I Can’t Believe They Dubbed This (Like This)! – This Week in Anime

Chris


We’ve still got a couple of days of Halloween season left, so why not indulge in a topic that scares so many anime fans?

It’s like the polar opposite of regular Western watchers who can’t overcome the inch-high barrier of subtitles.

Regardless, I agree that Bad Girl is a hoot that deserves to be seen by broader audiences, and also that it’s kind of a left-field pick for a dub. It’s especially apparent when you put it against the other seasonal shows that HIDIVE picked for this treatment. They’re all LitRPG or isekai-adjacent—as Coop and I covered last week, the exact kind of seasonal packing peanuts that the likes of Crunchyroll regularly roll out the dub treatment for.

So it’s nice to see HIDIVE throwing the Bad Girl bone to an audience besides the type that leave something like Hero Without a Class running in the background while they do whatever.

Mostly it’s a trip to hear English-language voice acting referencing so much Rider-related material. We’ve only barely started getting Kamen Rider stuff over here in recent years, and it’s almost universally been sub-only. I remember some scuttlebutt about FUUTO PI getting an English dub, which would’ve been surreal on its own, but that never came to pass.

I feel like I say this every time the English-speaking weeb world gets a new whiff of Rider, but maybe Tojima getting a dub could move the needle as far as popularity and exposure go. I’m not counting on it, but this is still pretty cool on its own!

Of course, this naturally puts me into the mind of some of my other favorite Toei superheroes, and their own unusual dabbling in dubbing.

There have been scattered attempts at getting Pretty Cure in localized English versions, some we’ve talked about before. But the ol’ “Canadian” dub of the original Futari wa Precure really was the stuff of legend there for a bit.

It is wild (and frustrating) that Toei hasn’t made a bigger push to put Pretty Cure out in a language for its target age bracket here, beyond the failed experiment of Glitter Force. Never forget.

More to the point, that Ocean-Production-dubbed version of Futari wa was a white(house) whale of a production itself for a while. That is, until Toei themselves rolled it out on their YouTube channel as part of their “Summer Weekend Splash” streaming event. You can still watch these as of this writing, and it’s kind of nuts to see the adventures of Natalie, Hannah, and the gang just out for everyone to see now.

This is at least a cooler way to watch this show for free than that crusty upload on Tubi, anyway.

It also means that Popuko and Pipimi almost certainly hold the record for the number of voice actors who have played them.

That’s just one snippet of a list that kinda…goes on for a while.

Also, dubbing something like Pop Team Epic means winding up committing to weird indulgences like dubbing over the entirety of the live-action Season 2 finale starring Shōta Aoi, but 1) it’s fun, and 2) I’ll take anything that exposes more audiences to Kōichi Sakamoto-directed tokusatsu.

We’re already back to Kamen Rider on this subject. I’ll step back before Lynzee confiscates my bugmen like parents going through their kids’ Halloween candy at the end of the night.

It’s an appropriate parallel to the Japanese PTE‘s voice-acting VS crossover, and just like in that version, I’m sure there are a ton of in-jokes I’m missing in the casting and delivery. Pop Team Epic is already a show where you watch every episode twice by default, and the addition of everything the dub does makes an argument for watching them at least four times. It’s in the trollish tradition of the show itself, anyway.

Anyway, as long as I am allowed a few more personal indulgences here on All Hallows’ Eve-eve, I’ll circle back to Toei‘s kids’ shows for one more second.

They’ve been only slightly more consistent about dubbing their Digimon anime as their Precure stuff these days, but what set their years-late treatment of 2020’s Adventure: reboot apart was its unique play toward legacy. It’s a whole new cast of voice actors (generally doing a great job, by the way), but they’re utilizing the old “nicknames” for the characters from the classic Saban dub…and they actually get explained in dialogue this time!

It’s a really interesting move that, annoyingly, is currently removed from Hulu as of this writing (a recurring curse with anime streaming there). Still, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, as Digimon Adventure (2020) definitely falls into the unenviable category of “good dubs of crap shows.” You’re probably better off revisiting the original, which is readily available. To say nothing of the new English dub Discotek produced for the uncut versions of the first three movies.

This was its own “Holy crap, I can’t believe they dubbed this (like this)!” moment.

I understand there’s an argument that the regular dialogue portions of hentai aren’t what people are coming to that material for, but then it begs the question of how much that audience really is asking for hentai to be dubbed into their native language at all! Still, it is a fascinating sidebar subject of the time, and poking around our encyclopedia pages for the likes of Kitty or Critical Mass can be a fascinating rabbit hole of voice actor pseudonyms. Even as you realize that a name like “Hentai Mona” has gotta be one of the least search engine optimized names on today’s adult animation internet.

I appreciate Discotek revisiting the hentai pseudonym tradition in their recent release of Urotsukidoji, but as you alluded to with OceanVeil, I can see the just-barely more respectful attempts at dubbing that material letting studios and actors be fully open about their participation. Even if it brings its own amusing moments.

Yes, that is Bradley “the dub voice of Coach in Gunbuster” Gareth showing up in the dub of Game World Reincarnation on OceanVeil.

We’ll see if OceanVeil building up their catalog and presence begets that at all. It definitely feels like we’re getting further compared to one of my personal favorite stories of “I can’t believe they…almost…dubbed this!” in Koe de Oshigoto!, which the aforementioned Media Blasters had picked up for a release with a dub in 2013…

…before confirming like half a year later that this wouldn’t be the case.

If you know Koe de Oshigoto!, you know why the initial announcement raised some eyebrows, and why the subsequent cancellation of the dub ultimately wasn’t surprising. Being a whole OVA about erotic voice acting, the ASMR appeal that might’ve sold this one wasn’t totally established yet.

That’s so Funimation.

The partials and almosts will always be the most fascinating examples of this dub dissertation. An easy go-to for me is my beloved BanG Dream!, which saw Sentai produce an English dub of the second season…and only the second season, out of the original three and multiple movies.

It’s such a compelling “What If” consideration. Could we have been staring down versions of the Film Live movies where the characters had minimal English banter in-between licensor-obligated Japanese-only recordings of the songs? Might we have found out how an English VA could have handled playing as Mutsumi and Mortis in Ave Mujica? The world will never know, but it’s fun to think about.

It can still feel esoteric what qualifies to get a dub, unless it’s an isekai/LitRPG seasonal, but that means we’ve got the room for the likes of Angel’s Egg or Bad Girl to feel like a pleasant surprise.

It seems like a trick, but it feels like a treat.