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INTEREST: Sentai Filmworks Announces ICE Dub Cast

On the other hand, ugh Stephen Foster directing. His track record as of late has been...less than inspiring.

Chris Patton is back? Thought he'd pretty much retired from Anime Voice Work.

I also have noticed a huge rise in grammatical/bizarre errors in recent English dubs. Heck, when I got the Angel Beats DVD, I wanted to hear what the dub sounded like, so I popped in the 'Stairway to Heaven' (High tension!) OVA. One of the first sentences I was greeted with was, "Hey Otonashi, do you want to play catch ball?".

To Jesu, I've also noticed a downward trend in dubs the past two years or so. I think a lot of it may have to do with the move to box sets over singles. Now places like Seraphim and Funimation have to dub 13 or 26 episodes in the same amount of time they use to dub 3 or 4.

I remember listening to commentaries where actors talked about being kept up all night working on just one or two lines. Sadly, ADR studios don't have the time or money to do that anymore. They also have a lot less staffing to work with, so mistakes are more likely to slip through.

dragonrider_cody wrote:

To Jesu, I've also noticed a downward trend in dubs the past two years or so. I think a lot of it may have to do with the move to box sets over singles. Now places like Seraphim and Funimation have to dub 13 or 26 episodes in the same amount of time they use to dub 3 or 4. I remember listening to commentaries where actors talked about being kept up all night working on just one or two lines. Sadly, ADR studios don't have the time or money to do that anymore. They also have a lot less staffing to work with, so mistakes are more likely to slip through.

On the one hand, I understand. But on the other, I'm pretty sure it takes more effort rather than less to create a very unfaithful script that sounds awkward instead of the more common "exact to the Japanese" awkward-sounding script. Watch a Foster dub with the subs on: he changes whatever he can in places, and it sounds WORSE. Then occasionally something will be direct-to-the-subs and you can tell it's because he didn't really get what was going on, so he left it alone, and that sounds bad *too.*

And again, with rare exception, I'm not hearing this ugly quality dropoff from other studios. Not consistently like I'm hearing from Foster. "Rushed out," to me, sounds like a lot of stuff from the late 90s, the real campy, stilted dubs. Foster's stuff REALLY DOES sound like he put time and effort into annoying the viewers with his bad jokes and mockery of serious scenes. I can handle "rushed out," I can handle "cartoony." I'm a dub fan, I'm fairly tolerant of such things. What I CAN'T handle is "Didn't care, decided to goof off and try to prove I'm more fun than this actual show is," and that's what he gives us. I don't like someone waving their dirty laundry in my face while I'm trying to follow a story.

I'm glad you enjoyed the Angel Beats dub. A lot of people are telling me they did. All I hear in it is a bunch of snarky teenagers (even the characters who are not snarky, which is a lot of them,) mouthing off until a serious moment comes, wherein Foster will cheapen it with bad accents, stupid phrases like "sick with the cancer," or wink-wink-ha-ha-it's-a-melodrama-get-it hammy acting. Also, his script is confusing as hell. ~But that's just meee~ ^^;