Forum - View topicThoughts on nostalgic English dubs?
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Sheleigha
 Posts: 1673 |
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But what makes a "bad dub" bad?
-Censoring/Editing? -Extreme script changes? -Bad voices? -Cheesy opening song added? To me, this what would make any dub bad, a combination of these. You can't really call something a "bad dub" because a few voice actors aren't too great, as far as I'm concerned. In many of the nostalgic dubs, most of these are present. And yet, some stay true to a portion of the script and do have a majority of good voices, but have huge script changes. As for the cheesy song thing? Well, I can remember liking say the Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Digimon themes back then. Now? Can't really care less for them. Trust me, if these dubs just came out this year, people would probably make fun of these songs, knowing the originals :p |
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SpacemanHardy
Posts: 2509 |
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I've been noticing a lot of "nostalgic defensiveness" towards one dub in particular, and that is G Gundam. I've been going through it recently, and while I'm really enjoying the show itself, the dub is, quite frankly, horrid.
Yet whenever I state my dislike for the dub, a million defenders instantly pop up and proclaim their love for it. What I want to know is not so much "Why?" but rather, "How?" How can someone listen to that and honestly think it's good in any sense of the word? The acting is awful, the script is shoddy, it somehow manages to be both hammy and overacted yet wooden and lifeless at the same time.... It's just all around a really, REALLY bad dub. But more than any other dubbed show I've come across, people really seem to LOVE this one in particular. I don't get it. The only reason I can possibly think of is because of nostalgic reasons. Unlike a lot of the show's fans, I didn't grow up watching it on Toonami and am going through it for the first time, having already been spoiled by the really good dubs of recent years. I gotta ask, to all those defenders of the G Gundam dub: How long has it been since you last watched it? I can almost guarantee that if you try watching it again these days, your opinion of it might not be as positive. Can someone here try to clue me in on why they like it so much, other than nostalgia? I just don't get it. 
Another one that a lot of people really seem to love is the YuYu Hakusho dub, but in that case, I can kinda see why. For the four main characters, their casting is amazing. Justin Cook, Chris Sabat, Chuck Huber, and John Burgmeier all do an amazing job. It's when you get into the secondary characters, however, that the acting really falls apart. Still, I think in all honesty it's better than the sub. At least Kurama doesn't sound like a girl. 
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t-sam
 Posts: 6 |
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Samurai Pizza Cats has to be the all time greatest. Bandai was too cheap to pay for a translation, so they just wrote a script based on the animation that was a parody. Discotek is putting it out on DVD in a few months, too!
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SpacemanHardy
Posts: 2509 |
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@t-sam
I don't think that's right. From what I heard, they were never actually provided or even offered a translation, so they pretty much HAD to make up the script as they went. |
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victor viper
 Posts: 630 Location: The deep south |
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I'd agree. It seems likely that many (most?) westerners' first exposure to anime has probably been a dub. Thus, when that first really enjoyable dubbed anime is found, it is very natural to have good feelings about it, independent of the actual quality of the dub. I might call it a simple stimulus response; the dub is a reminder of an enjoyable experience, and hence an enjoyable experience by proxy. I certainly have my nostalgia dubs-the Tenchi dubs, for example. Tenchi was one of the first shows that I really enjoyed, and I watched it dubbed. Today, I'm able to acknowledge intellectually that the dub is inferior in just about every way (scripting and performance), but when I revisit the show, I'll still watch the dub all the same. |
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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It's kind of funny you berate people for liking G Gundam's dub then turn around and say YYH's was good. That's the thing about preferences I suppose.
Personally I thought Kuwabara's voice was horrid. He doesn't even sound human. And the script changes were way too drastic, altering entire scenes at times, and making Yusuke more or less come off like a huge jerk with his bad one liners and attitude. He was far more subtle and subdued in the original. Saban's Digimon dub also had this problem with Yamato and Ruki. It seems a lot of dubbers think "being cool" means "being a conceited jerk". It's especially bad in Ruki's case when she's supposed to be distant and lonerish, which kind of doesn't make sense when she's spouting off Buffy-esque one liners on how awesome she in the dub. |
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Sheleigha
Posts: 1673 |
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I think they did the same thing on Pokemon where having a rival means that the rival has to sound super snobby and stuck up :/ You know, that english snob voice that some characters get. Yamato I don't think was as bad as Ruki's. Speaking of Yamato's voice in general though, I did like his dub voice, and always found his original voice to be just WAAAAAAY too deep for an 11 year olds :/ |
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t-sam
Posts: 6 |
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@SpacemanHardy
Yeah, that's actually more like it, now that I think about it. I heard about that probably 10 years ago, my alzheimer's is getting to me. |
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Sleverin
 Posts: 153 |
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@SpacemanHardy
I've been meaning to watch this show for a long time because it's always sounded so amazingly ridiculous...this, gentlemen, THIS sounds like brilliance at its finest. To think if only DBZ had been done in the same manner, perhaps I could watch it as an adult form time to time in some sort of "ironic" fashion but as it stands...mane was DBZ just embarrassing now that I think about it...not just the voice acting though, the 50 episodes of Goku training every season followed by his marginal amount of episodes of actually doing anything. God am I glad that I'm an adult and can now watch anime at my whim and choice, because man were the old days of anime as a kid just not that great in retrospect. Sure I got to watch anime, but was it really all that great? Eh, not really, but damn did I love me some Digimon, at least it had a freakin' plost that went somewhere other than Pokemons endless quest of malarkey and the monsters spoke English and had their own personalities. Plus I remember some of the series being rather dark, at least when I was a kid, and made it feel a bit more serious and interesting. Then there was Monster Rancher as well and...eh, it wasn't bad as a kid but nothing really has the fondest memories as Digimon. |
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MorwenLaicoriel
 Posts: 1617 Location: Colorado |
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I'm totally going to just prove that I'm a nostalgic idiot with this post but I have to step in here.
I agree on the Digimon dub. Yes, it's not perfect, but considering what they had to do--repackage a children's anime and make it work for children on a broadcast station? They did a great job overall. A lot of the corny jokes were stupid, yeah--but it's a kid's show, so corny jokes were forgivable (and it's not like the original has highbrow humor either). They kept in nearly all of the major plot points, even dealing with a child character's parent's death in Digimon Tamers. The voices for the most part make sense for the characters and are well-acted. There's a lot of parts that make me cringe (the continuity errors early on, like when they had Mimi talking about a baby brother when she didn't have one, and adding in ship hints where there weren't originally any like they did with Kari and TK), but overall, particularly compared to a lot of other dubs marketed to children at the time, they stuck pretty closely to the spirit of the original. Heck, even the name changes were a lot better than a lot of other series, since they kept the kid's Japanese surnames for the most part (what the heck happened with Tai and Kari's, though?) and the new first names were treated as "nicknames". (Hikari -> Kari, Jyou -> Joe--it worked IMO).
Okay, I have to admit that I'm slightly offended by this. Part of it is, yes, nostalgia--Superbook was my first anime and I grew up obsessed with it as a really young kid. And I'm not going to tell you the dub was good (it reeeeeally wasn't, it was awful) or even that the show was particularly good (it was a low-budget, silly kid's show--one that also decided to rewrite biblical stories to make them more child friendly, like having Joseph being framed for stealing from his master instead of being accused of raping his master's wife (they really should've just skipped that part, honestly)). But the reason I wouldn't recommend the show to people is because it's a low-budget, silly kid's show and because the dub was pretty bad, NOT because it has a "biblical nature." There's plenty of shows that borrow biblical imagery, mythology, etc and are still plenty watchable--NGE, Chrono Crusade, Trigun, etc--and there's also plenty of shows dealing with Japanese mythology and spirituality that it would be a shame to skip out on just because you don't personally believe in the religion--My Neighbor Totoro, Natsume's Book of Friends, Mushi-shi, etc. It's been a while since I've seen the show, but while (despite still being a Christian) I've rejected a lot of particularly preachy Christian media now that I'm an adult and I'm wary of super saccharine "Christian" media with little artistic depth...I still wouldn't suggest people avoid Superbook just because it deals with the Bible. I would tell people to avoid it because, well, despite my nostalgia for it, it's just not very good. Taking out the bits relating to the Bible and replacing them with...IDK, Greek and Roman myths or historical events, for example, wouldn't make the show any better, a lot of what makes it mediocre doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter.
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DomonX2
 Posts: 232 Location: Neo Toronto, Neo Canada |
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Kuwabara was voiced by Chris Sabat. Nuff said and not in a good way. |
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Sleverin
Posts: 153 |
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@MorwenLaicoriel
For Digimon: I don't really know anything at all about the original stuff in regards to names, jokes, etc. but like I said earlier, it was definitely the fondest of my memories as a kid for these types of shows. It went somewhere, it seemed like the characters changed, and I remember that the situation seemed quite real, I mean they had to find food, suitable shelter and everything else while in a foreign environment that was extremely hostile. It seemed like the stakes were actually important because the characters possibly could suffer some serious tragedies. For Superbook: I've never seen it myself, but judging from the context of HK's post I think he meant that trying to sub a translation of a re write of ancient texts into Japanese and then subbed back into English would really only be watched by hardcore fans as adults since the whole exercise seems so redundant. Of course I could just be putting words into his mouth, and if I am, my bad, not trying to force meaning that may not originally be there. |
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EireformContinent
 Posts: 977 Location: Łódź/Poland (The Promised Land) |
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Wasn't Superbook originally dubbed in English, with Japanese dub released much later?
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Divineking
 Posts: 1293 |
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Personally I only equate a bad dub with bad voice acting but that's just me. I generally consider edits to be an entirely different thing to be angry about in a dub and I can acknowledge some hackjob dubs had decent voice acting. An example would be the Shaman King dub which even today I still find to be surprisingly watchable on it's own(occasional ridiculous accents non-withstanding). Of course that was actually relatively faithful for a 4Kids dub and the anime wasn't that great an adaption of the manga either so I'm not sure how to count that. Of course acting can't save an entire product as a whole but I do tend to get annoyed when people label the VA's in said dubs as talentless(i.e. most of the New York VA's) when most of the time if you put them in a uncut dub their usually decent(of course there are bad VA's out there but that's another story). Sadly voice direction is one of those things that's always been an issue for dubs targeted towards kids.
As far as the nostalgia thing goes I do hold it up to some extent like with the Pokemon dub or something like that but generally I've been able to see the flaws in some of the old dubs from my childhood. Especially the DBZ dub. Watching it now with Kai's dub to compare it to makes it almost cringeworthy at times. Never thought I'd hear myself saying that... |
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DomonX2
Posts: 232 Location: Neo Toronto, Neo Canada |
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@SpacemanHardy
Agreed on you 100% about the G Gundam dub. I hate it. I hate how most of G Gundam's popularity is from the US and since that's the case, the show is usually associated with the dub, which is not how it should be. I think the hate that most people have for this show is due to the dub. Fanboys also refuse to accept the fact the dub changed the meaning of this show. G Gundam is named after the titular Gundam, God Gundam(Episode 49 proves that G stands for God) and the dub changed it to Burning Gundam, which makes the makes the struggle between God Gundam and Devil(known as Dark Gundam in the dub) lost. The dub is also only available uncut, by footage, but still has all the censored dialogue. Even SEED's uncut dub is actually uncut, via dialogue. Can't agree with you on YYH though. That is one of those nostalgia dubs, which has nothing good about it, if you look objectively. It's only slightly better than DBZ's dub, which isn't saying a lot. The only reason people like the YYH dub is because 2% of the country were into it(mainly teenagers). |
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