Varies from person-to-person.MasenkoHA wrote:Aren’t most of Funimation’s post-Dragon Ball/Z/GT dubs considered good?
Pretty much everyone agrees that Funi stepped up their game massively for Kai, but some -- such as myself, VegettoEX, and Danfun64 -- argue that their work on TFC left something to be desired, and the liberties they've taken with the TFC and Super scripts have been taking things too far. It wouldn't be a problem if it was just a slightly iffy added or changed line here or there, but it's consistently happening several times per episode, and it really pisses off us sub purists.
Plus, I don't think their recastings went far enough in Kai, and it's now kind of too late to fix that... Their cast did improve in Kai, and their new cast members since Kai began have been great choices(Especially the special guests like James Marsters and Brian Drummond), but there's a significant amount of legacy castings who've been kept who really aren't up to snuff in my view, such as Tenshinhan, Trunks, and Yamcha. And as many observed when Marsters was in Super, the really legitimately great actors/castings end up quite jarring in scenes where there are lesser castings/actors.
And even going back to Kai 1.0, the scripts often kept added lines and weird ways of rendering things from the old Funi Z dub, or getting lines wrong that often even the original Funi dub did get right, and often made other unnecessary adaptation changes. These aren't nearly enough to make the dub bad, but then you have some of the iffy castings that remain, and you have the added/changed lines, and you have some straight-up dubbing errors(The narrator in the final(?) episode of Kai 1.0 claims Kaio and Bubbles were revived using the Dragon Balls, which very notably isn't the case, and they left in a line that was apparently only supposed to be used in the edited dub), and then of course TFC was a pretty major step back, in terms of accuracy...
These factors all come together to mean that, while Kai onwards haven't been bad dubs, they're really only decent, and in fact the dubs have arguably slowly slid down in quality since Kai 1.0, with even Kai 1.0 itself ending worse than it started in some respects(Some Japanese terminology, particularly attack names, were properly romanised instead of using invented dub terms -- Makankosappo(Which, for the record, translates as Demonic Piercing Light Murder Gun) instead of Special Beam Cannon, for instance. This was dropped around the Namek arc).
One thing everyone is agreed on is that the Kai-onwards era of Dragon Ball dubbing is better, but whether better is good or not varies depending on how forgiving you are of the flaws in these dubs... Which usually means whether you're a dub-focused fan who goes with Kai based on the superior acting and alleged better accuracy, or if you're a sub-focused fan who's looking at the dubs with a strong knowledge of the original dialogue, spirit, and such of the Japanese version.
So, in my opinion, they're not good, just decent. But that is notable, since all Funimation's pre-Kai dubs were just different levels of crap, so it is nice that we finally have some serviceable dubs you can watch without hunting for TV rips of the Canadian dubs.
There is a slightly deeper level to this, though.
In '97, Pioneer sub-licensed the show from Funimation and did the famous uncut Ocean dubs of the first 3 Z movies, which are without a doubt the best dubbing work the franchise has received, so basically everything since then has had to live in the shadow of that. And these movies were produced under Funimation, using the cast that was -- at the time -- the only active English cast of Dragon Ball.
And even if we discount the movies, there's the AB Groupe/Ocean dubs of the series(Often referred to as the Canadian dubs), which used Funimation's scripts for Z and skipped 50 episodes, but DB and GT are an interesting case, as they were actually better dubs than Funi's. The scripts were better(GT's were originals done by Ocean, DB's were based off Funi's, but heavily corrected/rewritten), the censorship was handled better(Despite common belief, Funi's DB dub is actually quite censored, even uncut. Interestingly, Blue Water GT is actually uncut aside from a few shots of Goku's junk in episodes 8 and 15 that were either zoomed or cut), and while the cast does take time to get used to, since you're unlikely to be familiar with the Calgary-based Blue Water cast DB and GT used, if you stick with it and watch either of these dubs through, you really do warm to this cast, especially since it's a much larger casting pool, which means you don't get all the bad accents Funi's dub was loaded with that attempted to add variety to their rather small cast at the time, and generally overall you get a lot more natural fits...
And, of course, even if you do end up taking the perfectly valid position that you prefer the Funi cast, the far greater script accuracy can't be argued with, at least...
And honestly, script-wise, Blue Water's GT is arguably more accurate than Funi's Kai dub, so while the casting can be debated endlessly, it's a rather sorry state of affairs when Funi's first solid dub is arguably less accurate than the low-budget alternative dub of GT from 2003, which was Blue Water's first work on the Dragon Ball franchise, and they did it as one of their very first productions...
So, to cut a long story short: It's complicated, but the Kai onwards era of Funi's Dragon Ball dubs are decent at least.
You say that, but a lot of people still claim Funi's uncut dub of Z episodes 1-67 were a godsend because the original dub had been cut, and it's a pretty common piece of misinformation that the redub was a lot more accurate and such...WittyUsername wrote:From everything I’ve heard people say about it, it’s apparently a pretty strong dub that stays true to the original. Considering that it’s been around for 11 years, it seems difficult to believe that people would only praise it for not being the 4Kids dub.Robo4900 wrote:Pretty sure a lot of that is down to the fact it replaced the 4Kids dub, which... Well... Less said about that, the better...WittyUsername wrote:Not that I follow anime in general, but isn’t FUNimation’s dub of One Piece also held in high regard?
And given the massive amount of hype about Funi's dubs from Kai onwards, and the whole Escaflowne fiasco(Which I've been told boils down to: The original uncut dub had its reputation ruined by the TV cut that was aired, so Funimation rode that tide to produce a new dub that incorporated stuff from the sort of "Director's cut" of the series, which used their in-house cast and wasn't actually much more accurate than the original dub, and replaced the old cast with an in-house cast), I generally take praise for an uncut dub that's replacing a cut dub with a pinch of salt.
