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NEWS: Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai Anime's English Dub Debuts in N. America on November 8

Is this going to be a batch of episodes or just one

Good question, I'm actually curious if there is a dub of the entire show or just what they got up to before the whole SAG thing. I mean you would think it was mostly dubbed and they are currently finishing it off, but something about the way it is being released makes it seem like they are just off loading an uncompleted dub to whomever will have it.

This shows dub has been streaming on some pretty weird places.

I think Dai just got dealt a bad hand and had a lot of stuff going against it.

-Toei keeping the show to themselves rather than license it to Funimation or Viz. This resulted in very little fanfare or attention for Western anime fans.

-No dub window or Western release plans

-Outside a couple of social media posts a week for each episode, they was practically no promotion for the series. I think outside episode drop notices from Crunchyroll, I think I saw ONE post for it on Twitter and it was when they were facing a huge backlash for the whole Mob Psycho 100 English dub fiasco.

-Dropped by Hulu in the middle of airing

-Dragon Quest is already fairly niche here but with the little fanfare/promotion there was probably a lot presumptions and misconceptions about the series like requiring knowledge/experience of the games, not knowing it's a Shonen Jump manga, thinking there's no appeal outside Japan.

-The above leading to it failing ANN's arbitrary voting rule denying even more possible exposure. A real unfortunate Catch 22. I think more reviews and discussion from ANN could've rectified the above problem but it just ensured its obscurity.

I think there was some good word of mouth by the end of the series and I think getting a dub out there will really help especially if they can get it on something like Toonami.

MarshalBanana wrote:

Good question, I'm actually curious if there is a dub of the entire show or just what they got up to before the whole SAG thing. I mean you would think it was mostly dubbed and they are currently finishing it off, but something about the way it is being released makes it seem like they are just off loading an uncompleted dub to whomever will have it.

never understood the SAG issue since it was dubbed in Canada,where they have nothing to do with stuff recorded there(and in fact,some LA actors with Canadian citizenship freely work in Canadian productions like Tara Strong)

-Dropped by Hulu in the middle of airing

Quote:

-Dropped by Hulu in the middle of airing

It should be pointed out the same thing happened with Digimon Adventure 2020 where Hulu just aired the first 50 episodes and stopped after that. All I can guess is either Toei only allowed a limited amount of episodes to air on Hulu for whatever reason or whoever is in charge of licensing Toei anime only ordered a set number of episodes and not the whole show

https://twitter.com/ToeiAnimation/status/1589723202615652355

First 50 episodes for now, 25 more than what's on BBC right now.

Curious if this includes the recap.that aired after 37.

Interesting -- but it's precisely the "reason" for this that I don't get. If you know that a series is going to have significantly more than 50 episodes (which a streaming service may not always know, to be fair) why only license a limited number of episodes? Is the streaming service waiting to see how well it does? Is Toei capping the number of episodes to be in a position to bargain with other services?

I assume either Hulu doesn't know there's more episodes or maybe Toei has episodes 51 and beyond as part of a separate licensing deal and Hulu isn't invested in enough to buy the rest or they might think episodes 51 and beyond are like a "second series" they don't think they need to get. Netflix also does the same thing with Pokemon where they only have the first 50 episodes of the Kanto arc and I'm not sure they're aware there's more than that for Kanto.

I suppose that must be it. I still find it hard to believe that they aren't aware of the existence of the remaining episodes, and I think that licensing negotiations play a significant part in these decisions, but who knows. At the end of the day it's subscribers that inevitably feel shortchanged.

Digimon Adventure 2020, Toei probably lists like the first 50 episodes as "season one" and the remaining episodes are "season two" and they probably didn't communicate with Hulu that these are all one show and they need the rest to be complete. Of course it's also possible Toei only wants a sample of these shows on Hulu to direct people to go to Crunchyroll or the digital stores to get the rest.

Slightly off-topic, but since you're clearly knowledgeable about it, would you recommend Digimon Adventure 2020? I haven't watched Digimon since the 1999 anime, which I was watching around the same time as the Pokémon original series, and I'm starting to feel nostalgic (yes, I'm old). It seems like a pretty big committment, but then again I just finished watching 100 episodes of The Adventure of Dai and don't feel like I wasted a minute.

Not unless you're a diehard fan. It starts off good and it has some entertaining moments but it also loses it's way about halfway through and becomes more of a standard action show at the expense of the character writing and it ends up feeling like a redudant reboot. If you want to see better examples of modern Digimon...

Thanks! I appreciate the honest opinion. I'll probably still check it out for nostalgia's sake, and also because I'm interested in seeing what a modern Digimon production looks like, but I probably won't commit to 67 episodes. I'll definitely check out Digimon Tamers though, since I was aware of it back in the day and was reminded of it last year after the "cancel culture" conspiracy theory controversy surrounding Chiaki Konaka. It's good to know that it became a fan favorite over the years and that it can be streamed at the moment. I suppose it was never remastered in HD?

If you still plan to check it out, it might be best to wait for the dub as Studiopolis is producing a dub of Digimon Adventure 2020 with a brand new English voice cast. But at the rate they're taking to dub it I won't expect it till next year. I imagine it will probably be like Dragon Quest and they release the dub in chunks.

Discotek is just about to release their HD remaster of the original Digimon Adventure on BD with a sub coming soon so most likely if that release is successful they'll probably eventually do the other seasons too.