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Answerman - Why Do Edited for TV Dubs Change An Anime's Music?

Digimon, on top of having its own original score, did pull some music from other shows. The most noticable one for me was Princess Sissi along with some tracks originally heard in Saban's Masked Rider.

darksharingan wrote:

Well, I can't completely hate the practice of changing music because we got Faulconer Production's tracks on DBZ, the kickass grunge in Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and the more emotionally engaging tracks in 4Kids' Pokemon movies (not including end-credit pop trash). All of which were infinitely better than their Japanese counterparts.

I partially blame Bruce Faulconer's music for the perception Dragonball has in America, and am personally glad that OST is gone forever.

Never saw Street Fighter II, but Pokemon has a really forgettable dub music score, especially compared to some of the powerful, amazing tracks of the original. Hakutai Woods is just beautiful.

darksharingan wrote:

Well, I can't completely hate the practice of changing music because we got Faulconer Production's tracks on DBZ, the kickass grunge in Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and the more emotionally engaging tracks in 4Kids' Pokemon movies (not including end-credit pop trash). All of which were infinitely better than their Japanese counterparts.

I partially blame Bruce Faulconer's music for the perception Dragonball has in America, and am personally glad that OST is gone forever.

Never saw Street Fighter II, but Pokemon has a really forgettable dub music score, especially compared to some of the powerful, amazing tracks of the original. Hakutai Woods is just beautiful.

Unfortunately, the Technical excuse tends to be the case more than the Artistic.
Was just watching ADV's Dirty Pair OVA, where ADV was unable to get many of the BGM music tracks for the dub, and had to substitute generic rock music in the scenes, although the original Japanese audio was intact--

Mega Man NT Warrior: Who did this? Who was in charge of this? Mega Man NT Warrior actually had a nice classic 1970's anime styled tokusatsu feel brought to modern day with uppity rock n roll and fusion techno as the score, and a lot of cast sung theme songs, including its own anthem for MegaMan.EXE. Brought to the states, everything about that was removed for this... cacophony of noise in attempts to sound cyberpunky and hardcore for the kids. It's just as bad as that episode where they censored corrupted and enemy Net Navis getting their limbs wiped out, not to exclude how ShadowMan.EXE had a big gaping hole in his chest from getting sniped by SearchMan.EXE. Post 9/11 censorship at its best, yeeesshhh. You can show me spoiler[blood and placenta on Law and Order SVU out on UPN at 8pm, but a kid's TV show? Come on....]

LBX recycled music from the Monster Rancher dub, which I believe used different music from the Japanese version.

WeirDiE_InC wrote:

Digimon, on top of having its own original score, did pull some music from other shows. The most noticable one for me was Princess Sissi along with some tracks originally heard in Saban's Masked Rider.

I never even saw Masked Rider air at any point for me, so I have no idea what any of its music sounded like.

What do you mean by "perception Dragonball has in America"? The only perception I know of is that it's a show where people fight truly ridiculous battles with the occasional death and rebirth, and I fail to see how different background music would have affected that. I think anyone who prefers the original is perfectly in the right but I think putting fight scenes to rock music is also perfectly reasonable.

Also regarding Pokemon I will fight anyone irl that says that the Japanese opening for Johto is better than the English. It is so much catchier. ♫Do do do do do dooooo ♫ (I know you're talking about in-show music but I'll take any chance I can get to post the Johto Journeys theme)

Ages ago when Yugioh was still fresh I remember seeing some kind of brief behind the scenes clip where they talked about the music changes and actual did show a bit of a focus group where kids got to choose which soundtrack they liked better. Could have just been editing bias, the kids shown actually did prefer the 4Kids soundtrack. Unfortunately I doubt the video actually exists online anymore.

The art is owed as faithful a translation as possible on every level, and this includes keeping the original music. That music was chosen for a reason and it's part of the very fabric of the series it's in. There's little, if any, reason to replace it, unless you try to do English versions of Japanese vocal songs.

LBX recycled music from the Monster Rancher dub, which I believe used different music from the Japanese version.

I've also heard that, apparently, the FCC literally has a rule (or, at least, had a rule that might have since been taken out) that children's programming, which is what these "edited-for-TV-with-new-music" anime tend to be marketed as, literally cannot go for longer than 15-20 seconds (maybe half a minute) without music, regardless of the original artistic vision. Supposedly this was to keep children from getting bored, as they felt that children couldn't/wouldn't continue to pay attention to what's on TV if there wasn't some sort of music playing in the background.

I don't know how to really explain it, but the people who treat it like it's "badass" or "gangsta cool". The kind of people who don't like the original or Super because they're too 'silly'. I don't know if we're counting 'Rock the Dragon" and "Step into the Grand Tour" though, but they didn't help either compared to the more adventurous and purehearted Cha La Head Cha La and Dan Dan.

Never been a fan of dub themes since they always tend to just repeat the name of the show over and over. It's not One Piece rap or Yu-Gi-Oh rap levels of bad, but I definitely prefer Ok! over it. Although as far as the Johto era openings are concerned, my favorite opening is Ready Go. I think it does an excellent job showcasing the culmination to the finale of the series after years of build up.

Honestly, the only time an English dub music track has been better than the Japanese version was Lugia's song.

I only JUST found out today that the song is different in the Japanese version, and it's... Not quite as good.

A lot claims there's no formula translating JP to EN fluently, but I disagree. I am a speaker of both languages and aside from local japanese puns, literal translation is possible, but again, there's a lot of influencers out there saying the otherwise and that is nothing short of misinforming people.

Saku-dono wrote:

A lot claims there's no formula translating JP to EN fluently, but I disagree. I am a speaker of both languages and aside from local japanese puns, literal translation is possible, but again, there's a lot of influencers out there saying the otherwise and that is nothing short of misinforming people.

Disagree if you like, but between any two different languages, there are going to be things that defy literal translation, at least if you want a listener/reader in the second language to fully understand things. Aside from puns, slang and idioms in particular present difficulty: sure you can translate what is said pretty literally, but the actual meaning gets lost. Those are so heavily reliant on culture that between two countries (or even different regions of the same country) that speak the same language, it’s common for slang to create confusion.

Just because a literal translation is possible doesn't mean it is desirable.

The point is to convey the author or director's artistic intent. Many times, if not most of the time, a non-literal but true-to-spirit translation does a better job at that than a literal translation does..