Answerman

Are Old American TV Dubs Of Anime Lost Forever?

A few years ago we got Blu-ray re-releases of Card Captor Sakura from NISA, and Sailor Moon from Viz... But neither company managed to get the old dubs that aired on American television, which a lot of people remember fondly. Will we ever see these old dubs again, or are they just lost forever?

I don't know that they're lost forever, but they're certainly not going to resurface anytime soon.

A little background... It's hard to imagine today, but back in the 90s communication with Japan was anything but easy or cheap. Email wasn't common until the VERY late 90s (especially in Japanese companies), and forget about sending audio and video online. The only way to communicate was to call, send faxes (at very high international phone rates) or send something by international post. So, in the anime business, once a show got licensed to an American company, the Japanese licensor really couldn't do much to supervise the adaptation process.

Today, of course, is a much different story. Producers expect (and receive) a huge amount of control over the US packaging, dub scripts, casting, and everything else. But back in the 90s, the companies got away with just about anything. Usually things went fine, and sometimes permission was asked before anything too crazy was attempted. But quite often, the American company just went ahead and did things, and the producers of the show wouldn't find out about it until it was too late. A lot of shows were altered quite a bit during this period -- Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura among them -- but we can only guess as to what was authorized and what wasn't.

Another problem is that while Japanese copyright law and the entertainment system over there is supposed to let the original creators of a show sign off on creative decisions and otherwise maintain control over their creations, that often didn't happen back in the 90s. The publisher of the original work, acting as their agent, would just take care of things, and the creator wouldn't even be consulted. This was especially an issue with shoujo manga and female manga artists. Flash forward to today, and if those artists are now powerful and successful, then you can bet they're going to be a lot more controlling of their work... and probably are not willing to keep approving the existence of versions they never liked.

When a show gets licensed rescued, the licensor often doesn't even have the rights to the adapted version (especially if the company doing the adaptation before was a big company like DIC or Nelvana). A new company rescuing a show like that would have to track down the rights to the adapted show separately. But even if they did, the licensor would have to OK its use. If the licensor is embarrassed over what happened before, or the creator was frustrated that their show got heavily adapted, there is no way they'd OK a re-release of it.

Frankly, the only reason we're getting so many re-releases of 90s dubs is because a show is so old that often nobody in Japan cares anymore.

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Anime News Network founder Justin Sevakis wrote Answerman between July 2013 and August 2019, and had over 20 years of experience in the anime business at the time. These days, he's the owner of the video production company MediaOCD, where he produces many anime Blu-rays. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.