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Hey, Answerman! [2010-03-19]

Shay Guy wrote:

What was the purpose of these two lines? No, really, what? Your own satisfaction at getting to laugh at someone? It's not like it burst out before you realized what you were doing; you had to think about it, compose it, type it up, look it over, and hit submit. Accidental rudeness I understand easily enough. I do it probably way more often than I should. Deliberate, calculated rudeness? Going out of your way to belittle (not criticize) someone? What's the point?

Let's put it in a different light.
Can you imagine some guy sending a letter to People Magazine asking them how to get Johnny Depp to do a commercial for their company? If the person is representing a reputable company, don't you hope they understand asking for top talent takes top dollar & also enough research to know they need to contact someone who actually does business with the people in question? Would you ask Fangoria to put you in touch with Stephen King or Stephen King's publisher?

Take DBZ (your example). Vegeta is so fricken much fun & hardly one-dimensional. He's the prince of a warrior race brought up from his birth to believe he's the best of the strongest, most feared race, only to hit the reality that is Freeza. Instead of Daddy just squashing Freeza, Vegeta is given over as a hostage, submitted to god knows what sort of humiliation (doesn't Freeza's court seem to be the bullying type?). Most kids I know (& it appears Vegeta felt the same) expect mommy &/or daddy to save them. Vegeta's didn't. No wonder he's shown dismissing his planet--they couldn't even save a little boy. His only option at that point is becoming strong enough to avenge himself & his people by destroying Freeza...and he fails.
That obviously hurt bad. And it colored most of his actions in the story. Piccalo also has to come up against his past & his present a few times

An example of a bad dub is Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. The voices are unpleasant, the acting is wooden and the pronunciations are excruciating (Tomoe pronounced Tohmoh! Heaven help us!). I never watch it with the English dub.

I'm so happy! For the second time, he chose my answer!

Moe, mhmhmm, well i really don't care if its moe, or action,or whatever, it just needs a good story, plot, and character development. I'll enjoy it.

Quote:

An example of a bad dub is Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. The voices are unpleasant, the acting is wooden and the pronunciations are excruciating (Tomoe pronounced Tohmoh! Heaven help us!). I never watch it with the English dub.

Actually what I found even worse than that is the script. It's hopelessly inaccurate and even occasionally inserts comments and screaming where there was no voice in the original (Kenshin's hilarious 5 minute long scream at the end as he narrates over himself screaming was not present originally).

It's tolerable if you've never seen or read any other Rurouni Kenshin material, but if you're a fan it just completely ruins it. Any mention of keywords an RK fan would recognize such as "Hitokiri Battousai" is entirely removed, and scenes that originally had very recognizable dialogue from the manga are changed to have the conversation about something else entirely. Episode 2 is still titled "The Lost Cat" even though the line of dialogue which this title comes from is not present in the dub. There were even several scenes in the Reflections OVA that I didn't realize were actually flashback to very specific manga scenes until I watched it in Japanese because the English script is just so different.

It's practically like watching Yu-Gi-Oh! (in terms of shear script inaccuracy...)

Funimation likes to think their scripts are witty and clever, but they're not. They need to stop thinking they're creative. The stories and characters have already been provided for them. If Funimation wants to be creative, they should produce their own cartoons.

Oh, please. The word "Tagalized" is so last decade.

And you'd be surprised that some of these otaku who abhor Tagalog dubs today actually had good childhood memories of watching BTX, Magic Knight Rayearth, etc. on the local networks. In Tagalog dub. Guess there's nothing else to blame but the Internet for giving us something to compare the local dubs against.

Lucy wrote:

For some stupid reason, J-VAs can change their voices so much easier E-VAs in subtle (or not so subtle) ways.

Um, no. Absolutely not. I'm nowhere near as good at placing seiyuu by their voices as a I am with English VAs, but there are several that I can consistently recognize specifically because they always have the same tone and inflection to their voice and never seem to make a serious effort to vary it. Granted, there are English VAs who are equally guilty of always sounding the same (Peter Doyle immediately springs to mind, and Steve Blum earlier in his career), but in my experience they just as regularly make an effort to vary their vocal styles and are much more prone to using appropriate accents.