actors that dubbed over the voices of Dice and his co-stars. The character of Ford, for instance, was voiced by Hungarian rock star "Feró" Nagy, the frontman of the band Beatrice.
As one Hungarian fan noted, Nagy’s dub was “extremely off,” which “made it all the more hilarious.” His loose interpretation of the material (nobody in Hungary cared about Andrew Dice Clay) led to the film becoming a cult hit, and some of the dubbed lines even “became ingrained in the slang of Hungarian urban youth culture in the ‘90s.”
It was similarly popular in Norway when it hit the home video market, and in Spain where Dice was again replaced by a popular musician, singer and comedian Pablo Carbonell, due to a “strike by dubbing actors.” Like in Hungary, it was the unique dub that was “appreciated by Spanish fans of the film.” Too bad no rock stars were available to record a profanity-laden dub that would have saved Vanilla Ice’s performance in Cool as Ice.
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