Weird Old Dub Stuff

[Vegetto95]

I very much disagree. The actors have significantly improved since Z. If you don't like the voices they use for their characters, that's fine, but their acting quality has improved significantly. I also don't think you're taking into account the actors that don't do those types of voices. Sabat's voices for Piccolo & Vegeta are also SIGNIFICANTLY less gruff than they used to be. Since Kai (although, the redub of Dead Zone even earlier for Piccolo), his Vegeta's way less gruff & he gave him an uppercrust accent to go with him being a prince while his Piccolo's been smoothed out to sounding more like his Zoro voice, which is very closer to his natural speaking voice. I also can't tell you how often I was annoyed at Sean Schemmel's performance as Goku in the Z dub. I genuinely have NO idea how anyone could think that performance was good outside of nostalgia. The voice tone hasn't changed much, but he now sounds much more confident in the role & I don't think he's missed a beat as the character since Kai. Say what you will about Schemmel himself, but his Goku is solid nowadays.

Yeeeeah, gonna have to agree to disagree on Sabat's Vegeta. Like I said in my reply to jjgp earlier, his Vegeta has more or less remained almost exactly the same since 2002-3. Saying that he's "SIGNIFICANTLY less gruff" is just... well, I'm REALLY trying to be nice here, but that is just a completely absurd statement. He 100,000% still does the character with the same old absolutely UNBEARABLE grunty, strainy, gravelly, over-the-top cartoony WWE fake tough guy affectation that does the character ZERO favors. Quite frankly, whatever slight improvements Sabat might have made in terms of line delivery over the years are rendered COMPLETELY moot by how absolutely fucking stupid and grating his Vegeta voice still sounds. It's simply impossible to deliver naturalistic, believable lines when you're CONSTANTLY straining to sound like the ungodly lovechild of Randy Savage, Rex Kwon Do, and RFK, Jr.

His Piccolo is slightly more tolerable (at the very least I don't wanna rip my eardrums out when I hear it like his Vegeta lmao), but it does still very much come across as WAY too tryhard (let's be real, damn near ALL of Sabat's roles do) and doesn't have that organic feel that Furukawa's delivery so effortlessly evokes.

Schemmel... eh, he's okay. He's tolerable I guess. I don't have any particularly strong feelings towards his performance one way or another anymore (well, at least with his Gokū... his Kaiō, however, is still complete and utter earrape just as it has been since 1999), but I think he still does have issues with some of the more serious and/or angry moments, ESPECIALLY his yells and Kiais, where he does still overact a bit too much in the old FUNimation style. But at the end of the day, neutral opinion or otherwise, he's just not my Son Gokū.

As for FUNi only licensing certain types of anime more often than not, you can't really blame them for that. They're a business & they needed to make money. Most anime people outside of Japan & in the US watch or check out tends to be Shonen stuff or adjacent genres. While there's certainly a market for other genres, they're nowhere near as big as the one for Shonen.

Oh come now, you know that's a sorry excuse. FUNimation already had a MASSIVE monopolistic STRANGLEHOLD on the US anime licensing industry even before the merger with Crunchyroll and RightStuf orchestrated by Sony. And in this post-FUNimation/Crunchyroll/RightStuf all merged into one massive conglomeration abomination under Sony all David Cronenberg/Brian Yuzna/Screaming Mad George style world? PFFFFFFFT. Yeah, ZERO question that they could ABSOLUTELY, EASILY afford a more eclectic home video output than they've been offering for the past ~decade. I'm preeeetty sure that they simply just don't care to anymore.

Here's the thing though... despite FUNiCrunchy's licensing ouevre nowadays being significantly more narrow and shallow than their vastly more eclectic releases 20-odd years ago... I wouldn't mind that anywhere near as much if THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE FILLING THOSE SHOES.

Throughout the entirety of the 2000s, in addition to FUNimation picking up anything and everything they could in an attempt to finally establish themselves more firmly in the US anime market after YEEEAAARS of having Dragon Ball aaaaand... pretty much nothing else, you also had Pioneer/Geneon, ADV, Bandai Entertainment, Anime Works, as well as Manga Entertainment and U.S. Manga Corps to a slightly lesser degree, AALLLL licensing and releasing new anime left and fucking right, from a veritable multitude of different genres, demographics, and styles, regardless if if was a huge marquee title or not. Odds were 8 to 9 outta 10 back then that if an anime was even just BARELY moderately popular in Japan, ONE of those companies was bound to pick it up, give it an at least halfway-decent dub, and put out it out on DVD. And every goddamn one of them had been doing exactly that since least the early 90s, if not the late 80s, albeit on VHS obviously.

Compared to nowadays, though? Aside from FUNimation/Crunchyroll, who else is out there still regularly picking up new anime licenses? Sentai Filmworks hasn't picked up anything new in at least five years, and has spent that time since almost exclusively re-releasing formerly out-of-print titles of theirs from ten or so years ago (and even back when they were still picking up new titles regularly, the overwhelming majority of them were either worthless, disgustingly sexist ecchi garbage or SUPER generic, samey, forgettable slice of life comedies).

Discotek Media, for as much as I absolutely fucking adore them, traffic EXCLUSIVELY in older media, be it from 20 years ago or 50-60 years ago, a large quantity of which are re-releases of license rescues that were put out on DVD by one of the aforementioned companies (ADV, Pioneer, Bandai, etc.) during the 2000s.

Viz Media has probably picked up maybe two or three new series in the last 20 years, probably the most recent of which was Chainsaw Man a few years back, which is, well... just another generic, overrated, dime-a-dozen uber-popular action shōnen of the moment series lmao. Otherwise, they've proven that they're clearly quite content to just keep churning out 400 re-releases of Bleach, Naruto, Pokémon, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, InuYasha, Death Note, Ranma 1/2, and almost NOTHING the fuck else.

Aniplex of America and NIS of America similarly haven't licensed anything new in god fucking knows how long, and they aren't even bothering to put out any re-releases either like Sentai. Hell, NIS's most recent Blu-ray release was from ALLLLL the way the fuck back in 2021!! (and even THAT was a re-release of a title they originally put out on DVD back around 2010 or so!)

Like, yeah... nowadays, it's JUST FUNimation/Crunchyroll, and has been for the ENTIRETY of the current decade. THAT'S why I take such issue with their ridiculously narrow licensing output, because unlike 15-20 years ago, there's no longer ANYONE else picking up their slack (a slack that, again, they themselves didn't even have at that time).

Again, obviously none of this is in regards to the streaming side of things, where, yes, a HUGE number of new anime constantly get deals to be on Crunchyroll or Hulu or Netflix or Prime Video or whatever else have you. BUT, that's still to this day such a different kind of game entirely than the home video licensing side that it's pretty much fully irrelevant to the point being made.

At the end of the day, I like owning the anime I enjoy. And I am the kind of person that, if possible, would MUCH rather fill up my shelf space than my hard drive space, if you get my meaning. FUNimation/Crunchyroll, Viz, Sentai, Discotek, etc. all still VERY regularly put out physical media... and yet they're leaving SO. FUCKING. MANY series to instead just get thrown onto streaming and forgotten, a HUGE portion of which would ABSOLUTELY have gotten physical media releases in the landscape from 15-20 years ago.

So I have to just sit here and watch series I've enjoyed over the last few years such as Lazarus, Dorohedoro, Shabake, Journal with Witch, The Darwin Incident, Trillion Game, The Fable, Oedo Fire Slayers, Jouran: The Princess of Snow and Blood, etc. all go to stagnate and die on some streaming platform when once upon a time, really NOT all that long ago in the grand scheme of things, I might rather have been able to hold them in my own two hands and just put their discs into my Blu-ray player easy-peasy without having to worry about internet connection signal, buffering, compression, or whether or not it'll even still be available on a certain streaming platform next month. And it really, REALLY doesn't have to be that way at ALL, even just counting the current crop of licensing companies.

Shonen is not a genre, its a demographic.

Absolutely right. GOD, I wish there were more people like you out there on the internet who actually understand that, I don't see it ANYWHERE NEAR enough. Scream it from the rooftops!!!

And another thing I wish more people understood... shōnen's a demographic primarily targeted towards elementary and middle school-aged boys, NOT 12-19 year old teenagers or whatever the way SO many people I've seen would like you to believe lmaooo. Obviously there's nothing inherently wrong with something being aimed mainly towards children in and of itself, nor is there with liking something of that nature (I mean... here we all are, the vast majority of us fully grown adults, on a Dragon Ball forum for chrissakes lmao), but I wish people would just be honest about that.

[Yellow Flower King]

Toshio Furukawa doing Piccolo effortlessly

I agree with this but Piccolo was not easy for Toshio Furukawa. He had to put a lot of effort and had to do retakes. At one point he asked "Well, if my voice is no unfitting, why not cast someone else?" And the sound director said "I picked you above so many actors" and moved by his faith Furukawa rolled with it. I still think Toshio runs a million circles around Sabat though.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Shonen is not a genre, its a demographic.

Absolutely right. GOD, I wish there were more people like you out there on the internet who actually understand that, I don't see it ANYWHERE NEAR enough. Scream it from the rooftops!!!

Honestly, I'm guilty of having this misconception myself. Thankfully I've since been educated. Sadly I don't think the "Shonen is a genre" narrative will be going away as the term is so ingrained in the anime fandom consciousness.

Its a falsehood that will only cause confusion for years to come, as it has done since Naruto, Bleach, One Piece and so many more Dragon Ball-inspired series came on the scene.

Guess all we can do is try and educate people that Dragon Ball is wuxia/martial arts fantasy, Naruto is ninja fantasy, etc and "shonen" defines not the type of story being told but the target audience (young boys).

I mean, Your Lie In April is also a shonen title, but its nothing like any of the above, so calling any series with heavy action "shonen" is pretty meaningless.

[WittyUsername]

Since we’re apparently getting into the “Shonen is a demographic, not a genre” discourse, I’d just like to point out that YA is a demographic as well, yet people regularly refer to it in a way that similarly makes it sound like a genre. I personally don’t think it’s worth getting all that hung up about.

[M16U3L2015]

Shonen is not a genre, its a demographic.

Absolutely right. GOD, I wish there were more people like you out there on the internet who actually understand that, I don't see it ANYWHERE NEAR enough. Scream it from the rooftops!!!

I mean, Your Lie In April is also a shonen title, but its nothing like any of the above, so calling any series with heavy action "shonen" is pretty meaningless.

And I this isn't limited to shonen; I recall that the two manga adaptations of Cowboy Bebop were published in a shojo magazine

[Vegetto95]

Honestly, I'm guilty of having this misconception myself. Thankfully I've since been educated. Sadly I don't think the "Shonen is a genre" narrative will be going away as the term is so ingrained in the anime fandom consciousness.

Its a falsehood that will only cause confusion for years to come, as it has done since Naruto, Bleach, One Piece and so many more Dragon Ball-inspired series came on the scene.

Guess all we can do is try and educate people that Dragon Ball is wuxia/martial arts fantasy, Naruto is ninja fantasy, etc and "shonen" defines not the type of story being told but the target audience (young boys).

I mean, Your Lie In April is also a shonen title, but its nothing like any of the above, so calling any series with heavy action "shonen" is pretty meaningless.

It's to the point where I've seen PLENTY of people call One Punch Man shōnen... despite the manga being published in a seinen magazine (and even then, the manga itself is an adaptation of the original webcomic, which technically doesn't even HAVE a demographic label to begin with)

Like, shōnen manga/anime cover SOOOOO many different styles and genres, from wacky gag comedy (Dr. Slump, Bobo-Bo Bo-Bobobo) to romance (Kimagure Orange Road, Video Girl Ai), horror (The Drifting Classroom, Asura), medical drama (Black Jack, Doctor K), crime procedural (Detective Conan, City Hunter), war drama (Area 88, Barefoot Gen), and so on and so forth, all of which are SOOORELY lacking in all of the "super-powered action" that the demographic typically tends to be associated with in the US.

Hell, this current season features two anime adaptations of shōnen manga (again, airing RIGHT NOW lol) by the names of Akane-banashi and Eren the Southpaw; the former of which focuses almost entirely on a girl who's training to become a professional performer in the classical Japanese comedic storytelling art of Rakugo, and the latter on a guy and a girl, both young adults early on in their careers fresh out of college, who respectively become a professional graphic designer at an advertising company and famous graffiti artist (and I ain't talkin' outta my ass here... I've been watching both for over a month now since they started airing lol). And next season in a few months will feature the adaptation of shōnen manga Bless, which revolves around - wait for it --- a supermodel and a makeup artist!! So yeah... HAAAARDLY what most casual anime fans think "shōnen" means

I really think a lot of the widespread misconception comes from the ever-increasing amount of well... normies, for lack of a better term ("casuals" is probably fitting too) over the last 10-15 years who generally only watch a VERY small, select few of only the most contemporarily popular action shone and who VERY mistakenly believe that nearly ALL anime are like that.

And hey, NOTHING inherently wrong with being a casual and only watching the hot, popular shit. Everybody's free to live their own lives how they wanna, I ain't arguin' against that. But that's no excuse for the MASS spreading of BLATANT and EASILY refutable misinformation from those types of people regarding what is EASILY one of the most highly visible and up-front aspects of the entire anime and manga industry with almost very little in the way of pushback from the few people who actually DO know what they're talking about lol

And I this isn't limited to shonen; I recall that the two manga adaptations of Cowboy Bebop were published in a shojo magazine

Yup, that's absolutely right!! I read both (hell, I own them lmao, Tokyopop put them out back in the early 2000s), and they're pretty fun. Nowhere near as good as the anime (but then, that's a REEEEAALLYYY high bar lmao), but definitely solid and worth a read. And they're SUPER short, one series is only two volumes and the other three.

[LostTimeLord]

It's to the point where I've seen PLENTY of people call One Punch Man shōnen... despite the manga being published in a seinen magazine

To be fair, the English version is published in Shonen Jump and the volumes have Shonen Jump branding on the spine. It's not exactly a huge leap to assume that a 'Shonen Jump manga' is shōnen.

[Yellow Flower King]

It's to the point where I've seen PLENTY of people call One Punch Man shōnen... despite the manga being published in a seinen magazine

To be fair, the English version is published in Shonen Jump and the volumes have Shonen Jump branding on the spine. It's not exactly a huge leap to assume that a 'Shonen Jump manga' is shōnen.

That's not what anyone said. If anything people should learn Shonen Jump manga isnt always fights or sports. It can be romance or mystery and so on.

[Scsigs]

It should be said, outside of Japan, Shonen is treated as a synonym for "action" rather than an age demographic by most people. So, people thinking so can't be faulted for it, imo.

[M16U3L2015]

Although the problem is that this leads to generalizations even about other demographics, there are still many people—including among anime and manga fans—who believe that all shojo manga are about romance or that all seinen manga are dark and serious.

[LostTimeLord]

That's not what anyone said.

I directly quoted their post. What does "that" refer to? Am I quote mining, or something?

[SylentEcho]

Yeeeeah, gonna have to agree to disagree on Sabat's Vegeta. Like I said in my reply to jjgp earlier, his Vegeta has more or less remained almost exactly the same since 2002-3. Saying that he's "SIGNIFICANTLY less gruff" is just... well, I'm REALLY trying to be nice here, but that is just a completely absurd statement. He 100,000% still does the character with the same old absolutely UNBEARABLE grunty, strainy, gravelly, over-the-top cartoony WWE fake tough guy affectation that does the character ZERO favors. Quite frankly, whatever slight improvements Sabat might have made in terms of line delivery over the years are rendered COMPLETELY moot by how absolutely fucking stupid and grating his Vegeta voice still sounds. It's simply impossible to deliver naturalistic, believable lines when you're CONSTANTLY straining to sound like the ungodly lovechild of Randy Savage, Rex Kwon Do, and RFK, Jr.

His Piccolo is slightly more tolerable (at the very least I don't wanna rip my eardrums out when I hear it like his Vegeta lmao), but it does still very much come across as WAY too tryhard (let's be real, damn near ALL of Sabat's roles do) and doesn't have that organic feel that Furukawa's delivery so effortlessly evokes.

Schemmel... eh, he's okay. He's tolerable I guess. I don't have any particularly strong feelings towards his performance one way or another anymore (well, at least with his Gokū... his Kaiō, however, is still complete and utter earrape just as it has been since 1999), but I think he still does have issues with some of the more serious and/or angry moments, ESPECIALLY his yells and Kiais, where he does still overact a bit too much in the old FUNimation style. But at the end of the day, neutral opinion or otherwise, he's just not my Son Gokū.

I agree. It doesn't seem like Vegeta would naturally sound like that. His slightly more gruff voice during the original Android saga was okay-ish.

Still, Horikawa's Vegeta has a certain cadence, that builds from calm, confident to tense sometimes in one sentence, which is absent in the English version. In Japanese, he sounds confident most of the time, but it somehow sounds only cocky in the dub.

Schemmel on the other hand seems to think that portraying Goku more accurately just means making his voice go higher. These guys were amateurs that learnt on the job unlike their Saban counterparts who were already pros. Piccolo sounds more like a stoic narrator than the measured, deliberate cadence with subtle rises and falls we get in the Japanese version.

I like watching my old Toonami tapes for nostalgia, but DB in English is kinda unbearable.

[Scsigs]

Although the problem is that this leads to generalizations even about other demographics, there are still many people—including among anime and manga fans—who believe that all shojo manga are about romance or that all seinen manga are dark and serious.

I mean, sure, but is that a regular Joe's fault if they're not introduced tot he terms correctly by these companies?

I agree. It doesn't seem like Vegeta would naturally sound like that. His slightly more gruff voice during the original Android saga was okay-ish.

Still, Horikawa's Vegeta has a certain cadence, that builds from calm, confident to tense sometimes in one sentence, which is absent in the English version. In Japanese, he sounds confident most of the time, but it somehow sounds only cocky in the dub.

Schemmel on the other hand seems to think that portraying Goku more accurately just means making his voice go higher. These guys were amateurs that learnt on the job unlike their Saban counterparts who were already pros. Piccolo sounds more like a stoic narrator than the measured, deliberate cadence with subtle rises and falls we get in the Japanese version.

I like watching my old Toonami tapes for nostalgia, but DB in English is kinda unbearable.

People's voices can vary wildly even when they're younger. However, I vastly prefer Sabat's Vegeta nowadays compared to 1999-2009. Like, it's still deeper than you might expect, but he's rounded it out to being more smooth, which I appreciate. It's similar to how Lanipator did the same thing in DBZA. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's still good in its own way. I also don't think he always sounds just cocky. The old dubs, maybe, but the newer dubs, nah.

Schemmel...isn't that great at trying to portray Goku's dumber moments. He tries to go higher-pitched to imitate Nozawa, but he wasn't hired for that back in 1999. He was hired as a voice match for Peter Kelamis & at a time where the dubs were aiming to make the characters sound "cool" as opposed to more accurate to the Japanese portrayals. Now, in every other instance, I feel Schemmel nowadays delivers very well, but he struggles with the more comedic moments that rely on those types of vocal inflections. Nozawa has a more natural range for those that he lacks.

The old dubs were pretty bad, though you can see they got better over time. First the translations & scripts were shit, then the acting was shit when they changed the cast, then they got slightly better as they went, then the scripts got good for the most part & the voice direction generally improved so that even the more divisive performances were more tolerable, then with Kai, they stepped it up & went more out of their way to be more accurate. First with the scripts, then some of the performances. I don't think we would've gotten Chris Ayres as Freeza if they didn't. Sabat can say it was because Linda Young couldn't keep up with their scripts' dialogue as much as he wants (which, there's probably SOME truth to), but I like to think it's more to cast someone who actually fit his character better. Even Bulma, I think Monica Rial pulls off better than Tiffany Vollmer who always sounded wooden to me. And say what you will about Nadolny, I think she fits as kid Goku, but not really Gohan. Colleen Clinkenbeard fits better. And overall, I think the performances are just more relaxed in Kai.
When you grow up with these actors & their performances, trust me when I say that they definitely vastly improved over time. If you're hoping for 100% accuracy to the Japanese performances, you're not gonna get that with most of them, but taken on their own merits, they're good.

[Yellow Flower King]

It's to the point where I've seen PLENTY of people call One Punch Man shōnen... despite the manga being published in a seinen magazine

To be fair, the English version is published in Shonen Jump and the volumes have Shonen Jump branding on the spine. It's not exactly a huge leap to assume that a 'Shonen Jump manga' is shōnen.

That's not what anyone said. If anything people should learn Shonen Jump manga isnt always fights or sports. It can be romance or mystery and so on.

On second thought you are right. In my defense what I wanted to say is that they meant its WRONG for them to say OPM is Shonen but on second look they meant exactly what you said they did. My bad!

[Yuli Ban]

The issue with the "Shōnen is a Genre" misconception stems almost entirely from the fact a lot of later "Battle Shōnen" (which is the closest thing to a pseudo-genre one can agree on, if only because language evolves) is derived directly from conventions codified by disparate earlier works that really got its start with Dragon Ball. None of which actually BEGAN with Dragon Ball, but it's Dragon Ball, specifically Dragon Ball Z, that's ground zero for the misconception.

It's already well known on the forum (but certainly not the wider internet fandom) that Dragon Ball's actual genre (martial arts cultivation fantasy/wuxia (in very generic terms)/xuanhuan (in specific terms)) is the real ground zero for almost everything the story actually does. There are some outside influences beyond that (Star Wars, Astro Boy) but the stereotypical "Genre: Shōnen" weebs in the West talk of is downstream directly of Dragon Ball and Hokuto no Ken before it, both of which directly fathered loads of later works that explicitly began reducing the overtly Chinese kung fu aesthetics and vibes for something more explicitly Japanese, without actually stripping away the Chinese (and technically Indian) roots of those aesthetics.
Earlier shōnen like Yu Yu Hakusho fused both to the point it feels almost like, with minor tweaks, it could have been set in Dragon Ball's world. Naruto is where the shift really starts: Japanese ninja, yōkai, village militarism, Buddhist/Hindu-derived chakra terminology, and Shinto-ish monster folklore, but it still keeps the inherited martial-cultivation engine: training arcs, inner energy control, forbidden techniques, rank systems, exams/tournaments, transformations, secret lineages, mentor chains, and escalating villain cosmology. Kishimoto directly said he got into Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball as a child and wanted to become like Toriyama. If the manga was better realized or at least less pseudo-sentimental, could have been genuinely fantastic cultural synthesis.

Then you get to One Piece, which is... weird. I mean, it's a fun idea, and it's way too obsessed with "sakuga" nowadays for its own good, ubt I mean, Oda is a sponge. He makes everything belong by sheer tonal imperialism, so you get pirates, kaiju, circus freaks, kabuki, French aristocracy, Italian mafia, tokusatsu, kung fu dugongs, giant robots, and Looney Tunes violence, but when it uses Haki as this influence of Dragon Ball-style chi cultivation, it feels like it's there because of the "battle fiction" influence more than because it's trying to be a part of the ongoing genre convention.

Then there's Bleach, which also goes with the "intensely Japanese bushido culture, animated fantasy chanbara... but we're still using wuxia-esque qi techniques out of nowhere?" (Also, triple-overdown on the flashback sentimentality and the genre feel like this is a manga written while listening excessively to Linkin Park, Three Days Grace, and Avenged Sevenfold even more than Naruto, and you can get why I've never quite clicked with it)

And later we have My Hero Academia which is trying to be Western capeshit... but again with all the same Dragon Ball-filtered chakra-meditation qigong cultivation techniques dressed up slightly differently... for what it's worth I actually like MHA, but it is pretty obvious that modern "battle shonen" is a warped pseudo-genre that's divorced from what created it

It's the manga equivalent of late 2000s post-grunge very vaguely influenced by Nirvana and Alice in Chains, by artists who have probably never listened to more than a few songs by Black Flag, the Pixies, Saint Vitus, or Butthole Surfers but are still trying to sound heavy and angst-driven


TLDR: the reason Western fandom often thinks “shōnen = screaming power-ups, tournaments, transformations, ki blasts, escalating villains, training arcs” is not because all boys’ manga are like that, fucking obviously, but because Dragon Ball Z became the international grammar lesson, directly influenced almost every later major Japanese action-oriented anime that blew up in the Americas and Europe, and this got filtered through a sort of online nerd folk mythology