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The Mike Toole Show - Canada's Anime Legacy

Nostalgia galore!

nobody can watch Primo TV unless they live in the parts of Provo, UT and Spokane, WA that get the channel over the air

It's really interesting as a latin-american to discover that not all english dubs were done in the United States, though to be fair the English I studied was British English and most media I consume is from the US so I am not familiar how Canadians talk.

the old Ocean Studios dub of Escaflowne was more or less replaced by a new Funimation version, as part of their Kickstarter campaign. After some steady complaining on the parts of completists (yours truly included), Funimation threw in the older dub as a separate, DVD-only deal; it was still no longer the definitive English version.

Obviously, my first question was, “Where the hell are the other ten episodes?!”

There is one enormous chunk of Canada's anime legacy that hasn't yet been overwritten or tossed aside, and that's Beyblade, the massive battlin'-top toy franchise that's up to about four or five hundred TV episodes, every last one of them dubbed in Toronto or Vancouver.

Second is Beyblade. It was an extremely challenging show as I was working directly with Japanese production. I had translators and everything… EXCEPT PICTURE! I’d get endless lists of music requests with a brief description and the number of seconds required, like, “Image of courage bursting through heart of dragon: 120 seconds”. All notes were translated from Japanese—lots of humorous confusion. I was literally writing blind. The Music Supervisor at Nelvana, Norm Beaver (who’s also my Bossman on Bravest) saved my life as the client liaison. I seriously don’t know how else I’d have made it through!

One of the most challenging scoring projects Marin worked on was the popular 26-episode animation series, BeyWarriors: Cyborg produced in Japan.

“I had to rely only on the character sketches and written instructions for each 2 minutes music segment,” recalls Marin. “To add to the challenge, there were about 200 minutes of music to compose with a very fast turnaround, amounting to roughly 4-5 minutes of new material per day. So, in a situation like that, the adrenaline is flowing and you feel exhilarated when you complete the task.”

I'm pretty sure that the latest show to be screened on YTV was originally titled Beyblade Burst God, as in “God, I can't believe how much damn Beyblade there is.” The franchise's currently-airing-in-Japan season will probably show up on YTV sometime next year, like clockwork.

Even the oft-maligned Blue Water studio in Calgary, versus the flagship in Vancouver, was putting out quality work. The dub they produced for Strawberry Marshmallow is seriously underrated (as is the show itself, in my opinion).

Quote:

nobody can watch Primo TV unless they live in the parts of Provo, UT and Spokane, WA that get the channel over the air

Huh? I thought Comcast carried that channel most places (or at least places unfortunate enough to be stuck with Comcast). I get it in Virginia.

I'll forever be sad that Nozomi is re-casting Gundam SEED/DESTINY . It always had some of the best dub performance out there imo. Patrick Zala, Gilbert Durandal, Mu la flaga, Andrew Waltfed and the most glorious and unbeatable Mark Oliver as Rau le Creuset. Episode 43 of SEED is GOAT material.

There are obviously gonna be some hurdles to getting the old material out there; the original Sailor Moon dub is so heavily edited it would have to be a stand-alone product, and there might be weird licensing issues with the western-made background music. Still, Viz probably could at least include the Cloverway dubs of Sailor Moon S and SuperS on those releases, but they're absent.

Of these examples, only Dragon Ball Z got a fair shake after the fact. Long after Funimation took DBZ dubbing in-house to get the show finished, and later circled back to get the earlier material dubbed by their cast, they released something on DVD called the “Rock the Dragon” edition—a release that included every Ocean Studios Dragon Ball Z episode that aired on American TV, just as it was. I don't think that this version broke any sales records (though it bears mentioning that every last copy eventually sold out and it goes for $200ish on eBay; remember, when your discs go outta print, you'll make a mint!), but Funimation recognized something interesting and important about how the show was originally presented.

This old stuff is worth saving, so I'd love to see a “Fighting Evil by Moonlight” edition of Sailor Moon from Viz.

About a decade back, Toei decided that they wanted to turn their Pretty Cure series into a hit in North America, so they went to Ocean Studios to get the first series dubbed, and shopped it around aggressively at licensing shows like MIPcom. Nobody took a chance on Precure… except YTV, who duly aired the adventures of Cure White and Cure Black a good year or two before the franchise became a neverending cult hit with magical girl nerds around the globe.

Toei may have worked with their partners to put aside the old Sailor Moon dubs, but they better not take Canadian Pretty Cure away from me. I want Hannah Goddamn Whitestone and Natalie Bloody Blackstone on Blu-Ray, dagnabbit!

A significant but as-yet-unknown quantity of World Trigger was dubbed at Ocean at the behest of Toei, who wanted to make it the next Shonen Jump hit series. Sadly, the anime is nowhere near as good as the manga...

Also Ocean. SEED might be facing a redub, but Sunrise and Nozomi are getting ready to release a fancy-pants collector's set of G-Gundam that includes the corny, altogether wonderful dub made in Calgary. I look forward to once again hearing Mark Gatha and Dave Pettit as Domon and Master Asia starting the series off with these halting, shouty performances, then gradually growing into their roles to neatly match the show's titanic finish.