Recently, following my viewing of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I felt the need to go ahead and review all of the Hunger Games films on my Youtube. I’ve reviewed all four films previously, on this site, prior to my vision loss, so really what I have to offer is a look at the audio description experience. All four films were available on Netflix until the end of May, which is exactly when I binged this series.

Of the four films, only Catching Fire (Deluxe, written by Roland Burner, and Narrated by Tansy Alexander) was balanced correctly. The first film (which i did not get the info for), Mockingjay part 1 (Deluxe, narrated by Tansy Alexander), and Mockingjay part 2 (Deluxe, narrated by Tansy Alexander), are all improperly balanced. Either this is how the track sounds, or Netflix missed the opportunity to correctly host the mix of this film in a way that a visually impaired audience would have been able to experience it.

Between the other three films, it was either inaudible, or far above the sound of the film, or sometimes both. As was the case with Mockingjay part 1, there were some of those action sequences that obliterated the audio description, while otherwise the audio description could be heard. Deluxe is usually the lighthouse in the port when it comes to finding consistently solid audio description, so I have to believe that Netflix was the fault here.

So how do we fix this? Our usual customer complaint routes create tickets that seemingly take forever to maybe get fixed. I’m a big proponent of getting the artists involved in caring about their project, the totality of it, and how audio description is a part of that. A director should want the best representation of their product, as should the cast, but so should the audio description company. As much as it sucks to say this, this is still a representation of the work of Deluxe, and while I understand that this fault lies with Netflix, I can’t say that everyone will make that correlation. I advocate for audio description, so I can understand when it’s a question of audio transfer, and that’s what I feel like happened here. For the average Netflix viewer, they hear the problems, and then they hear Deluxe, and worse yet, they hear Tansy Alexander. It certainly isn’t her fault, as she’s just a voice talent hired to describe, but when a regular person is looking for someone to blame, they might think that somehow Deluxe has created the inferior work. Worse yet, is that the suggestion could come from Netflix or any other service that in fact it is the way it was given to them. The blame game. The shifting around is often easier than accepting that some wires got crossed, and regardless of how we got here, someone will fix it.

This isn’t really a referendum on any one person, but rather just a general musing. I think about the comments Kevin Smith made when he stumbled onto audio description for the first time, totally unaware this thing existed, and it helped to shape his work. On the other side of this, the Station 19 cast gave a nice shoutout at the end in the audio description for one of their final episodes, thanking any audience members who had been following that show for seven seasons with audio description. Jake Gyllenhaal is openly doing interviews where he refers to himself as legally blind, and how that relates to his work. Well, it’s no surprise then that his hosting of Saturday Night Live was the first, and only episode of that show to ever have audio description. Are those two things connected? Did Jake advocate, or was it a happy accident? because if he is advocating, his request should have extended that audio description track to next day viewing on Peacock, where it doesn’t have the audio description he may have requested.

If the advocacy comes from the artists, likely the change will come faster than it will from an army of consumers. There is an active petition to get Gilmore Girls with audio description on Netflix, with over 10K signatures. However, if the series stars and creators got involved, i do believe the problem would be solved.

We can call these services and complain until the cows come home. Personally, I’m trying to get Disney to put the audio description they paid for on The First Omen onto their streaming service. But, it’s really easy to ignore me, from a corporate standpoint, and a lot less if I were able to get the stars and director to start a social media campaign to make it happen.

I know Deluxe has created thousands of audio description tracks, and it would be maddening to track the use of all of them, but perhaps in the long run it could be advantageous, as no one wants a poor quality version of their work floating around.