South Indian Films Dubbed in Hindi

[Prem Rogue]

Every once in a while I'll see new DVDs of South Indian films dubbed into Hindi.  Today at the video store they had the dubbed version of the Telugu film Mass (Nagarjuna, Jyothika).  Do people up North actually watch these dubbed films or is it so cheap to dub them that the threshold of profitability is low?  Some of the dubbed DVDs I see have someone like Isha Koppikar or Priyanka Chopra in them, who are familiar faces to Hindi-speaking audiences.

[wannabe]

I think they only dub the ones that have some major hero in them, like Nag or Chiru.  The heroines in even the non-dubbed ones are mostly Hindi anyway, so I doubt that the decision to dub or not depends on who the heroine is.

[Prem Rogue]

Do people watch the dubbed movies though?  I can understand if it was a Mani Ratnam film or something, but are North Indians really watching Nag and Chiru's movies?

[tabula rasa]

they might be at B and C centres, ie rural places. I don't really know, but I have always seen a spate of such films come along in spurts.

[headless chicken]

I personally love it when South Indian films are dubbed into Hindi because South Indians have a long tradition of making mythological films based on stories from the various Puranas.  Mind you, these are the *only* South Indian films I watch but still....the Telugu and Kannada ones which have been dubbed into Hindi are beautifully done.  Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Tamil movies which tend to have poor acting, look more low-budget and C-movieish.

[mainhoonemily]

I bought a copy of the Chiranjeevi movie Indra from Amazon and it sat on my shelf for months until I watched it and found out it was dubbed in Hindi.  I wouldn't have minded except that the song lyrics were completely re-written into Hindi and so none of the picturizations made sense with the new lyrics!