SSVegetto wrote:Penguintruth wrote:
Character motivations are minor details? Tone is a minor detail?
You know, I don't get hung up on minor details between Japanese versions and English dubs. I get hung up on enormous details like those.
From what I have seen, most of their motivations seem to be the same.
Son Goku (sub): I wanna fight just for the sake of fighting and becoming better at martial arts for no other reason other than because I enjoy it.
Goku (dub): I wanna fight to protect innocent people, right wrongs, and smash evil doers.
Vegeta (sub): I worked as a genocidal mass murderer for hire because I’m a sick, sadistic bastard who gets his rocks off inflicting pain and death on people weaker than I am, and lording my power over the defenseless. I live for making the helpless suffer.
Vegeta (dub): I worked as a genocidal mass murderer for hire because Freeza was such a bad influence on me when I was young and impressionable. I never would’ve done it if I had known better and had a positive influence, honest!
The Saiya-jin race (sub): We’re a bunch of psychopathic, horrifically brutal space barbarians who rape and pillage the shit out of whatever society we stumble across in our travels, so we can steal all their cool shit for ourselves. We have zero problems slaughtering defenseless men, women, and children for no better reason than killing boredom. We’re also a bunch of sniverling, cheating, rat bastards who will say or do or kill anything to stay alive and stay on top. We don’t give a shit about anything else and are happy as long as we have booze, tits, and the mutilated corpses of our slain victims around us at all times. We also wind up working for a genocide-for-profit company cause it lets us do our usual schtick, while also getting paid for it and staying in the good graces of the scrawny bad man with horns who’s so powerful he could probably wipe us all out with bad breath alone.
The Saiyan race (dub): We’re an honor-bound, cultured race of warrior noblemen who also work for a genocide-for-profit company, regardless of the fact that there’s absolutely zero honor in such work, and that it’s about as polar opposite of anything cultured or noble as you can get. We also do it to stay in the good graces of the powerful tyrant who can wipe us out, which is pretty cowardly and also flies directly in the face of anything noble or honorably warrior-like. This crisscrossing of totally conflicting concepts and motivations doesn’t make a lick of fucking sense, but hey that’s cool, cause it makes the background of two of the main characters much more palatable for dipshit kids to idolize guilt-free and with zero moral grey areas to concern their merchandise money-giving heads over.
Run the definition of “same” by me again?
SSVegetto wrote:Tone? Both dubs do have tone? Defeat villain, train, fight the next villain, etc. All that other stuff I see is just minor details.
What you just described isn’t the “tone” but rather the general story formula. Those are two
entirely different things. Tone is a lot of things, and is generally the networth of things like the music, the acting style, the art and animation, the directing, the sound effects, the finer details of different things, and the general atmosphere that they all come together to bring.
That’s what “tone” is.
“Character A kills character B and goes from point C to point D” isn’t tone, it’s the most baseline and brisk of summations about the overall story progression, and in approximately soundbite/TV Guide summary length at that. Only reason the dub absolutely
cannot fuck with this no matter what is because it’s inherent to the visuals and to the animation itself. This seems to be the overwhelmingly biggest sharing theme that links both versions, and it only is because there’s absolutely no choice in the matter without FUNi having to make their own show totally from scratch or pull a Robotech/Windaria with the footage. The rest is audio vandalism that’s youtube fan-parody quality at best.
SSVegetto wrote:Well, I found myself more emotional when watching the English dub. It's like they improved Akira Toriyama's story. Not so much it that it actually changes the show.
So you’re telling me that in say, the Bardock special, when Bardock lights a Kannasan on fire with a Ki attack and the Kannasan is yelling his last warning to Bardock about the psychic visions over his own screams of agony in the original and the dub goes ahead and changes this via the dialogue so that the Kannasan isn’t on fire but is “absorbing and converting the energy” of the attack while calmly explaining the psychic situation to Bardock (yes this is a real change from the sub to dub: look it up on your Bardock DVD and see for yourself)… you’re telling me that the way the original did this scene is LESS cool than the dub’s revision, and that the dub is more emotional and an improvement over it?
Again I’ll repeat: you’re arguing that a version of a show where a dude
gets lit on fire and burns to death while screaming his last words in agony and defiance is LESS badass than a different version where he’s perfectly okay and is just absorbing energy while saying his last words totally normal like nothing's happening; and that the latter is somehow an improvement on the former. I have this right?
