Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

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Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Son Gohan 1995 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 6:07 am

Which characters have the dub ruined in terms of personality. Goku is the first that comes to mind, in the original he's selfish and likes to fight strong opponets. The dub however protrays Goku as this superman figure, someone who goes around saving the world. Freeza is another one I heard, I know the dub gave freeza some ridiculous lines and from what I heard his original version spoke in a polite mannerism.(I would love to see some examples of this.) Also Freeza's dub voice is horrendous (Linda Young). Any other examples of character personality changes? I would love to see examples of some!

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by ABED » Sun Sep 06, 2015 6:09 am

Vegeta's overall personality remained more or less in tact, however, during his death scene Vegeta says Freeza is the man who turned him into the man he is.

Bulma is turned into a vapid valley girl, and Yamcha is a dumb surfer dude for a while in season 3.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by nickzambuto » Sun Sep 06, 2015 10:36 am

How many threads can we get on this topic per day? They should be clumped together with the "I don't like how Gohan is being portrayed" threads and stickied. Like, yeah we already know, you aren't saying anything knew.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by VegettoEX » Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:24 am

nickzambuto wrote:How many threads can we get on this topic per day? They should be clumped together with the "I don't like how Gohan is being portrayed" threads and stickied. Like, yeah we already know, you aren't saying anything knew.
Someone with 12 posts is clearly a new person and is more than entitled to discuss anything they want to discuss. If you're not interested in participating, you can simply not post. No-one is forcing you to read or get further involved. Find another discussion you ARE interested in, or take the initiative and start one on your own that you are curious to hear feedback on.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by fadeddreams5 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:37 am

I personally prefer Goku's dub personality...by a long shot. It goes hand-in-hand with Toei's movie Goku. That's just me.

Frieza was definitely the #1 victim of dubism though. It's a radically different and overall worse character. Bad VA, bad lines, and significantly altered personality...
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Kamiccolo9 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:13 pm

Freeza. Definitely Freeza. No bastardization of any character in the franchise comes close to what they did to Freeza. They turned a sadistic emperor who politely tortured his victims into a wisecracking grandmother who hit on Goku. Goku got some stupid lines, but he was always a superhero; the dub just turned it up to 11. Funimation murdered Freeza, and propped up his stuffed corpse for their show.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by B » Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:14 pm

Kame Sen'nin. It has more to do with his overall portrayal by Mike McFarland than the writing(not that it was ever great). He's essentially the English equivalent to Hiroshi Masuoka; a goofy pervert without a hint of that wise martial arts master.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Lunatic Fringe » Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:51 pm

B wrote:Kame Sen'nin. It has more to do with his overall portrayal by Mike McFarland than the writing(not that it was ever great). He's essentially the English equivalent to Hiroshi Masuoka; a goofy pervert without a hint of that wise martial arts master.
I think that a dub portrayal obscuring the characteristics of a person would be more down to Sean Schemmel's North Kai than Mike McFarland's Roshi. His serious moments in DB were pretty believable, especially his scenes with Tenshinhan at the 22nd WMAT.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Son Gohan 1995 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:58 pm

nickzambuto wrote:How many threads can we get on this topic per day? They should be clumped together with the "I don't like how Gohan is being portrayed" threads and stickied. Like, yeah we already know, you aren't saying anything knew.
You completely miss the point. I'm fairlynew to the japanese version so I need to see specific examples of dub and sub character personalties as I won't be able to tell the difference if I watch them seperately.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by TheBlackPaladin » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:10 pm

Kamiccolo9 wrote:Freeza. Definitely Freeza. No bastardization of any character in the franchise comes close to what they did to Freeza. They turned a sadistic emperor who politely tortured his victims into a wisecracking grandmother who hit on Goku. Goku got some stupid lines, but he was always a superhero; the dub just turned it up to 11. Funimation murdered Freeza, and propped up his stuffed corpse for their show.
Absolutely.

Back in "the day," there were characters that FUNimation had the right....rough idea...of. Which is to say, for most of the characters, it wasn't as though they gave them traits that previously weren't there, it was more so that they improperly--and to an extreme degree--emphasized (and downplayed) various aspects of the characters. It also didn't help that they eventually were dealing with actors with no prior experience. For the most part, though, their personalities were intact in a very general sense.

Then we get to Freeza......it's water under the bridge now, don't get me wrong, but man, they really didn't get this character right at all. Not even the rough idea. The upper-class, condescending, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, repressed psycho was simply nowhere to be found in the dub. I don't really even know how to explain the new personality they gave Freeza in the dub. It seems like even FUNimation didn't have an idea of what they wanted to do with him. They couldn't decide whether to make him lizard-like, a comedic relief, a dark and foreboding type, a loud and declarative type....really, I'll cut Pauline Newstone and Linda Young some slack here. No actor, and I mean no actor, can give their best performance when they don't know why they're saying what they're saying, and so if even the writers and directors don't know what they're doing, no one can possibly hope that the actors will.

If anything, I give the previous actors some credit for at least doing their best to try and give the character some kind of consistent personality. Even disregarding the fact that Freeza's original characterization by Ryusei Nakao was not faithfully adapted, it seems that even in the context of the "reversioned" dub personalities, dub Freeza's dialogue was all over the place in terms of tone, speed, and intent.

Thankfully, the Holy Trinity of J. Michael Tatum (the dub script writer), Chris Sabat (the director) and Chris Ayres (the actor) saved Freeza.
A "rather haggard" translation of a line from Future Gohan in DBZ, provided to FUNimation by Toei:
"To think of fighting that is this fun...so, it was pleasant fight, as many as, therefore is a feeling which is good the fight where."

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by OWmyDragonBallz » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:21 pm

TheBlackPaladin wrote:
Kamiccolo9 wrote:Freeza. Definitely Freeza. No bastardization of any character in the franchise comes close to what they did to Freeza. They turned a sadistic emperor who politely tortured his victims into a wisecracking grandmother who hit on Goku. Goku got some stupid lines, but he was always a superhero; the dub just turned it up to 11. Funimation murdered Freeza, and propped up his stuffed corpse for their show.
Absolutely.

Back in "the day," there were characters that FUNimation had the right....rough idea...of. Which is to say, for most of the characters, it wasn't as though they gave them traits that previously weren't there, it was more so that they improperly--and to an extreme degree--emphasized (and downplayed) various aspects of the characters. It also didn't help that they eventually were dealing with actors with no prior experience. For the most part, though, their personalities were intact in a very general sense.

Then we get to Freeza......it's water under the bridge now, don't get me wrong, but man, they really didn't get this character right at all. Not even the rough idea. The upper-class, condescending, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, repressed psycho was simply nowhere to be found in the dub. I don't really even know how to explain the new personality they gave Freeza in the dub. It seems like even FUNimation didn't have an idea of what they wanted to do with him. They couldn't decide whether to make him lizard-like, a comedic relief, a dark and foreboding type, a loud and declarative type....really, I'll cut Pauline Newstone and Linda Young some slack here. No actor, and I mean no actor, can give their best performance when they don't know why they're saying what they're saying, and so if even the writers and directors don't know what they're doing, no one can possibly hope that the actors will.

If anything, I give the previous actors some credit for at least doing their best to try and give the character some kind of consistent personality. Even disregarding the fact that Freeza's original characterization by Ryusei Nakao was not faithfully adapted, it seems that even in the context of the "reversioned" dub personalities, dub Freeza's dialogue was all over the place in terms of tone, speed, and intent.

Thankfully, the Holy Trinity of J. Michael Tatum (the dub script writer), Chris Sabat (the director) and Chris Ayres (the actor) saved Freeza.
I understood your entire comment. But what lost me was when you said that Nakaos Freeza was not faithfully adapted. What do you mean by that? Did TOEI bastardize Freeza? I call that bullshit.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Metalwario64 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:27 pm

He's saying that the dub didn't adapt Ryusei Nakao's performance.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by TheBlackPaladin » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:29 pm

OWmyDragonBallz wrote:
TheBlackPaladin wrote:
Kamiccolo9 wrote:Freeza. Definitely Freeza. No bastardization of any character in the franchise comes close to what they did to Freeza. They turned a sadistic emperor who politely tortured his victims into a wisecracking grandmother who hit on Goku. Goku got some stupid lines, but he was always a superhero; the dub just turned it up to 11. Funimation murdered Freeza, and propped up his stuffed corpse for their show.
Absolutely.

Back in "the day," there were characters that FUNimation had the right....rough idea...of. Which is to say, for most of the characters, it wasn't as though they gave them traits that previously weren't there, it was more so that they improperly--and to an extreme degree--emphasized (and downplayed) various aspects of the characters. It also didn't help that they eventually were dealing with actors with no prior experience. For the most part, though, their personalities were intact in a very general sense.

Then we get to Freeza......it's water under the bridge now, don't get me wrong, but man, they really didn't get this character right at all. Not even the rough idea. The upper-class, condescending, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, repressed psycho was simply nowhere to be found in the dub. I don't really even know how to explain the new personality they gave Freeza in the dub. It seems like even FUNimation didn't have an idea of what they wanted to do with him. They couldn't decide whether to make him lizard-like, a comedic relief, a dark and foreboding type, a loud and declarative type....really, I'll cut Pauline Newstone and Linda Young some slack here. No actor, and I mean no actor, can give their best performance when they don't know why they're saying what they're saying, and so if even the writers and directors don't know what they're doing, no one can possibly hope that the actors will.

If anything, I give the previous actors some credit for at least doing their best to try and give the character some kind of consistent personality. Even disregarding the fact that Freeza's original characterization by Ryusei Nakao was not faithfully adapted, it seems that even in the context of the "reversioned" dub personalities, dub Freeza's dialogue was all over the place in terms of tone, speed, and intent.

Thankfully, the Holy Trinity of J. Michael Tatum (the dub script writer), Chris Sabat (the director) and Chris Ayres (the actor) saved Freeza.
I understood your entire comment. But what lost me was when you said that Nakaos Freeza was not faithfully adapted. What do you mean by that? Did TOEI bastardize Freeza? I call that bullshit.
I apologize, allow me to clarify. What I meant was that the Freeza, as played by Ryusei Nakao, was not faithfully adapted by FUNimation in their dub.

In context, what I was saying was that, even with that taken into account, FUNimation seemed to have some sort of consistent idea of what the DBZ characters should be like in their "reversioned" dub. Even if those ideas were wrong, they were wrong consistently, and for the same reasons. With Freeza, it seems like they didn't have the slightest clue how to write for him, and there was no consistency even with his "reversioned" dub characterization. They just gave him line after line after line of dialogue that would contradict the previous lines in a variety of ways, whether it was the speed, the intent, or the tone.
Last edited by TheBlackPaladin on Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A "rather haggard" translation of a line from Future Gohan in DBZ, provided to FUNimation by Toei:
"To think of fighting that is this fun...so, it was pleasant fight, as many as, therefore is a feeling which is good the fight where."

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Kuririn Fan » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:43 pm

Too many to count. That is one of the reasons i switched to subs...........forever.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by ABED » Sun Sep 06, 2015 1:53 pm

B wrote:Kame Sen'nin. It has more to do with his overall portrayal by Mike McFarland than the writing(not that it was ever great). He's essentially the English equivalent to Hiroshi Masuoka; a goofy pervert without a hint of that wise martial arts master.
The personality was still there, the problem isn't that the dubbed ruined his personality, he's still a perverted wise old martial arts master, the actor simply didn't have the skills to be believable as the old man.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Lord Beerus » Sun Sep 06, 2015 6:03 pm

Freeza, hands down. As much as I hated Goku becoming Superman-lite, nothing compares to absolute assassination that occurred with Freeza. Literally nothing from Freeza's character was retained.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by dbzfan7 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 6:49 pm

Freeza no contest. So bad that I couldn't stop calling Freeza a woman. I was constantly gener confused because of the voice, lines, and performance. Chris Ayres, J. Michael Tatum, and Sabat saved Freeza.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by Son Gohan 1995 » Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:15 pm

TheBlackPaladin wrote:
Kamiccolo9 wrote:Freeza. Definitely Freeza. No bastardization of any character in the franchise comes close to what they did to Freeza. They turned a sadistic emperor who politely tortured his victims into a wisecracking grandmother who hit on Goku. Goku got some stupid lines, but he was always a superhero; the dub just turned it up to 11. Funimation murdered Freeza, and propped up his stuffed corpse for their show.
Absolutely.

Back in "the day," there were characters that FUNimation had the right....rough idea...of. Which is to say, for most of the characters, it wasn't as though they gave them traits that previously weren't there, it was more so that they improperly--and to an extreme degree--emphasized (and downplayed) various aspects of the characters. It also didn't help that they eventually were dealing with actors with no prior experience. For the most part, though, their personalities were intact in a very general sense.

Then we get to Freeza......it's water under the bridge now, don't get me wrong, but man, they really didn't get this character right at all. Not even the rough idea. The upper-class, condescending, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, repressed psycho was simply nowhere to be found in the dub. I don't really even know how to explain the new personality they gave Freeza in the dub. It seems like even FUNimation didn't have an idea of what they wanted to do with him. They couldn't decide whether to make him lizard-like, a comedic relief, a dark and foreboding type, a loud and declarative type....really, I'll cut Pauline Newstone and Linda Young some slack here. No actor, and I mean no actor, can give their best performance when they don't know why they're saying what they're saying, and so if even the writers and directors don't know what they're doing, no one can possibly hope that the actors will.

If anything, I give the previous actors some credit for at least doing their best to try and give the character some kind of consistent personality. Even disregarding the fact that Freeza's original characterization by Ryusei Nakao was not faithfully adapted, it seems that even in the context of the "reversioned" dub personalities, dub Freeza's dialogue was all over the place in terms of tone, speed, and intent.

Thankfully, the Holy Trinity of J. Michael Tatum (the dub script writer), Chris Sabat (the director) and Chris Ayres (the actor) saved Freeza.
When I first watched the japanese version, I was shocked to see how different Freeza was from his dub counterpart.

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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by DBZAOTA482 » Mon Sep 07, 2015 12:49 am

Freeza, they made him into the creepiest GINLF comedian ever. I couldn't even take seriously till seeing the original and newer dub.
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Re: Characters that the dub ruined the personality of?

Post by NitroEX » Mon Sep 07, 2015 4:50 am

Everyone has likely already mentioned the big ones so I'll just say teenage (Buu arc) Gohan. There's no shred of innocence or naivety in Kyle Hebert's voice and I think he was miscast from the beginning. Brad Swaile overall suits the character better.

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