Instead of just importing a show and subbing or dubbing it, we should have random American companies buying the licenses to like 5 random seasons from 5 random animes, cutting them into pieces and Frankensteining them into one show with a new dubbed narrative that has nothing to do with the original source material, all with the sole purpose of selling old Japanese toys to American kids
Instead of Naruto and One Piece we could have Pirate Ninja Battleforce where Naruto and Luffy are brothers named Chuck and Bronson. Every once in a while there’s a fight scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion spliced in
subs
This really happened? That’s so weird…
In Portugal they they did air the whole Dragon Ball series (og, Z and GT) but with the dub being very far from the original. Essencially the Voice Actors kinda improvised along the way and filled it with Portuguese references. It ended up becoming a hit with young and old stopping what they were doing when a new episode aired in the afternoons. Still remember sitting in the school cafeteria with teachers, cleaners and kitchen staff all watching Frieza scream at goku like a little removed (they dubbed him with a super high pitch voice). Good times…
Is this why every country that speaks Portuguese is very obsessed with DBZ, including adults?
Luffy defeats Big Mom by having a beyblade battle.
I’ll be honest I prefer subs but that’s mainly because the dub actors are usually bad (the cheapest they could pay to do a dub for english). When they actually get real high quality actors for things dubs can be extremely good, for example I prefer the dub to Howl’s Moving Castle over the sub purely because it has an all A-List actor cast, Christian Bale as Howl is great and Jean Simmons as Sophie absolutely nails it, Billy Crystal is Calcifer, Laurel Bacall as the witch of the wastes, it’s a really top cast lol…
There’s a reason that domestically they use their famous voice actors as a selling point for shows compared to when we get ported dubs with some dubbing company doing it with their regular cast who dub hundreds of shows on the cheap.
IIRC, Disney was the United States licensee for Ghibli films for a long time, so they brought in the A team whenever they did the importing/dubbing. Patrick Stewart is in Nausicaa as Lord Yupa, for example.
It’s the right way to do it. Criticise them for all sorts of stuff but there’s a lot of examples like that showing they’re not just churning absolute shit out for maximum profit.
There’s so many things that you could give an A-list team to that would completely change the dub. It’s almost like talking about 2 completely different things when you talk about “dubbed anime” and then talk about situations like this where they went beyond that.
Akira was dubbed twice, so it’s not implausible to get a new cast for an old classic. There’s hope!
EDIT: Cowboy Bebob’s dub was amazing by accident. I think you’ll appreciate this video about dubs in general and the Cowboy Bebop story.
Subs are superior because when I was 10 years old buying bootleg VHS tapes of Urusei Yatsura I thought I was cool because the ugly yellow subtitles had swear words
The world lost something when you could no longer go on obscure forums to buy shady VHS anime that was probably translated wrong
Uphold Big Green DBZ dub thought.
“The Saiya Peoples”
Fun fact Toriyama didn’t confirm they’re supposed to be called Saiyans (like the English translation of Saiya-jin) until very recently with Dragonball Super.
He should have also come out and said Vegeta’s name is Bejita just to poke all the internet arguments going back to like 1995
