#ThrowbackThursdays: Remembering The Sunday Chinese Theater In The Philippines

Since it's Thursday so I decided to write a #ThursdayThrowback post on RPN-9's Chinese theater. The show would air Judge Bao which lasted for 236 episodes. Granted, it's a historical series so just expect it. What really made me go "HUH?!" was the fact that the show was once aired in CHINESE with no decent translations whatsoever. I wonder, did RPN-9 ever reconsider that they are catering to FILIPINO-Chinese and not to people from China? Just how many Filipino-Chinese ever learned to speak Mandarin back then, especially in the 90s when "American superiority mentality" was really the trend back then?

And of course, we can't do without Madame Fu Pei Mei who died last 2004. While there were the Mandarin airings but later, there was the rather lifeless Tagalog dub as seen on TV. I thought about how I once thought she was just a Filipino-Chinese until I realized the Tagalog doesn't match her lips. Regardless, I found all those dishes really mouth-watering. Her loss is a huge loss to the cooking world. Fortunately, her legacy lives on in her 30 cookbooks. Some of them are in English so non-Chinese speakers can go ahead, buy them, and enjoy them!

Later on, ABC-5 would later pick the Chinese Sunday Theater and dub it into what I'd call "horrendous Tagalog". It reminds me of why I even stopped watching foreign shows dubbed on the Filipino channels -- most of them have very bad dubbing! I soon remembered just how I really didn't care too much about this one considering I once had that American dream -- a dream that I tend to flip flop about more than once.

Years later, I thought about how the Sunday Chinese theater did manage to somewhat "distort" my mind. It made me almost think that Meteor Garden was just once a segment of the Sunday Chinese theater until I saw how new it was and how the F4 (who I once thought were Japanese due to them copying Anime hair -- until I saw their MV "Can't Lose You") were in it. It was because ABS-CBN aired Meteor Garden with the Chinese subs while it was dubbed in Tagalog. I got into it and enjoyed it until I managed to watch Meteor Garden with some subtitles.

What I find even weird was that while I didn't really get interested to watch Judge Bao even with the lousy Tagalog dub -- I ended up watching Chinese Ghost Story (2003) and Return of Condor Heroes (2006 version) all the while I thought of the Sunday Chinese Theater. Yes, the Chinese Sunday Theater is gone as it ended becoming the Chinese weekday afternoon theater -- long before we had the Korean-Chinese whatever afternoon theater as a result.