I found out about the off-Broadway then on-Broadway musical Avenue Q through very old forum-dwelling MP3-sharing sheanigans. I shared it with my French friends and we fondly remembered all songs by heart after a while (fun fact: this short-lived group fever for Avenue Q somehow led to a friend starting a conversation with his future American wife).
The show has that song called Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist, which has probably aged very poorly with the broadcast illusion of a post-racist society getting vigorously shattered to pieces recently, and one bit in the song goes like this:
FORMER CHILD ACTOR GARY COLEMAN:
You were telling a black joke!
PRINCETON THE PUPPET PROTAGONIST:
Well, sure, Gary, but lots of people tell black jokes…
GARY COLEMAN:
I don’t.
PRINCETON:
Well, of course you don’t — you’re black!
But I bet you tell Polack jokes, right?
GARY COLEMAN:
Well, sure I do. Those stupid Polacks!
About ten years later, I lived in London for a while and Avenue Q happened to be performed in the The West End district, and some friends that I had shared my fondness of Avenue Q with happened to be visiting, and we all went to see the show. We were surprised to find out they had localized a few Jokes, which was a bit weird in the context of a story built on New York gentrification and Sesame Street references and Gary Coleman being a character in the story. The one scene above went like this.
GARY COLEMAN:
You were telling a black joke!
PRINCETON:
Well, sure, Gary, but lots of people tell black jokes…
GARY COLEMAN:
I don’t.
PRINCETON:
Well, of course you don’t — you’re black!
But I bet you tell French jokes, right?
GARY COLEMAN:
Well, sure I do. Those stupid French!
And I was a bit sad. Well! That had nothing to do with video games, sorry!
I like that the Xenoblade series has, almost “canonically” now despite the loosely shared universes of each game, a British-English voice casting due meta-contextual reasons surrounding the first game. This also led to the incidental casting of a young actress who became much more famous in the UK just a year after the release of Xenoblade Chronicles in Europe. It’s pretty cool that she accepted to reprise her role in last year’s remake, especially because there is a brand new story centered on her character, despite having seemingly completely dropped video game voice acting from her regular jobs.