Barbarella Supplemental

This is a text supplement to the P.R.S.F. video that can be found here.

In my perpetual attempts to delegate all praise and accept all blame, the initial translation work on my French was done by Stephanie Smith, but the horrible pronunciation and the goofy subtitles are entirely my own doing. You may recall Stephanie Smith for her art Teddy uses in his video which can be found here. Also, if you want to get some fine jewelry, she makes that too which can be found here.

Fun fact about Jane Fonda in this film: she had to turn down starring in both Bonnie and Clyde AND Rosemary’s Baby to keep filming Barbarella, which was directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim. Also, apparently Sophia Loren turned down the role, so Vadim asked someone to play the lead before his wife.

Another point, while that is Marcel Marceau may have had a speaking role in this film, that wasn’t his voice you were hearing. Marcel did the French language track of Professor Ping and he was dubbed over in English, so you’d have to watch it in French to hear the famous mime speaking full sentences and not just the “No” from Silent Movie.

For those of you who may be wondering, from what I read, Duran Duran did in fact get their name from the character in this movie. It’s not just a strange coincidence that it sounds so similar. So, for any of you out there wondering where the name of Duran Duran came from, you are now fully enlightened on the subject.

Actually, on the subject of music, there seems to be more songs about, in one way or another, Barbarella than almost any other character sans Santa Claus I’ve ever seen. Is there something about this movie that just lends itself to music?

A few years ago this film was adapted into a stage musical, proving once again that any damn thing can and will eventually become a musical.