Generally these are the comical scenes, for me personally, even though I feel one of the biggest dub problems is trying too hard to be 'funny' in areas where it may not be the biggest focus at times. Off the top of my head I can think of two from the later half of the FUNimation dub.
The first is in the Buu Saga, during the 25th Budoukai. Remember the video 'reenactment' of how Mr. Satan 'defeated' Cell? With the goofy bobblehead costumes and whatnot? Well, it was funny enough in the Japanese version, because the focus of the humor was how we the audience (and Gokou and friends as well) know this is faaaaaaar from what really happened, and on the costumes and cheesy effects, while the dialogue (though perhaps humorous in itself for what it is; typical hero-babble) is a lot more 'serious' in terms of its goal - to show the people of the world how heroic their 'Champion' was during this battle.
But to me, the fact that the dub basically rewrote this entire scene was far and above more hilarious, because it was just so...corny. And we know from a lot of the early Season 3 dub in particular FUNimation handled DBZ in a veeeeery corny way, but that was probably unintentional in that they didn't realize how lame they really were...this, however, was absolutely perfect with the scene. Having Gokou cock his head and say 'That's me!!' to his bobblehead counterpart, for instance, or dialogue from bobblehead Gokou and Vegeta such as 'Hercule is great!!' 'I wish I were him!!' in those horribly cheesy voices just had me rolling. Truly, I think the dub handled this scene brilliantly and it was a lot funnier than in the original Japanese.
My other favorite is in Movie #12, when Goten and Trunks are taking on the never-given-by-name-but-quite-obviously Hitler and the Nazi army. In the original version, when the go Super Saiyajin, 'Hitler' says something to the effect of 'What kind of yankee boys are they, dying their hair like that!!'. All well and good, because the humor in this part of the movie is in the simplicity that Goten and Trunks are fighting Nazi's.
But the English line given is something that nearly had me falling out of my chair laughing - here they are becoming Super Saiyajin against frickin' NAZI'S, and while FUNi would typically be shying away from such a referrence (though perhaps since the movies come to DVD uncut first they didn't bother, who knows, FUNi + DBZ = confuses the Hell out of me sometimes), they ENHANCE the whole Nazi joke further. I believe the line was something to the effect of 'Blonde hair? Blue eyes? Super strength? I shouldn't be fighting them, I should be RECRUITING them!!' To me that was such a brilliant line and I'm kinda disappointed the Japanese writers didn't think of that one first. It was such an obvious joke and yet watching the original version, before I'd ever seen the dub of it, that never hit me, and I'm sure it never would have. I thought that was amazing.
So, anyone else have any scenes they thought were handled better in the dub version? Be it another humorous scene line the two I gave, or a more serious-oriented scene that actually played off better, either through dialogue, the voice acting, etc? I wanna hear some stories, people
(P.S. - Don't say IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAND!! because that just makes you totally unoriginal.)
