Česko hledá SuperStar is the Czech version of Idol series. It is broadcast on Czech TV Nova, first series in spring 2004, the second a year later, the third series in autumn 2006. The show was very popular in 2004, with an audience of more than 3.5 million people; other media attention was also huge. The further series' rating was rather lower. In 2008, the program was superseded by the X Factor. However, Czech broadcaster TV Nova and broadcaster of Slovak version of Idol TV Markíza confirmed that both versions will be joined into one federal. The latest version is called Česko Slovenská Superstar, which started in September 2009.
Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest. Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.
