Ajay wrote:Rial's doing wonders with Bulma,
While my experience with the Super dub is almost non-existent, I have heard some of Rial's Bulma and was... less than impressed to put it mildly.
Don't get me wrong: I generally have NOTHING at all whatsoever against Rial as an actress, and I've heard her consistently be more than perfectly fine and capable in plenty of other dubs going back decades now. Her Bulma though, at least in the bits that I've listened to, was unbelievably shrill and obnoxious, playing her as an over-the-top nagging harpy; something which Tsuru has just about NEVER done, generally always taking the more cool and classy approach with her. Could just be I happened to listen in at the "wrong" moments, but Bulma in general shouldn't really be played like that
at all, even at her worst moments.
Seems to be, yet again, a deliberate creative choice in the directing over on FUNi's end of things, rather than an issue with the actress herself (who I know is capable of better than this).
Ajay wrote:I think that's ultimately why I'm so annoyed by unnecessary changes, and why I embarrassingly lost my cool this week. All the ingredients for a truly faithful and authentic Dragon Ball experience are here, but they're totally let down by bad script writing, strange directorial decisions, and silly voice effects. I don't harp on the dub's shortcomings because I don't like that it exists, or that I'm some hopeless weeby elitist; I pick at it because it's so close to letting both sub and dub fans alike discuss the show on equal footing, but it's let down by bad decisions. I wanna talk about the show, not how 'funny' the "Let's go see Yamcha" addition was to someone. It's like they took a huge leap forward with Kai, then stumbled backwards for Super, forgetting that they're meant to be translating the Japanese experience into English, and not writing their own show and characters like it's the 90s.
It's so nearly where it needs to be... but just not quite, and that's so frustrating knowing how capable they are.
Honestly, are we
really that surprised by this at this point?
While I haven't generally make it a point to go out of my way to follow just about anything relating to the dub over the years (at least not since the Saban-era back in the mid/late 90s), just by sheer presence and osmosis within this fanbase now I've seen more than my fair share of how Sabat and Schemmel at least approach the topic of the FUNimation Dragon Ball dubbing in general throughout many interviews over the years; and its pretty obvious via a number of comments they've made that there's a LOT of ego involved at this point.
Even from the limited exposure to their thoughts (and others like Gen Fukanaga's) that I've had now, I've long gotten the sense from them that there are people over at FUNimation who see
themselves as the main reason that the show took off in the U.S. rather than just the show in and of itself, and that their special brand of "remixing" things is a necessary and vital component for its success rather than totally needless and burdensome meddling that does incredibly little beyond creating and stoking totally needless divisions and fracturing within the fanbase. The sad fact that there are a number of dub fans, who for various reasons cling maddeningly to the old Z dub, who eagerly agree with this sentiment and approach only seems to encourage it further.
That Kai (or at least portions of Kai, since its my understanding that its accuracy has wavered a bit in certain segments: I don't know that for sure though, so please correct me if I'm mistaken) now looks like a random, incidental fluke at this point rather than the new way of doing things going forward doesn't really come as much of a surprise to me, given some of the attitude and personalities that are still involved in the dub to this day.
The reality is that Dragon Ball Z singlehandedly
BUILT FUNimation into an empire from pretty much
nothing. They came into things as a nobody little shitstain of a local-yokel production studio and are now as of most of the last decade now pretty much THE top name in U.S. anime licensing, and became so pretty much
entirely on the basis of DB raking in heaptons of mountains of cash for them. That there are people behind the scenes there who feel a certain sense of "ownership" over it, that its somehow "their" baby rather than Toriyama or Toei's and that they're somehow something more beyond just the middlemen responsible for importing it across territories shouldn't come off as a shock given their history with it and its vital role in their financial success. Not to mention given the swaths of the fanbase here who place such a GREAT deal more emphasis on the English voices (and other absurd things like the Faulconer score, or Cartoon Network's marketing for it back in the early 2000s) over just about everything else that makes DB what it is.
Despite the fact that the show would've basically done this for pretty much ANYONE who got it significant exposure on the air here (as its historically done for pretty much everyone across the globe time and time and time again throughout the decades), human ego is what it is, and unfortunately there appears to be a sense over at FUNimation (among some people there at least) for quite some time now that they're "creatives" who were an instrumental part of this "wonky little Japanese obscurity" taking off into a huge phenomenon in the U.S. rather than just INCREDIBLY lucky folks who were handed this already-proven and tested money-printing machine giftwrapped on a platter purely by the grace of nepotism for Fukanaga's family connections back in the mid-90s, and all they had to do was put it where enough people would see it while it did the rest, regardless of whatever else they may have done to it in the process.
Or at least that's how its often appeared to be the case from what I can tell as someone who generally doesn't follow this stuff or most of the people involved all that particularly closely: any of the number of people here who are much more intimate with following these folks over the years, by all means please correct any incorrect appraisals I very well might be making here.
