Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are Old American TV Dubs Of Anime Lost Forever?
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Top Gun
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Pokemon's dub worked so well when so many others didn't for a couple of reasons. For one, it was a very young-skewing show in the first place, so there was little in terms of actual controversial content to excise. You ditch someone waving a gun in Ash's face and James wearing huge fake tits, and you're pretty much set. (And "donuts," don't forget those!) For another, it was almost completely episodic, so the few things that were changed didn't have any significant lasting impact. You didn't have Sailor Moon's "cousins" that raised all sorts of awkward questions, or Cardcaptor's ham-fisted attempts to change its main character, or the absurd hatchet job of 4Piece that would have utterly screwed the editors an arc or two down the line. Besides that, Veronica Taylor and company were legitimately good actors who brought a lot of life to the characters they played. I will legitimately defend that dub to this day. (Also, the puns. If you don't like that you have no soul. ![]() |
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Primus
![]() Posts: 2800 Location: Toronto |
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For the most part, this is true for the US/Canadian TV dubs that aired from the early 2000s onwards. The biggest issue with a lot of that is the consumer grade recording equipment because if there were official home video releases, they rarely did every episode. You can find the entirety (or, at least what we think is the entirety) of Nelvana's proper Cardcaptors dub online, but some of the sources are VHS TV rips so it doesn't sound very good. I'm not really sure what the situation with Knights of the Zodiac is. DiC dubbed 40 episodes but I'm not sure ADV put them all out. There's still stuff that slips through the cracks, though. Trying to find more than 2 episodes of Hasbro's Idaten Jump dub (which were uploaded by staff on the show) is basically impossible. That's in spite of airing in Canada and the US and getting a legal streaming release a decade ago.
Nelvana never had an issue with Cardcaptors being aimed at girls. That's one of those apocryphal fan theories that somehow has lasted nearly 20 years. The company's name comes from one of the first female superheroes. In fact, in Nelvana's trade materials for Cardcaptors, they were actually playing the focus on girls as an angle:
A lot of what the internet holds a grudge against that dub really seems to be the product of KidsWB rather than Nelvana. The rest of the English speaking western world got something far more in line with your typical children's TV anime dub (which, I guess would still get people mad), rather than a hack job that sliced half the show to refocus it on Li. The differences between what the US got and what everyone else did goes from the severe (everyone else getting the entire show vs. a cut up) to little bizarre changes. Australia even got English attempts at the Japanese theme music. One of the weirder things is that music was specific to the Australian run (and it was just the OP/ED tracks - the rest used the Canadian BGM). I watched the show on Teletoon in Canada and while our run of the dub wasn't the KidsWB edit, we still got the EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED NOW chant. A couple of months back I sent Justin a question seeing if he could shine some light on why/how this all happened, but it seems a little out of his range. I wouldn't know where to start trying to find KidsWB people. The producers at Nelvana behind the show have gone on to become relative big shots in the Canadian television industry and might not remember something from this long ago anyway. Ocean's always been a very private company and I'm not sure they'd really know about what KidsWB did. |
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ninjamitsuki
![]() Posts: 615 Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology) |
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I kind of want to watch the old Toonami edits of shows again, with the digital bikinis and "tea" and everything, just for nostalgia's sake. I know some people taped a few episodes but a lot of them seem to be lost.
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Stuart Smith
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Not true, actually. The dub has done numerous things to change controversal elements, plot events, and in general cause confusion. I think the one that effects the franchise to this day is the 'Gotta catch em all' which causes people to this day wonder why Satoshi doesn't catch every Pokemon he meets, when in the original he states he only catches Pokemon he likes. Not to mention Kasumi's entire personality being changed as well as some of Takeshi's pervy dialog. They flubbed a lot of continuity with their changes like Takeshi's father and Satoshi's Kentauros as well. I think the changes to the movies have been documented enough to not go into them. Admittedly, the first series was the worse of the franchise. The later series would suffer a lot more from the dub, especially come Diamond and Pearl. -Stuart Smith |
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gedata
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How does the Macross series and Harmony Gold fit into this topic? What I've read here suggests that western distributors don't really have the power to hold on their adaptations indefinitely. But then their are those annoying legal issues that keep Macross titles from being legally distributed.
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KabaKabaFruit
![]() Posts: 1883 Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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Depends on how you define "anime" to those back then. The western dubs deliberately played down or even eliminated the Japan angle in order to convince viewers that the show is an American made cartoon and those that knew would've gotten their sources through the grapevine or read special magazines that focused on the sub-medium. Plus, hardly anyone called anime "anime" back then. It was all referred to as "Japanimation". A term that stayed on strong through to the late 90s until Toonami and the Internet changed people's perception of the sub-medium. |
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CatSword
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Those two series are the most commonly brought up when someone asks about 4Kids dubs that are actually good. They definitely pushed the envelope of what was allowed on Saturday mornings. (The word "jackass" is used at one point in Shaman King, though in a literal/double-entendre sense, and the edited dub was still violent enough the PTC complained about it, which I think was the first and only time they complained about something from 4Kids. Ultimate Muscle got away with similar innuendo and surprising crude humor/violence.) I would like to say there's still hope for the both of them, considering Monster Rancher managed to get separate broadcast dub and uncut subtitled releases. I also don't feel like anyone on the Japanese side of Shaman King or Ultimate Muscle would have hard feelings about either one of those dubs. |
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EricJ2
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Since Discotek CAN'T do dubs, and it would be economically suicidal for them to try, they and Nozomi are very good about spending the money and extra mile to get the existing dub into the bargain for license rescues, like all three dubs (one Streamline and two MangaUS) for Castle of Cagliostro, or original ADV dubs for the great 90's ADV classics like Dragon Half.
If you mean the US-dubbed "Ninja-turtle Kero" version of Movie 1 (Movie 2 was dubbed more faithfully from scratch), that's also the official Pioneer version that's currently streaming on Crunchyroll. Even despite the TV series on the site being the more faithfully dubbed Animax version, and you can hear the differences back to back.
There were so many facepalming examples in Nelvana's cut of how US kids' television just couldn't deal with the kids-shoujo anime tropes of Sakura being cute...She couldn't be allowed to get "Ho-eee... ![]() (And their attempts to try and localize/explain other anime tropes, like Li getting the "stiff-nervous" walk around Yukito or Sakura, are best left unmentioned.) |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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1.
I don't know how old you are but when I was a kid, it was called anime. Japanimation was a leftover term from the 70's/80's. When I was 10 (1995) and Sailor Moon came out, if you had said "Did you know this is from Japan?", the kid would have stared at you with The Look on his face and said "Duhhh!" I assume that you grew up in Canada; YTV showed a lot of anime and the hosts talked about it. Some dub companies were worse than others in the credits (Looking at you, Cinar; You even switched gears from one dub to the next) but I remember many credit sequences crediting the Japanese company and listing their own dub as the English version; It doesn't make the Anglicizing of the script, to make the show "palatable", any less dumb but there wasn't always some deep dark conspiracy to hide that it was a Japanese cartoon . 2. As to old dubs, most of the time we're grateful just to get the darn things, and then there are tricked out releases like the Voltron sets which seem to exist to go "Na na na na na". I am glad that one of Discotek's practices is to include the original dubs, as best as they can. |
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jr240483
![]() Posts: 4416 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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i still have the vhs versions of SM that DIC did. however for us older audiences the questions should be, why bother??? especially for nevlana's version of CCS which is more or less atrocious beyond words. while the argument for that it can be used to bring in the much younger audiences is valid, its more or less redundant now considering we have series like pokemon , YGO , doreamon , yokai watch and the bastardized version of the smile precure series to target those younger audiences. seeing those god awful versions might make some of those audiences into dub hating sub only elitists cause it happened to my sister. its better off to let those dead dubs remain in the past and eventually forgotten , especially those that are in the abomination categories like that bastardized version of CCS as well as series that have been hacked up by 4kids |
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MoonPhase1
Posts: 497 |
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It's mostly just nostalgia on what fans want on older Dubs of those shows and others like it if you were a 90s to early 2000s kid watching this stuff on Toonami, Kids WB, Fox Kids, etc. It's not really to mock the Dubs from back then versus today's Dubs. If you were a kid during that time or at least a teenager, those were the Dubs you would have grown up with and listening to those Dubs makes you feel like a kid again. People like that would love to get a new release of those Dubs if they're still into the show or at least Anime in-general. Of course that doesn't mean they all feel the same, but definitely shouldn't be treated as garbage.
Funimation had that great idea of making that DBZ Rock The Dragon Set with the Canadian Dub. |
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LaytonPuzzle27
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Don't forget Nevlana and DiC may be worst in anime dubs but they are also Best known for creating some good animated shows and films.
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NJ_
![]() Posts: 3078 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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Shouldn't be too hard for Muscle since it was the 4Kids dub's popularity that led to Toei making a second season (or second and third seasons if you go by it's later Japanese broadcast).
And they even acknowledged that dub's existence in Dragon Ball Super by getting Brian Drummond to voice Copy Vegeta for all of it's 3 episodes. |
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Primus
![]() Posts: 2800 Location: Toronto |
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Given it was Cinar, the Wizard of Oz credit deletion might've been another fraud attempt. The company used to have Americans ghost write their shows and then credit it to the management's family or nonexistent people for the purposes of exploiting Canadian tax credits. Speaking of Cinar, Ronin Warriors was apparently one of those dubs that had issues getting legally cleared. Discotek wanted it, but still haven't gotten it. Apparently it was collaboration between Cinar and a company called Graz Entertainment with VO outsourced to Ocean. Cinar's lineage isn't difficult to follow (Cinar -> Cookie Jar -> DHX), but who knows what Graz is. |
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jr240483
![]() Posts: 4416 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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but if and i mean a BIG IF they have ZERO relation to the anime industry. other than that , anything anime related completely turned into toxic materials and gives only ammo to those that are the dub hating sub only types. while funi released the hacked up ocean dub version for the sake of nostalgia since it was the first that premiered on toonami's world debut, its more or less an inferior version compared to the unedited version that funi did. the same when it came to SM after viz did a recast. and once funi does the new sealed arc of CCS , die hard fans would more or less request that the original gets dubbed by the new one so they can FINALLY erase that atrocious nevlana version until it is completely forgotten. |
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