It might sound weird that I should write about the magic of the live experience. I write dubbing scripts after all. My texts are never performed before a paying audience (the voice actors and everyone in the studio when they are recorded GET paid to listen to them), and when the finished product is screened, I’m usually long gone. But no one should forget that there is an audience out there, the people that go to the movies or watch shows on TV or their selected streamer.

Nothing can replace live.

The final notes of the Ring Cycle are sublime in any case, but what can be better than hearing them after having sat through all those hours, over several days, of Wagner opera, with a bunch of people who might be strangers, but who have been through the same experience with you?

After several days of watching Shakespeare’s “Wars of the Roses” series in an unheated tram depot in Frankfurt in the 1980s, huddled in blankets and around thermoses with hot tea and coffee (and other things), the audience had truly become a band of brothers (and sisters).

And who can resist the happiness of people forming a conga line to an impromptu “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” after over three hours with Bruce Springsteen? The feeling of togetherness on the platform waiting for the subway home after a soccer game, won or lost?

Never in a million years will people feel the same way for a performance generated solely by a computer.

And it works even without live people on a stage. I’ll never forget how the giggles of my 12-year-old godson sounded, floating above a chorus of adult laughter in a sold-out theater, when we were watching the first “Thor” together. This kid’s delight, coming as much from the lines that I wrote, as from the fact that we were watching an evening screening and he was the only kid, was infectious to everyone around us.

This is who we write dubbing scripts for.