The Best Dragon Ball dub?

[SaintEvolution]

Well, talking about the worse dubs, I have somethings here:

- Malaysian English Speedy dub(movies): I don't have much to say. It's the worst Dragon Ball dub in the world.
- Old Serbian dub: The scripts are the same from the french dub, and I don't have to say that the french script is horrible, but that is not all. The acting is extremely awful, probably one of the worse acted dubs of anything I ever seen, and again, that is not all. The lip sync and recording are horrible too. It's a complete lame.
- Greek dub:The actors were not really bad, but they were very bad directed. The translation was lazy(cause they used 4 other very different dubs to translated). The mixing and voice recording was pretty bad too. And didn't have to mention the Voice filters.
- French dub: The actors were good, but most of the screams were not dubbed. The translation was horrible too. And thanking to them, most of the european dubs are pretty bad. They became much better in Kai, but the original french dub is still bad.
- Portuguese(Portugal dub): They received the scripts from the french dub, and because of the translation was actually horrible...until they tried to put some Portuguese jokes and funny things to make the show more funnier. That kind of adaptation is usually good, but the portuguese actors upped that to another level. Portuguese Dragon Ball is more a kind of circus than "Dragon Ball" in essence. Also, they used voice filters and in some times you can hear the french dub behind the portuguese voices.
- Spanish(Spain dub): They had good actors, but again, they were badly directed, but the translation was even worse than the french one(Son Gohanda).
- UK/Big Green dub: Bad acting, and horrible translation. Thanks to France. Not much to say.
- Ocean dub(for Cell and Majin Buu arcs only): Bad and corny voice acting. Bad music. No constancy of voices(Goku had 3 voices). It's a disappointing fact that the ocean dub could became so bad after Freeza Saga.
- Hungarian dub: The acting and the voices are actually not bad. But the translation is horrible. Thanks to France again.
- Swedish Movie dubs: Similar case of the Hungarian one. The acting is not bad, but the scripts are horrible. Thanks to France...again.
- Thai dub(s): The scripts are actually good, but the voice actors weren't so, and things like sound mixing and lip syncing were horrible in the original Thai dub(in the 2 Z thai dubs, actually). For example, you can heard the directors and some irregular studio echo effects behind the voices in some times.
- Catalan dub: Bad in original DB, Saiyan and Freeza arcs. Became better in Cell and Majin Buu and it was very good in Kai. The problem with the original catalan dub is about the mixing(they didn't dubbed many screams), and translated many chapters by the french dub. Anyway, it was better than the Spanish(Spain) although, but it's still a bad dub. A similar situation goes to basque(Good acting, good voices, but horrible scripts, many no-dubbed screams), valencian and galician dubs(same thing, but with dubbed screams).



There are other dubs that are not bad, but not thaaaaat great, I think. For example, the mandarin Z, the German or the original Funimation dub. Also, there are dubs that I didn't had a good impression when I'd saw, like the albanian or the original arabic, but I didn't had saw much of them, so I'm not in a good position to judge.

[Eire]

the German

Run. Just run really fast.

[SaintEvolution]

the German

Run. Just run really fast.

German dub has some very good actors and a good acting in general. But the scripts are very bad.

It's a much better dub than the french for example, but worse than the cantonese or the brazilian ones, in other way. If we only use european dubs to make a comparison, the italian dub for example is better in most of the aspects.

But OK, it's not one of the worse dubs I ever heard. The others I listed are much worse. Buuuuuuuuuuut...it's not one of the bests, by the way.

[DragonDuck]

While not the very best, the Danish dub deserves mention. It's a great dub with very nice, well-flowing translation (even though it used the French dub as a base), passable to great acting and good mixing. While there are some bad voices like Vegeta's and Karin's (Had a female voice even though he is male), it's good in my opinion. Well … the very best? That'd have to be the Korean DB dub. They really nailed that one, it looks like

[NitroEX]

- Ocean dub(for Cell and Majin Buu arcs): Bad and corny voice acting. Bad music. No constancy of voices(Goku had 3 voices). It's a disappointing fact that the ocean dub could became so bad after Freeza Saga.

While the acting might not have been amazing in terms of anime dubs as a whole (mainly due to it being a rushed production) I don't really see how the later Ocean episodes had bad acting overall. I agree that there were flawed moments in a lot of the Android and Cell episodes but I'd argue there are plenty of good acted moments too. Bad acting to me is usually monotone or under acted performances, I find plenty of these in the Blue Water DB, GT and Funimation Z dub but not as so much in the Ocean versions.

Also if we're talking about corny dialogue I honestly think the Saban episodes had more of that especially with the heavier censorship.

[SaintEvolution]

While not the very best, the Danish dub deserves mention. It's a great dub with very nice, well-flowing translation (even though it used the French dub as a base), passable to great acting and good mixing. While there are some bad voices like Vegeta's and Karin's (Had a female voice even though he is male), it's good in my opinion. Well … the very best? That'd have to be the Korean DB dub. They really nailed that one, it looks like

There are 2 korean DB dubs. The Champ dub, and the Tooniverse one. The 2 dubs are not really bad, but I think that the Champ one is better, cause it has a better lip sync.

And about the Danish dub, it was pretty for the TV series, but for the movies....I mean, the acting and the mixing/recording were always OK, but they used the Big Green dub as the base to make the movies. For example, just see this video, is the same silly "kamehameha" line used in the French/Big Green/Other european dubs. At: 5:00:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15sNSDIo4TY

- Ocean dub(for Cell and Majin Buu arcs): Bad and corny voice acting. Bad music. No constancy of voices(Goku had 3 voices). It's a disappointing fact that the ocean dub could became so bad after Freeza Saga.

While the acting might not have been amazing in terms of anime dubs as a whole (mainly due to it being a rushed production) I don't really see how the later Ocean episodes had bad acting overall. I agree that there were flawed moments in a lot of the Android and Cell episodes but I'd argue there are plenty of good acted moments too. Bad acting to me is usually monotone or under acted performances, I find plenty of these in the Blue Water DB, GT and Funimation Z dub but not as so much in the Ocean versions.

Also if we're talking about corny dialogue I honestly think the Saban episodes had more of that especially with the heavier censorship.

Under or Over acted performances can be bad.

Anyway, the original series, for both ocean/blue water and Funimation dub were not that good. But Ocean dub achieved great moments in their uncut movies dubs, and in Saiyan/Frieza arcs. The others...not that much(Funimation started to became better in Majin Buu, but it was not much compared to their great Kai version).

[TheRed259]

Greek dub: The actors were not really bad, but they were very bad directed.

I think that for the most part of the Greek dub of DB and DBZ the casting was okay. One of the biggest miscasts in my opinion was Goku's voice in GT & Movies. His screams was the main problem. I am sure that GT and the Movies would be a lot better if Goku had another voice. (That guy also did Gohan and Babidi till episode 239 of DragonBall Z but he was a lot better back then) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxKV2rG6ypE

Now as for the best dub, I will go with the English one from Funimation. I like both the 2007 Remastered Version and the Kai one.

[NitroEX]

Under or Over acted performances can be bad.

Anyway, the original series, for both ocean/blue water and Funimation dub were not that good. But Ocean dub achieved great moments in their uncut movies dubs, and in Saiyan/Freeza arcs. The others...not that much(Funimation started to became better in Majin Buu, but it was not much compared to their great Kai version).

Are you saying you found the performances over acted then? I'm just confused as to how you find the Saban acting better by a large margin (as implied by your comments), to me they're relatively the same and I enjoy them pretty evenly.

[gohann]

Dragon Ball (FUNimation), the cast were all great here and the script despite some creative liberties was actually good. Most of the people that previously worked on DBZ had better performances here (Chris Sabat, Stephanie Nadolny, Tiffany Vollmer, etc.)

Next would be probably Ocean's Tree of Might (TV airing only; the uncut version has Peter Kelamis...)

[UltimateHammerBro]

In all fairness, the use of the name "Milk" over "Chichi" was not bcause of a bad translation or because the dub producers just felt like changing the name, in that particular case it was a censorship concern. In Spanish, "Chichi" is a (somewhat vulgar) term for breasts...without meaning to get too graphic, it would be like if the original character's name was "Booby," and they didn't change that for the English dub. I know I certainly wouldn't be able to take that seriously, I'd probably just laugh every time the character's name was mentioned (OK, so I'm a bit immature, sorry). So it's unfortunate that they had to change it to "Milk," but I understand the dilemma they had and don't count it against them.

It's funny, because the "Chichi" problem was even worse in the European Spanish version, yet they kept the name.
I personally have NEVER heard "Chichi" as slang for breasts. "Chichi" in Spain (at least) isn't a vulgar term for breasts, but for a vagina.
What they did was just change the pronounciation a bit: instead of "CHEE-chi", they called her "chi-CHEE", so the original name was almost kept, and no one made a big fuss about it.

That also meant that the manga translation of the scene where Master Roshi meets Chichi has a different (and untranslatable, but quite good) piece of wordplay.
I'm afraid that using "Chichi's chichis" in that scene would have really caused an uproar.

[SaintEvolution]

Under or Over acted performances can be bad.

Anyway, the original series, for both ocean/blue water and Funimation dub were not that good. But Ocean dub achieved great moments in their uncut movies dubs, and in Saiyan/Freeza arcs. The others...not that much(Funimation started to became better in Majin Buu, but it was not much compared to their great Kai version).

Are you saying you found the performances over acted then? I'm just confused as to how you find the Saban acting better by a large margin (as implied by your comments), to me they're relatively the same and I enjoy them pretty evenly.

I'd just say that over acted performances can be bad too.

And, in the original funimation dub, many performances were over acted. In the Ocean after Androids/Cell, it was the opposite.

Dragon Ball (FUNimation), the cast were all great here and the script despite some creative liberties was actually good.

Next would be probably Tree of Might (TV airing only; the uncut version has Peter Kelamis...)

I'm sorry to disagree, but a dub have to keep most of the original "essence" of the show that as possible to keep.

Funimation dub only became to be good in the remastered version when they used the original soundtrack. But before this...well, I don't have so much to say. Anyway, in Kai they came to be awesome.

[TheBlackPaladin]

Y'know......I myself am a little surprised that I'm about to say this.......but among the dubs that the Dragon Ball animes got, I think FUNimation's was one of the better ones.

With that having been said, I must add two disclaimers:

1) I personally don't count FUNimation changing the musical score against them anymore, because they have since released all of it on home video with a "English voices with original music" audio track. Nobody has to listen to that score anymore if they don't want to, so it is now possible to compare the dub fairly to all the other international dubs.

2) Perhaps more importantly......to be quite frank, a lot of the dubs for the Dragon Ball animes were not very good.

Really, it seems that only two or three dubs could compete toe-to-toe with the original Japanese version. Almost every single other dub suffered from shortcomings, whether those shortcomings were due to technical issues, censorship, acting, or translation...often, a combination of all these things, in some cases leaving significant portions of the show undubbed. Even today, with many European countries having home video releases of the show, voice actors were not brought back in to dub previously censored scenes. The French DVD release, for example, has both the original Japanese audio and the French dub track, but when it gets to a scene that was censored in the original TV airing on the French dub track, the audio switches over to the Japanese audio and briefly turns on French subtitles in order to maintain continuity with the uncut video track.

As horrible as "Season 3" was, that represents FUNimation's lowest level of quality, but it's not an accurate representation of the dub's quality overall. Either midway or late into the Cell arc, the translation was actually pretty good from there on out, save an unnecessary (but yes, cringe-worthy) joke here and there. By that point, the dub was passable.

Now, of course, one could argue that FUNimation should aim for higher than "passable," and I can't disagree. Kai is what took the dub from passable to great. And honestly, I can say that I wasn't surprised by the increase in quality, because I saw it coming. As I watched the dub of DBZ, as well as the dubs of the video games, I saw a gradual but noticeable improvement in the quality of the acting and the translation. So they didn't "suddenly" get good with Kai, it was a gradual improvement, and one that was evident in the later stages of the DBZ dub.

We didn't have the best dub, certainly. That's probably the Latino Spanish dub. However, between having it completely uncut, gradually improved acting, and gradually improved translation, I'd say the FUNimation dub was a huge step up from other dubs who couldn't--and still can't--make the same claim.

[SaintEvolution]

Y'know......I myself am a little surprised that I'm about to say this.......but among the dubs that the Dragon Ball animes got, I think FUNimation's was one of the better ones.

With that having been said, I must add two disclaimers:

1) I personally don't count FUNimation changing the musical score against them anymore, because they have since released all of it on home video with a "English voices with original music" audio track. Nobody has to listen to that score anymore if they don't want to, so it is now possible to compare the dub fairly to all the other international dubs.

2) Perhaps more importantly......to be quite frank, a lot of the dubs for the Dragon Ball animes were not very good.

Really, it seems that only two or three dubs could compete toe-to-toe with the original Japanese version. Almost every single other dub suffered from shortcomings, whether those shortcomings were due to technical issues, censorship, acting, or translation...often, a combination of all these things, in some cases leaving significant portions of the show undubbed. Even today, with many European countries having home video releases of the show, voice actors were not brought back in to dub previously censored scenes. The French DVD release, for example, has both the original Japanese audio and the French dub track, but when it gets to a scene that was censored in the original TV airing on the French dub track, the audio switches over to the Japanese audio and briefly turns on French subtitles in order to maintain continuity with the uncut video track.

As horrible as "Season 3" was, that represents FUNimation's lowest level of quality, but it's not an accurate representation of the dub's quality overall. Either midway or late into the Cell arc, the translation was actually pretty good from there on out, save an unnecessary (but yes, cringe-worthy) joke here and there. By that point, the dub was passable.

Now, of course, one could argue that FUNimation should aim for higher than "passable," and I can't disagree. Kai is what took the dub from passable to great. And honestly, I can say that I wasn't surprised by the increase in quality, because I saw it coming. As I watched the dub of DBZ, as well as the dubs of the video games, I saw a gradual but noticeable improvement in the quality of the acting and the translation. So they didn't "suddenly" get good with Kai, it was a gradual improvement, and one that was evident in the later stages of the DBZ dub.

We didn't have the best dub, certainly. That's probably the Latino Spanish dub. However, between having it completely uncut, gradually improved acting, and gradually improved translation, I'd say the FUNimation dub was a huge step up from other dubs who couldn't--and still can't--make the same claim.

Well, the funimation english became much better with the original soundtrack...but still had some problems(the translation was still far the original, some scenes were completely over acted, and some things like that). But in general, the remastered version with the original soundtrack is good.

About english Kai, I don't disagree that had a gradual improvment. But it was a great improvment, by the way.

And about the latin spanish dub, as I said before, it's a great dub in terms of translation, pretty good in acting(besides some horrible dubbed characters, like Cell's), good in the voices(Goku at first seasons sounds like a 55 years old guy, but this became better in the later episodes, for example)...but it was a bad dub in voice recording and lip sync. For example, in many times the voices are like 0.25 seconds later to the screen, and they are a bit muffled too(like if the actors recorded their roles inside a box). If we compare the latin american dub's voice recording with older dubs than that in this aspect(like the catalan, or the french), we can see that well.

[sangofe]

I'm counting dubs for all the productions(the TV series(Z, GT, Kai, and the original with Kid Goku), the movies, the specials, all), in aspects like the acting, the sound mixing, the audio recording, the lip sync, the translation...all the aspects we can have to make an analisys.


I think some of the asian dubs are very good, cause they are close to the original in the dialogues, and have good acting, for example, the cantonese or the korean dubs. The German dub for example, has a pretty acting, but a not so good mixing(some times the musics and the effects are very low) and the translation was took by the french dub, that has horrible and lazy dialogues.

And actually there are many dubs that are not so commented too, like the indonesian(I only find 2 videos of indonesian DBZ), the albanian or the polish dub for the movies.

Anyway, what dubs you think that are the best ones for Dragon Ball? (Also, you can the ones you think that are the worse too)

Are you counting Kai, or not? For DBZ I find that the Mexican Spanish dub is quite good, the Korean dub (not sure which of them, but I watched one of them that had really good voices and acting) along with the Danish DBZ dub. For Kai, I think the French and US dubs are very good.

[UltimateHammerBro]

And about the latin spanish dub, as I said before, it's a great dub in terms of translation, pretty good in acting(besides some horrible dubbed characters, like Cell's), good in the voices(Goku at first seasons sounds like a 55 years old guy, but this became better in the later episodes, for example)...but it was a bad dub in voice recording and lip sync. For example, in many times the voices are like 0.25 seconds later to the screen, and they are a bit muffled too(like if the actors recorded their roles inside a box). If we compare the latin american dub's voice recording with older dubs than that in this aspect(like the catalan, or the french), we can see that well.

Could this have something to do with the video having a different framerate than the one it had originally? Lip-sync tends to be pretty good in Spanish dubs (regardless of the country).

[SaintEvolution]

I'm counting dubs for all the productions(the TV series(Z, GT, Kai, and the original with Kid Goku), the movies, the specials, all), in aspects like the acting, the sound mixing, the audio recording, the lip sync, the translation...all the aspects we can have to make an analisys.


I think some of the asian dubs are very good, cause they are close to the original in the dialogues, and have good acting, for example, the cantonese or the korean dubs. The German dub for example, has a pretty acting, but a not so good mixing(some times the musics and the effects are very low) and the translation was took by the french dub, that has horrible and lazy dialogues.

And actually there are many dubs that are not so commented too, like the indonesian(I only find 2 videos of indonesian DBZ), the albanian or the polish dub for the movies.

Anyway, what dubs you think that are the best ones for Dragon Ball? (Also, you can the ones you think that are the worse too)

Are you counting Kai, or not? For DBZ I find that the Mexican Spanish dub is quite good, the Korean dub (not sure which of them, but I watched one of them that had really good voices and acting) along with the Danish DBZ dub. For Kai, I think the French and US dubs are very good.

I'm counting all productions that can be counted(the old movies, Kai, the new movies, the original TV series, GT, and the rest).

And...the danish dub isn't the worse, but isn't the best. They used the manga to search and correct some dialogues of the french dub, but still have errors, speccially in the movies.

And about the latin spanish dub, as I said before, it's a great dub in terms of translation, pretty good in acting(besides some horrible dubbed characters, like Cell's), good in the voices(Goku at first seasons sounds like a 55 years old guy, but this became better in the later episodes, for example)...but it was a bad dub in voice recording and lip sync. For example, in many times the voices are like 0.25 seconds later to the screen, and they are a bit muffled too(like if the actors recorded their roles inside a box). If we compare the latin american dub's voice recording with older dubs than that in this aspect(like the catalan, or the french), we can see that well.

Could this have something to do with the video having a different framerate than the one it had originally? Lip-sync tends to be pretty good in Spanish dubs (regardless of the country).

I had saw entire episodes in the latin american dub with a normal quality, and yeah, the audio recording and mixing in the latin spanish dub aren't the best ones. Been honest, it was a bit poor dub in this aspect. Until the original french dub, that had a poor mixing with many no-dubbed screams, has a more clean recording and a better sync.

Also, find for some interviews with voice actors around the world, the brazilian VA Alfredo Rollo(who voices Vegeta in Brazil) said that the mexican dub was, in his words, "Bem ruinzinha", that in english means "pretty bad"(or just "not good"), just because of lip sync reasons(some episodes in the brazilian dub were based in the mexican dub until I know, so the brazilian actors had saw spanish and japanese versions I thought); Alfredo saids too that the studio had to fix the sync in some moments. Unfortunaly I can't encounter that interview now.

[90sDBZ]

For me it's the original Funimation Z dub. The Faulconer score while not perfect is still awesome. And even though Season 3 had some poor acting, the performances had a certain charm to them in that they were over the top in a good way. Even early on you could tell there was passion in a lot of the performances eg. Dale Kelly as the Narrator. The acting got noticeably better in Season 4 and continued to improve over the course of the series.

While Funimation's Kai dub does have better acting overall and can be considered technically better, it doesn't give me the same feel-good vibe that the old dub does. And I never really liked post-DB Kikuchi as much as Faulconer to begin with.

[SaintEvolution]

I had saw some clips from the two serbian dubs.

The old one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQSIzfIAQFA ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd1dEkvQsIc ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UssGTAf7vY
It's an extremely weak dub in voice acting and based in the french

And the new one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoqWyevs_bA ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps6EzXxoxaI ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qqtZeHOPuE

The new serbian dub it's a good dub in the first look. The old one was a lame.

Also, there is a croatian dub too, but I only can find it in bad quality videos, so I can't judge. And a russian dub too, just look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzki36zn-Uw

It's sounds to be a good dub, but I'm not the best to judge this dub actually.

[Sanyo96]

Beerus and Goku fighting in the sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCRKfgNJfz4

I do love Sean's scream as Goku in the English dub of BoG when he's escaping out the cave tunnel, gave me chills down my spine.

[SaintEvolution]

Beerus and Goku fighting in the sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCRKfgNJfz4

I do love Sean's scream as Goku in the English dub of BoG when he's escaping out the cave tunnel, gave me chills down my spine.

I liked the entire scene in the english dub, but this scream in itself not so much. I mean, Sean did a great scream, but the echo/reverb effect in the "I will not let you destroy my world" doesn't sounded so natural. And...I don't think that Jason Douglas's voice fits for a cat like Beerus/Bills/Birusu. But they did the best they could, and sounded very well in for the entire scene(until the "HA" scream).

Greek dub: The actors were not really bad, but they were very bad directed.

I think that for the most part of the Greek dub of DB and DBZ the casting was okay. One of the biggest miscasts in my opinion was Goku's voice in GT & Movies. His screams was the main problem. I am sure that GT and the Movies would be a lot better if Goku had another voice. (That guy also did Gohan and Babidi till episode 239 of DragonBall Z but he was a lot better back then) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxKV2rG6ypE

Now as for the best dub, I will go with the English one from Funimation. I like both the 2007 Remastered Version and the Kai one.

Well...the translation was a very bad problem too. They did some very bad errors in this aspect.

But that actors, with a decent direction, and a good and careful staff(translaters, sound mixers) could be a good job, in another situation.