Least favourite performances in your dub

[Tian]

As we much as we love the dubs we grew up with, I'm pretty sure all of us have some performances we didn't like that much.

Here's mine from the dub I grew up with (Latin Spanish dub):

* Abel Rocha (Nail): I felt his voice as too old and nasal for the character. His Kai's VA (Roberto Mendiola) was much better for the role.

* José Luis Castañeda (Nappa and Dr. Gero): I personally think he was miscast in both roles.

His flat voice doesn't fit Nappa's brute juggernaut and Dr. Gero's evil scientist personalities. I feel Kai voice actors for those characters (Héctor Reynoso and Guillermo Coria) nailed the roles more than him.

* José Luis McConnell (King Kai's 2nd VA): One of the sad cases where the actor only can fit for one of the character's sides.

He had a too serious voice for the comical side of the character. I don't like it so much that every time I watch any scenes where he's voicing King Kai, I imagine Ricardo Hill's voice instead of his.

* Ricardo Brust (Cell): It's not voice I didn't like but the shitty robotic voice filter they put over it.

It would have been much better without it since Brust already has a deep voice, deep enough for someone like Cell. There were times where I couldn't understand what Cell was saying because of that stupid filter.

Thanks to Kami, his Kai voice actor (Salvador Reyes) didn't have that filter on his voice.

[MasenkoHA]

Stephanie Nadolny

[Vijay]

Stephanie Nadolny

Haha. "Raspy" would be an understatement I felt it killed whatever innocence Goku was supposed to embody in manga or even original anime intended to be

My dub is Speedy how could I ever bring myself to even call it a "dub" in da 1st place to say nothing of least fav performance.

But I'd say most actors did their job well. Despite horrible dialogue & engrish...

[KBABZ]

Much as I have a soft spot for the Funimation dub and adore Nadolny's Goku, Schemmel's performance as Goku in the 23rd TB is one of the worst goddamn things I've ever heard in my entire life. COMPLETELY ruins the character!

[Soppa Saia People]

i more or less grew up with the Japanese version (combination of me being a manga kid, and actually have that option), so i'll just go with that. probably my least favorite is mayumi tanaka as baba. i know people have issues with her yajirobe but to me this is her worst performance, and maybe the worst voice in the entire series. she just sounds like.... mayumi tanaka doing a, really bad, impression of junpei takiguchi, and i know people take issue with that role as well, but to me this is just a lot worse, and it's so obviously her and the voice is genuinely almost grating to listen to. it's not a huge deal, baba is a minor character and by the time tanaka takes over she doesn't appear much, but still, bleeeeh.

also anyone as kame'sennin after kōhei miyauchi passed away Are Not Very Good but the worst of what i've heard was hiroshi masuoka, i have no clue if it was a directing issue or he just wasn't suited for the role but holy cow, it impressively misses the entire mark of the character and all that, and its such a shame given that miyauchi's kame'sennin was one of the best performances, he pretty much made the character for me. ultimately roshi was more or less done as a character far before that point so it doesn't really matter, but still, it's really bad.

[MyVisionity]

John Burgmeier as Tien
Justin Cook
Kent Williams
Tiffany Volmer as Bulma
Cynthia Cranz
Chris Sabat as Vegeta, Piccolo

...impression of junpei takiguchi, and i know people take issue with that role as well, but to me this is just a lot worse...

Junpei Takiguchi as Uranai Baba is one of my favorite performances in the entire series.

[Tylerman29]

Schemmel from his debut in the Namek saga all the way through the Cell arc is god awful...some of the worst acting I've ever heard.
It's really hard to pick just 1 from the DBZ FUNi dub..they are all pretty bad performances.

I'm only in the Namek arc in my JP complete DB, Z, GT watch, and so far, I love every single performance.

John Burgmeier as Tien

IDK why, but in Kai he is one of my favorite voices. He improved a lot.

[Danfun64]

My dub is Speedy

What the hell? The main way your dub could be Speedy is if you grew up in Malaysia before the Malay dubs were created and broadcast. Even then, Speedy imported BLT DB Movie 1 and a large chunk of the Saban and Funi Z dubs after giving up on running the Z series like 12 episodes in or however long they did it...

Though technically speaking, the Speedy dub was a dub. It may have had it's fair share of fatal flaws: It's sound mixing suffered from tape distortion one day, no M/E audio the next; tminology wasn't guaranteed to be consistent from film to film (Krillin was IIRC called Kuririn in a bulk of the early Z films, Infinite Hands in DBZ Movie 9, Mohan in DB Movie 2); sometimes Goku was Gohan and vice versa; the acting was very poor (though I thought Speedy Gohan's sadness when he was complaining to Piccolo right before the latter was about to abandon him for the wilderness training was better after than Old Serbian Killin crying over Goku's death from that one clip); the list goes on. There's really no reason to watch Speedy when almost every other English movie dub has better acting (though the Solar Entertainment dub of DBZ Movies 10-11 has poor acting of it's own. For example, the poor imitation of Betty Boop that serves as Android 18's voice. "Mr. Satan was fucking[/talking] to me first." But despite Speedy being so bad that it's only enjoyable in small doses, it does have the basic qualities of a dub. It has several "actors" and uses them to speak dialogue in a different language than the original source. While it isn't really focused on lip sync, it does make a bit of an effort to have characters speak when they are supposed to. Speedy may be bottom of the barrel, but it's still in the barrel of dubbing.

[Xeogran]

The Polish dub of DBS had Goten sound 20 year older than he is.. I don't know how this casting was approved. I'd understand if it was 90s where most shows had goofy dubs, but to be like that in 2018 is just weird.

[Robo4900]

My dub is the Westwood Z dub, really. Whenever I watched the show on TV, it always tended to be from the Trunks saga or later, and being in the UK, that means basically I mostly saw the Westwood dub.

And my least favourite performance there is Terry Klassen as Roshi.
I do like Terry Klassen as Kuririn, Babidi, and... Whichever one of the Kaios he played... But his Roshi is just awful IMO.

Bonus round:
Roger Rhodes as Vegeta in Blue Water's GT.
I will defend Blue Water's GT dub to the ends of the earth, and I maintain that it is a solid piece of dubbing work on the whole (and honestly their work on DB was pretty cool too, though they were held back by the censored French video masters, and Funimation's crappy scripts), but Blue Water are frickin' lucky that Vegeta didn't have a large role in GT, because holy shit was Roger Rhodes a miscasting as Vegeta. Maybe he could've given a better take under different circumstances, but what he's doing with the role just does not work!!
And if anyone thinks I'm being mean...
I hope Ocean get to dub Kai TFC one day, and they get Roger Rhodes to dub fake Vegeta. That'd be a good gag, and I'm sure he'd be up for it (though it'd be much funnier if they got the Funi cast to do that instead). And to continue this lighter note I'm ending on: Despite not being a good Vegeta, Rhodes was a pretty great Karin.

[10gigtriforce]

Terry Klassen - Krillin in the ocean dub. just... by far the worst part of that dub and i prefer most of its voices to funi's. but his Krillin is just so bad...

[MasenkoHA]

Terry Klassen - Krillin in the ocean dub. just... by far the worst part of that dub and i prefer most of its voices to funi's. but his Krillin is just so bad...

I don’t have a problem with his Krillin but of the major players he was the one I was least sad to see go.


Also on the subject ALL the Ocean Voice actors for Roshi have been awful across the board. Mike Macfarland aint even in the same ballpark as Kohei Miyauchi but he was honestly a step up from any Canadian voices Roshi had.

Also on the subject of Roshi his GT Japanese voice was awful

[funrush]

Funi dub

• Linda Young as Freeza - sounds like a grandma
• Alexis Tipton as Kid Trunks - clearly an adult woman struggling to sound like a young boy, to the point where it's distracting
• Stephanie Nadolny as Saiyan Saga Gohan - She's fine in the Android arc but a 4 year old's voice should not be that raspy

[RandomGuy96]

Aside from the obvious choice of Young as Freeza, every single raspy child voice was just unbearable.

[OmegaRockman]

I don't really consider the Z dub to be "my" dub since I don't watch it anymore, so I'll go with Kai for the Z material. By far the worst performances are Sabat's ReaCoom and Schemmel's Kaio. I'd probably give the edge to ReaCoom since that voice is more grating to me. I guess I'm just so used to Schemmel's Kaio at this point that I've made my peace with it. I should note that in Kai both Sabat and Schemmel can at least deliver mostly competent acting despite those voices (with Schemmel managing some genuinely funny reads), but the voices themselves cause both performances to suffer as a whole.

For DB, "my" dub is the Funi dub, unfortunately. Until a proper home release or high quality fan restoration of it comes out, I don't see Blue Water's dub being a viable alternative for me. So yeah, Funi's dub. Honestly, while the whole cast was still going through growing pains af the time, the end result wasn't too bad performance-wise. Better scripts could've given this dub a passing grade. Still, the performances that stick out as particularly bad to me are kinda major: Kid Goku, Adult Goku, King Piccolo, and Piccolo Jr. The two Gokus are bad for not being able to act their way out of a paper bag (Nadolny is the worse offender but Schemmel clearly hadn't figured it out yet, either) and the two Piccolos are bad for being gravelly to the point of being distracting (Sabat was in the middle of his "I really need a lozenge" phase). The worst out of the bunch is Nadolny, and the scene I point to to solidify this point is when Goku finds Kuririn dead after the tournament. Nadolny doesn't seem able to convey anything resembling a genuine human emotion here, instead resorting to those painful "guuuh" sounds. Where Schemmel's performance came off as just kinda flat and awkward, Nadolny's comes off as outright embarrassing. To be fair, I listened to a little if Nadolny's video game work recently (not enough to make a full evaluation, mind you), and it sounded like she improved a bit. Maybe if given another chance with a more experienced director, Nadolny might be able to put out a good performance. As-is, though? Nah. The lead of the show deserves better. Have Clinkenbeard redub this stuff, PLEASE.

As for Super, the low point is Microsoft Sam Magetta. The thing that really gets to me is that the text-to-speech thing could've been used on the robots from the mecha universe (3, right? It's been a while) and it would've actually been kinda clever. For Magetta, though? He's an organic being and should therefore be treated as one. However, it's such a small thing that it's worth letting go. As for performances by actual people, I'd probably have to go with Schemmel's Black. Not that it's bad per se, but the faux-Britishness that seeped in more and more over the arc didn't work fantastically. If came off less as an emulation of Marster's performance than something based on an idea of Marster's performance. Like, "Oh, he's sophisticated and verbose? Gotta be a Brit, I guess." Again, it's not bad (MUCH improved from what he did in the games), but Schemmel showed he was capable of much better at the start of the arc when he was just doing his "regular Goku but a bad guy" voice.

[Peach]

Stephanie Nadolny

I hated her in GT so much.

Same with Pan's valley girl actress, Uub's actor, and Goten's actress in DBS.

[dbgtFO]

Goku's screams in the danish dub and a lot of the characters being voiced by the same guy without significant variation.

[kei17]

* José Luis Castañeda (Nappa and Dr. Gero): I personally think he was miscast in both roles.

His flat voice doesn't fit Nappa's brute juggernaut and Dr. Gero's evil scientist personalities. I feel Kai voice actors for those characters (Héctor Reynoso and Guillermo Coria) nailed the roles more than him.

Yeah, his flat performance is one of the worst things in the Cloverway dub. His Yi Xing Long was terrible, too.

* Ricardo Brust (Cell): It's not voice I didn't like but the shitty robotic voice filter they put over it.

It would have been much better without it since Brust already has a deep voice, deep enough for someone like Cell. There were times where I couldn't understand what Cell was saying because of that stupid filter.

Thanks to Kami, his Kai voice actor (Salvador Reyes) didn't have that filter on his voice.

I wonder why they did that to Cell's voice though he is the most non-robotic one among Gero's creations.
A lot of the Latin American DB fans seem to be blinded by nostalgia and they tend to bash the Kai dub because of its every little difference from the old Z dub, but as you say, there are things actually improved in Kai.

[Cure Dragon 255]

It might have nostalgia on its side but at least it doesnt have Karina Altamirano's horrid Gohan along with some other TERRIBLY AWFUL performances that will literally make you turn off the TV than keep listening, AND with the extremely few improvements can be counted on one hand you have to be wondering if you guys just are too biased AGAINST the Cloverway dub. I know Gloria Rocha was kind of a shitty person and did some terrible changes that literally make no sense (Maki Gero. My brother even REFUSED to say his name correctly. Which is infuriating) but her work speaks for her and its amazing.

EDIT: Also I love you Kei, but I can readily find people that hated Japanese Yi Xing Long.

[kei17]

I can readily find people that hated Japanese Yi Xing Long.

Actually I don't like Shibata's Yi Xing Long, too. He sounds too old and doesn't match the wild speaking tone of the character. He sounds like an old man trying to act like a young outlaw.