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The Mike Toole Show - More Than Meets The Eye

That OmniProductions dub is nothing less than a gift from God, and I'm quite sad that they didn't include it on any of Shout! Factory's releases. Just the fact that they mispronounce ("Roadimus Prime") and even change (Soundblaster --> New Soundwave) some of the names makes it a barrel of laughs.

Like, in the 80s, robots turned into vehicles first. Later, dinosaurs, insects, and animals would be added. This all made a certain kind of sense; you could pretty much envision meetings of toy execs and designers all agreeing that the only things kids would love more than robots that turn into trucks and planes are robots that turn into dinosaurs and tigers. But man, the Rock Lords? They turn into rocks.

Allow me to comment more on the introduction than the body of the article...

Quote:

Last week, I was talking to translator extraordinaire Neil Nadelman, who happens to be a good friend of mine. He'd recently wrapped up a long series (Sentai's Psychic Squad) and was ruminating on the pretty extreme volume of translation and subtitling work he's completed over the years.

And he's not a translator extraordinaire merely by sheer volume, either. I view him as one of the best in terms of actual script writing -- not in terms of "inventing/changing stuff", but in terms of producing scripts that let the material shine in English, far better than a straight/standard translation ever could.

For Shout's Transformers anime DVDs? I'm surprised to hear this.

From everything I've seen, Shout simply took the subtitles as used on the UK/Australian sets (translated by others), and simply inserted in a whole bunch of anachronistic terminology that isn't in the Japanese dialogue, like AllSpark some 12 years before the term was actually coined, etc. By all accounts, the PAL sets, while hardly perfect, have far more accurate subtitles.

Well, that seems to be a small error there. From the looks of it, it has 2 micro-missile launchers, so it's a Super Valkyrie, not a Strike Valkyrie.

hey Mike, how old are you?

Oh c'mon, even Tom Hanks character in his breakout movie BIG had the transforming skycraper!

As he put it:

• After he gets a job at the toy company, there's a scene where Josh is in a meeting and they're discussing a new Transformers toy. It's a giant skyscraper that turns into a robot. After playing with it for a little while, Josh announces, "I don't get it. It turns from a building into a robot, right? Well, what's fun about that? What's so fun about playing with a building? That's not any fun!" and he then goes on to brainstorm ideas for a new line of Transformers based on insects.
  

Point of clarification: Neil was involved in fixing some technical aspects of the subtitles, and mentioned this in passing to me. I don't believe he did any translation or rewriting. I've been told a lot of that weird jargon was due to Hasbro.

Also, a pal from twitter pointed out that, while most of the Gobots we know and love only fleetingly appeared in Machine Robo, at best (you can spot some of them in the background of the 2nd ED animation), Cy-Kill actually had a small role late in the series:



The more you know, etc.

Joe Carpenter wrote:

hey Mike, how old are you?

I'm 36.

And yeah, I'm bummed that none of the Shout Factory sets included that amazing dub, featuring Six-Shot, the Ninja Consultant for the Decepticons! The original TRANSFORMERS TAKARA UK dvd yielded some of the earliest DUBS THAT TIME FORGOT clips that I would run at con panels back in 2002, and it always got some big laughs.