In praise of Polish voiceover artists

This is actually a short post and I’m writing it because of a thing that happened at school before the Christmas break. In the last week before Chrtistmas all the classes get lazy and they either want “free lessons” (which means doing nothing) or they want to watch a movie. I’m the kind of a teacher who never agrees to such requests, but in the case of one class I was really tried and settled on screening Karate Kid: Legends (2025). I played the movie with the original audio track and Polish subtitles.

To be honest, the students were quite calm and engrossed in the movie, but suddenly I head a chatter in the back and when I approached one of the students, I discovered she was actually reading the subtitles out loud! It was quite funny, but she was doing a good job for her peers. And it reminded me about the craft of professional Polish voiceover artists.

Poland often prides itself on inventing the art of one man (or a woman) reading an entire film (with the original audio playing slightly muted in the background), but I think it’s not true. It’s an invention that probably arrived here from the Soviet Union because it was much cheaper to churn out and distribute localised versions of movies on VHS rather than doing a professional multi-cast dubbing from scratch.

I am a kid from the 1990s who grew up before the advent of the internet, so TV and VHS were my ways of discovering movies. There were no subtitles and no DVDs, only Polish voiceover, so I would like to thank here voiceover artists for their work on the movies I grew up with, in particular:

• Lucjan Szołajski for reading Spies Like Us, T2: Judgement Day, Cops and Robbersons, and Apollo 13,
• Tomasz Knapik for Die Hard 3: With a Vengeance,
• Marek Gajewski for Planet of the Apes and the TMNT movies,
• Władysław Frączak for Batman, Batman Forever, the Free Willy trilogy, and Sneakers,
• Leszek Sznytter for Batman Returns,
• Andrzej Matul for The Wedding Banquet,
• Maciej Gudowski for the Police Academy movies,
• Tomasz Magier for the Indiana Jones trilogy,
• Zdzisław Szczotkowski for Back to the Future Part III,
• Jacek Brzostyński for Ghostbusters I and II,
• Janusz Kozioł for the Wings TV series and The Olsen Gang movies.

Unfortunately, only five people from the list above are still with us today, but the voices of all of them live on forever.

There was even a documentary made by Polish Television about these artists, but unfortunately it’s without English subtitles. Still, I include it here.

Image attribution: Feature image taken from Pixabay.