“Surrender” is not a word in Toni & Charlie’s vocabulary. They are in desperate need for a pet. For a dog, to be precise. Unfortunately, between their wish and the dog, there’s Dad – referred to as “Padrone” in episode 62.
Episode 63 explains what this is all about. Antonia and Carlotta, aka Toni & Charlie, “look after” the Padrone in his study. In the first panels, it remains unclear which direction the story takes,
Operation D.O.G. (2) comes in black and white and refers to the good old days of film noir, when Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney got people off the streets and into the cinemas. In addition, I avail myself of some clichés of racketeering. And who could be more suitable than the Mafia?
This is why Carlotta stumbles through the story with a rather poor grasp of the Italian language. The “buon giorno” greeting becomes “bong jojo” (I was looking for an onomatopoeic equivalent to “buon giorno”. I was tempted to to translate it into “Get back Jojo”, but resistd as I felt the rhythm of the words was unfitting).
The reply to Antonia’s remark “a beautiful study” is “pizza margherita”, a remark, which, when you think about it for a moment, could have come out of Otto’s mouth. You know, that chiseler from the film “A Fish Called Wanda”. I simply liked the idea of a small kid prentending to speak another language.
In the final panel, Charlie shoves the table lamp off the table, commenting this rude manoeuvre of hers with “awww, cappuccino”. You may have heard someone using the German word “kaputt” (meaning broken or defective). Here, again, Charlie pretends to speak Italian by making up words of her own. I think I have heard the use of the word “kaputt” in English a couple of times (maybe American English?) and so I left the balloon as it was. The word “kaputt” is pronounce as the first to sylables of “cappucino”, which is why it’s a good joke in German. Hopefully, it makes you sneer a little bit in English, too.
I like puns in general and I like using them in my stories. In episode 63, there are quite a few of them. Which is what gave me a bit of a headache when translating the episode. I tried to find corresponding puns in English. I hope I didn’t muff it.
Actually, the more stories I tell about Toni & Charlie, the more the two give me the creeps.
Okay, anyway, let’s have the epsiode.
