My own self

I think I was ten. Possibly eleven. The globalisation and centralisation and all that jazz that we people on the fringes of civilisation (i.e. "people who doesn't live in, or within an hour's drive from, cities") blame all our problems on hadn't gotten particularly far yet, and thus we still had a video rental shop in my hometown. (Technically we still do - there's one shelf of DVDs at the Narvesen and three at the local gas station - but I'm talking a proper one, with an entire shop filled with nothing but videos for rent) On a whim, I think, and probably because I loved the book, I had my dad check out the first VHS with episodes of an animated series simply marked as "The Jungle Book". It was Norwegian-dubbed - except for the opening credits, which were in English, and the title-text on screen, which was French. As I grew older and wiser and realised the animation-style was Japanese (but not so old we had The Mighty Internet to answer All Questions You Might Have About Anything) I remember this utter salad of languages and cultures peeking through confusing me a little.

Anyway, I obviously liked it. Why else would I be writing this post? And so, some nagging was applied, and my dad rented me the next installment next week. And so it went. It quickly turned into a contract of sorts - if I was good one week, I'd get to rent the next installment next week. I was usually good, seeing as I didn't have a backbone back then either, so I liked this arrangement.

All good things must come to an end. I don't recall if it was the shop running out of VHS'es or if they simply didn't translate more of them to Norwegian - or even if the shop went bankrupt already back then - but somewhere about halfway through the show, I ran out of videos to rent one way or another. Since then, I've been looking for them.

A couple of years later, I found one for sale somewhere. The second VHS-tape, annoyingly with three of the episodes I'd liked the least on it. I bought it, of course, it was better than nothing, and for that decision I will forever be grateful, because in hindsight, the main plot on that tape is probably among the best the show ever had. It didn't have Shere Khan, though, so twelve-year-old-me didn't particularly care for it...

It would take many years before I found the next one - yes, literally the next one, it was tape number three. I believe I might have been fifteen at the time. The shop, of course, also had tape number two, but no other ones. Gritting my teeth at the combined luck and misfortune, I bought it, only barely wrestling myself to not buy their copy of the second tape just to have a backup for my own - and joy! It was an awesome collection of three episodes among which two were among the favourites I could remember from when I was younger.

This was all I would have for almost a decade, despite looking for these tapes wherever I went. True, I did whilst still in my early teens stumble over some German-dubbed episodes I hadn't even seen before on some channel - possibly Nicelodeon - that my grandparents got on their satelite dish. But seeing as I didn't speak German, it only served to tease me further. Two years after high school, however, I was nearing twenty years of age and had just moved to Bergen some months before. A video rental right next to where I lived was finally paid a long-postponed visit - and lo! It had Jungle Book-VHS'es. Three of them.

Tapes 2, 3 and 4.

I mean, seriously, at this point I figured someone was having a costly laugh at my expense. At this rate, I'd find them all by my 254th birthday, at that point having re-found that blasted tape number two seventy-three-thousand times. Asking the guy behind the counter if they had any more and getting an expected no, I rented tape number four, and went home to watch it. It was nice and all, but hardly Awesome. Not comparable in quality to the two I already had, and that wasn't just my by then incredibly nostalgic committment to those two tapes talking - these were simply weaker episodes. Still, I was just so happy to have found ANYTHING. I considered re-renting it to bring it home to my parents where there'd be two VHS-players so I could copy it - anything to not lose the thing again. But then the video rental apparently finally realised that nobody had sold VHSes for four or five years, and put their stock of such out for sale.

Miracles do still occur, you see. They're slimy and hard to spot, but they do occur.


Joy upon joy, I now had three tapes. Of the, what, fifteen or so I remembered. I never stopped looking for them online, though, but couldn't find anything in either Norwegian or English. Finally, I found someone who'd put the very first two episodes with English dubs out on YouTube. But that was sadly it.

But then! Out of nowhere! Some silly shop in Italy, of all places, decided to start selling them with Italian AND English dubs on. I had to pay through the nose, but this last December, for my own 24th birthday, I got the entire show.

It's in English, and as all Norwegians my age with a pseudo-geeky bone in their bodies know, English dubbing is on the whole horribly, horribly inferior to Norwegian. They never dare to actually act their lines, these English voice actors, and the few times they do it's so overdone it just sounds out of place. So, sadly, it was not as enjoyable as the voices I grew up with would have been by far, rewatching this.

But that's one laugh I'll let the trickster gods of fate have, and happily. I got to rewatch the entire show this December. All the way to the end that I never saw before. Corny voice work can't take that away from me. (Even Fox can't take that away from me, and gods know they've probably tried.)

I seriously never thought I'd get to finish this show. While the Dream of finding them with Norwegian voice work will probably still go unrealised, this is as good a silver medal as it gets.

So, what did I think? It was alright. Some plotlines and characters are really deep, and the show does a surprisingly good job (just like I remembered!) at staying true to Kipling's original work whilst adding a score of characters and nuances, and removing some of the really dark stuff. The save-the-environment-vibe of the late eighties is impossible to escape in this show, though, and this is very annoying. Luckily, you don't notice it much in the episodes without humans in them, and those are by far the best ones anyway. The score, the drawings and the characters are the ones I grew up with, and that probably coloured my imagination more than any other single thing I've ever experienced. (That includes Disney and Tolkien. I know. Freaky.) The ending is thoroughly unsatisfactory, by the way, but that's just like Kipling's own ending. I get the whole journey-to-manhood-thing. But who can hear the story of Mowgli and not wish he'd stay in the jungle at the end? Bah.

I have it now. The only feeling of joyous nostalgic closure that's ever come remotely close to this was when Wesley chose the lie and Angel decided he kinda wanted to slay the dragon. And I only had to wait for that one for five years. This took almost fifteen.

Thank you, Italy.

I have it now.