ABED wrote:Blade wrote:ABED wrote:FUNi was a young company and their negotiating skills were practically non-existent. They only got the show because of nepotism. Notice that DBZ became a massive hit when they got on a good timeslot on a channel people watched, hence not a failure.
Okay, cool - but you've entirely failed to answer my questions and explain what you were actually getting at in your reply. How was your response relevant or disproving of my argument? What was the take-home message in your post, other than to make an ad hominem remark?
It was in the post, you keep using that argument as some proof that DB wouldn't have made it unless they changed it to suit American audiences. DB failed not because the show itself wouldn't appeal to American children. I don't think showing DBZ first before going back to DB was a bad move, but that doesn't neccessitate the changes they made. DBZ became a success once it was put on a station that people watched, and in a good timeslot, and was advertised, not because of the ridiculous changes.
I didn't mean "embarassing" as an attack, but that point you made comes off as ignorant.
When you write that DBZ was targeted to "uninitiated masses" what does that even mean? Because they don't know the original, they must get a changed product? How would that make the audience any more initiated? Japanese fans of the show or the manga were initiated to the story because they watched or read the story. You don't have to be a connoisseur to watch a show that's close the source material. It explains as it goes along. You don't need any previous knowledge to get it.
If people need background on characters then explain, don't make wholesale changes to the characters and dialog.
It seems that in the anime fandom there's a culture of over-sensitivity in regard to dubbing along with a fervent protectionism of the integrity of the source material, that demands the absolute faithfulness of any English adaptation to the original, Japanese language in-jokes, cultural content and all. This trend is particularly justified in regard to many anime series where the target audience are primarily fans of the original, but in the case of companies attempting to sell acquired titles to new audiences who have no familiarity with the source material, or even anime, there's a staunch rejection by the online community of defacing an original work.
I find it to be a rather interesting commonality that the majority of Japanese imports that have had widespread success in the Western world have been edited for content during the adaptation process. It's not just Dragonball Z, but also Pokemon, Digimon and YuGiOh - all of which were very successful, and also edited for content. This by no means is definitive proof that adapting an anime in such a way is a sure course for success, but it's a positive correlation, and in regard to this debate, holds more weight than some of the baseless conjecture that have been mooted in ripost.
Adapting a show to traverse the boundaries of language and culture is something that happens regularly across the world with literally hundreds of different shows. Take Doctor Who for example, which regularly contains a great deal of British cultural in-jokes and information in both the dialogue and plot. Many of these things are simply not included in foreign language dubs or replaced with things that are more culturally identifiable or befitting of the language they're being dubbed into, with little or any objection from the receptive audience. Whilst this doesn't mean that I'm expressing my approval of the use of colloquialisms such as 'mondo cool', it's at least something which is understandable through socio-cultural memetics to the target audience, which in turn can have a domesticating effect upon the tone and atmosphere of the show, which in Dragonball Z's case could otherwise easily mystify or alienate a foreign viewer. From a television marketting perspective, these are concerns which are incredibly important and factor heavily in the decision making processes.
Funimation's Dragonball Z dub does so much more than change small elements of dialogue in order to cater for a young American target audience, where an identification with heroic figures is particularly marked. Take episode 245 for example, where Goku first transforms into a Super Saiyan 3. If you compare the original episode to the Funimation adaptation there's a particularly noticeable difference in musical tone in Goku's transformation, with Falconer Productions depicting the transformation as a glorious, heroic moment - whereas in the original it's anything but. The pieces of Kikuchi's score used by the director of that particular episode connote the violent, dangerous and less-than-heroic elements of what Son Goku is doing - which for a protagonist in Japan is a comfortable situation as Antonia Levy notes in her article 'The New American Hero: Made in Japan'. Levy notes that in Japan it's normal for a heroic figure to move outside the moral 'black and white' and states that it's not 'necessary for a manga or anime hero to be a saint, to fight for the right side or even be successful'. In Robin Brenner's book 'Understanding Manga and Anime' he comments on this by stating that American adaptations often 'edit or dramatically alter anime' to avoid issues with Western viewers failing to 'adapt to the storytelling style'. Funimation's adaptation of this episode in particular is really quite representative of what these academics are saying. There's this prevalent opinion that Funimation's decisions were made on-the-fly and without wider intent, but that's entirely baseless, for here is an example of a totally deliberate attempt to tailor the communicative tone of the episode towards a particular demographic of people. Whilst the majority of people on this forum no doubt harbor disdain towards Funimation's 'Superman-ificiation' of Goku into the traditional white heroic figure mold that the original character is somewhat departed from, the success of this element of their adaptation was substantial in how it effected audience recognition of Goku as a protagonist, in turn providing them a powerful marketing tool by which the show could be easily identified with. I'd even go as far to say that the Goku portrayed in Funimation's dub is one of the most successful American heroes thus far of the 21st century, as the character has become ingrained in the hearts and minds of millions as not being a strange, pointy-haired export from Japan, but instead a superhero comparable (and frequently so) to other domestic inventions such as Super Man.
'Multiculturalism means nothing in Japan, for every outside culture must pass first through the Japanese filter, rendering it entirely Japanese in the process.' - Julian Cope.
