ringworm128 wrote:People talking about Funimation's pre Kai dub(s) like they never improved from 1999.
Because they largely didn't. What "improvement" there was was so incremental and minor as to qualify under the heading of "polishing a turd". Even the much vaunted Boo era of the old dub is cringe-inducing and largely unlistenable. To say nothing of GT, which took the faux-hardcore mindset from the Z dub and ramped it up on steroids.
Kai and the recent movies are the first the dub has
ever come anywhere within lightyears of being reasonably passable.
I don't want to say that this is due to an inherent lack of talent on FUNi's end (not across the board at least: there's only a few names here or there I'll reserve that judgement for) because we've seen them do very, very good work on other things time and time and time again. Rather I simply think that the shittiest aspects of the dub (droning, monotonous rock/electronic music that never stops, constant yelling, screaming, and constipated grunting, godawful bad jokes, and incessant talking and narrating over what are supposed to be quiet scenes, etc.) became, in FUNimation's minds at least, baked into the series' general image. They had a huge hit, and no one wanted to rock the boat by throwing off their "success formula" too much.
And now of course these attributes are SO baked into dub fans' minds that this is how the series is "supposed to be", that you see how berserk they can get when post-Kai FUNi tries to steer things even SOMEWHAT back to the original version. Recasting Freeza, using some original attack names, using the original score instead of Faulconer, etc.
This is partly why I've generally always maintained that the best thing to happen for the series dub-wise (creatively I know, not financially: this would NEVER happen obviously) would be to just clean slate, baby with the bathwater, scorched earth-style start over from scratch with NO holdovers whatsoever from past creative decisions. Recast just about everyone else that wasn't already recast in Kai (including both Sabat and Schemmel), do a fresh new & more accurate translation of the scripts, and just dub the thing like it'd never been dubbed before and without worrying about clinging to or staying "consistent" with the shittiest decisions and mistakes of the past.
http://80s90sdragonballart.tumblr.com/
Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
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