Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Aren't New Dubs Made For Old-School Shows?
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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In some cases, we have the opposite problem of an old show getting two or more Tagalog dubs. Sort of understandable when the dubs are from different companies, but the same company making two dubs for the same show baffles me.
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peno
Posts: 349 |
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Two dubs are still an OK situation here. Sometimes, we get even more than two dubs. Close Encounters of the Third Kind has 5 dubs, The Magnificent Seven has 4 dubs, The original Star Wars trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI) has three dubs and that's starting to be standard in Czech dubs. It seems that these days it's cheaper to make new dub than to even try to acquire the original dub. On the other hand, we have a situation like the Lost TV series, where the only dub allowed to be aired is the original AXN simuldub-like dub, which has many problems, while much better TV Nova dub or attempts to create new dub are denied by the studio. Really sad situation.
The problem you would face, however, is that those fansubbers are very often hardcore sub fans, who couldn't care less if the anime they were working on is dubbed. I can even go as far as to say that they hate dubs and wouldn't want to do anything with them. I don't say all of them are like that, but I encountered a lot of these attitudes among the fansub community to say it's the majority opinion there.
Actually, if you want to lower the expenses on dubs as much as possible, this is the last thing you want to do. Otherwise, you would be bound to pay the actors every time the dub is put on online service, released on DVD/BD or aired on TV (unlikely, but not unimaginable, if you create hype big enough to lure a TV network). In the end, you may pay more on such a dub than with fixed salaries. Actually, royalties were common practice for dubs here until early 1990s and it's the expenses related to royalties not only for actors, but also the crew, that makes these old dubs so expensive, that unless it's real gem, no one is willing to pay the royalties required to acquire these old dubs. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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That's the thing--those are hardcore fans, and in a normal fandom, the hardcore fans make up a minority, with the more casual fans outnumbering them (often vastly). When you sell only to the hardcore fans, you can't really tell just how big the more casual markets are. Street Fighter was thought to have fallen into a niche until Street Fighter IV ignited the curiosity of the non-hardcore, for instance. (Of course, Capcom fumbled up Street Fighter V and now it's back to being a niche series.) If you get opinions only from the hardcore fans, you're not going to weave the widest net, and your perception of things will be incredibly distorted. Of course, there's been a history of a lack of interest from casual anime fans of older series. I remember there being a vendor booth, at last year's Anime Expo, run by who I assume to be hardcore fansubbing fans, or something. They were selling pro-sub, anti-dub shirts, signs, and such. The other vendors around them had a lot of people, while they didn't have any at any point I passed by, and I didn't see a single attendee wearing one of their shirts the whole four days I was there. This suggests there are multitudes of fans who don't agree with them but don't necessarily make their presence known online, or at least on the places you visit. |
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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SFV'S lukewarm reception and sales has more to do with focusing entirely on tournament play by sacrificing single player content. Plenty of hardcore SF fans dont care about EVO tournaments, such as myself.
I have no idea why a fansub fan would be at AnimeExpo given its focus on dub voice actors and American licensor panels. I doubt they would care what Viz, Dark Horse, and Funimation are releasing. Chances are they were a casual fan who just preferred subs, which is a pretty bizarre combination and not surprising they were ignored. Regardless, as it's been said, dubs for older titles are a bit of conflict of interests. Dubs are mainly popular with the mainstream casual fans, ones who would be turned off by older looking series in 4:3 format. Very few older shows can even get a sub only budget release. Most of them are only available fansubbed by the hardcore fans who want to watch/share them, and most of them don't care for dubs. LOTGH is praised by many people who've seen it, but most people wont watch it due to its age. Sentai licensed it in 2015, but I have no idea what happened to it after that. I suppose they dropped it? The hardcore fans may be a minority in some cases, but a minority is all who will care about certain shows, so listening to them is your best bet if you want to cater to the small fanbase an old show has. To me personally, a dub wouldn't matter in this case. -Stuart Smith |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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To begin with, you need to consider why Abridged Series YouTubers and fansubbers do what they do for free. I'll spare you the lecture about why they do, but it is not a desire to work for free as long as anime is somehow involved. As a bottom line, if a company is looking to profit by selling the results of their work, they won't provide it for free. Not to mention the difference in focus; being skilled at writing and voicing gags for a short video edited from a full episode is very different from scripting and properly voice acting a real dub of a full episode. Ditto the translation side of things. And doing that for a single episode is one thing, good luck talking anyone into doing any of that for an entire long-running series such as Urusei Yatsura or Legend of Galactic Heroes for free.
So if it's a mutually profitable relationship, does that mean you are paying the Abridged Series YouTubers and fansubbers after all? Or if you're not paying them for doing the work, how is it supposed to be profitable for them? And besides that, Kickstarter is not a source of "extra" funds; it's a glorified pre-order system. People pay their money in advance of the product actually being made so that producers with a great idea but no existing capital can afford to make the product. If so few people are willing to buy dubs of obscure old shows to begin with, you're not going to get many supporting it on Kickstarter either.
Realistically, there's only so far "creative business models" can carry something, and if it was at all likely to be anywhere near profitable to put dubs of old shows on streaming services, one of the established companies would have at least tried it by now. And no, "don't pay people" is not a workable (or ethical) solution to that, however creative you think it is.
Look, all credit to Abridged Series YouTubers for putting some amusing content out there, and I'm sure there are exceptions, but their voice acting is not up to scratch for a proper dub of something. I sure wouldn't consider it worth paying for a streaming service to get a show with voice acting at that level. You are not going to get "good enough" by promising small trickles of money in the future rather than even a modest fixed wage for voice acting.
Look, it might be possible to produce a dub with costs as minimal as you're thinking of, but it's going to be terrible, to the point of actively turning away people who otherwise might have been interested. |
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