I think that's a combination of two things. Firstly, the people who were complaining about the dub were mostly people who were familiar with the Japanese version. Secondly, the audience who was enjoying the dub--mostly kids who didn't know any better about the changes FUNimation made--were not quite as "internet-savvy" yet. So we had no way of hearing from the people who liked it.penguintruth wrote:Actually, quite a bit of the fanbase was pleased with the DBZ dub before Kai (which mystifies me, since back in the day you couldn't find a positive word about it).
Then they grew up. All of a sudden we saw a ton of dub fans popping up online.
This is only a theory, but I'd even go so far as to say that we would have seen a similar situation with the 4Kids dub of "One Piece" if it had lasted longer. There wasn't anything that even resembled a compliment about that dub online, but offline, I saw a decent amount of passion for that dub. All from kids who weren't of "forum-posting age" yet. I used to be a camp counselor, and I remember talking to a group of kids who loved the 4Kids dub and said that "after they changed the voices (unknowingly referring to FUNimation taking over), the show sucked." I did my duty as a good citizen and informed them of what they were missing out on, of course, but that's just the thing...they had to be told that something was amiss.
Same thing with DBZ. If someone wasn't already familiar with the Japanese version of DBZ, or weren't told about the Japanese version of DBZ by someone else who already knew about it, I don't think there'd be any reason to suspect that anything was "wrong" with the dub. I mean, I thought DBZ was a cartoon of American origin until I was older and, on a bored Thursday night, took a trip to ol' Wikipedia.
Exactly. To them, that's the version they saw first, so that's the version that's "correct."penguintruth wrote:But that was the problem. They grew up watching a poor representation of the show and assumed anything different was wrong.
Even later, when these fans learned about the changes FUNimation made, many still didn't care. They had no sentimental attachment to the original version, and seeing a loyal dub was never a concern. They didn't care. They just wanted the show that they grew up with and enjoyed. I don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself, but it must have put FUNimation in a very difficult position when they were deciding how to approach the Kai dub. After all, early on they were toying with not even dubbing Kai, and just splicing in the old dub audio with the Kai footage. It was largely because of Justin Cook's insistence that we even got a new dub of Kai at all.
. Seriously who the hell thought that FREEZA should be voiced by women regardless of voice depth. Sorry if that came off as sexist but just saying.
