Puto wrote:I would totally love it if FUNimation were to license Digimon and give it a DVD release, with a new, proper dub and subtitles.
Please, FUNimation, make it happen!
There would be no value in redubbing the first five.
The value in the first five is having more episodes to sell to people who were fans when they were younger, and to possibly have an episode package to sell to someone to air.
Any value those five shows would have is lost if they have to reproduce them to sell.
Best case for the first five, a Voltron-esque release. They release the edited dub on DVD first, and it's sales convince 'whoever' has the license that a separate subbed release is worth the effort.
This isn't a DBZ or a Sailor Moon. With DBZ you had a limited number of episodes that had to be redone, and the show had largely been marketed consistently. With Sailor Moon you have a large number of people with a connection to it and a heavy dislike for the dub, and the potential to actually sell it.
Digimon is an oddity in that, due to random licensing and production quirks, it vanished for awhile, then came back with a new season, and vanished immediately, and outside of a small subgroup of people, the dub just isn't hated enough for it to be a potential issue for sales. Having a new dub would be like redubbing Go-Lion again and marketing it as Voltron. The people most likely to buy Voltron on DVD want what they saw when they were kids and a new dub is utterly worthless. We've seen evidence of this with some of the crazyness we saw with a few countries having a new dub cast for Kai. And that wasn't even 'replacing' the original, imagine the shitstorm they would have gotten if they went 'Yeah... the old dub is terrible, we can do much better now, so we will never be using the old one again, and here is a much better one.'
Original Digimon series aired 12 years ago in the USA, it's starting to enter that zone that many franchises enter where, you can still appeal to old fans and get them back, but not if you just disrespect what they saw in the first place.
Also, I don't actually think Funi will announce Xros Wars at AX, I'd just like it if they did, so I made that my crazy prediction for the con.
A guy can hope.
