"Digimon Around"-A New Series?
- Thread starter Silver Wolf
- Start date
Lynxara
Nice post!!
You're a poor mind-reader, sir! Au contraire, I like localizations. Occasionally I make them. I'll give the Digimon Adventure dub credit for some good casting and better-than-average-at-the-time ADR.
But the script? The script was a fucking mess, the writers should be ashamed of themselves and I say this as another writer. It was a poor commercial product for any age range, regardless of the quality of the original material, but it was especially poor for reaching a young English-speaking audience.
Let's go over all the stupid **** in the Digimon localization, shall we?
- Name changes for attacks, locations, and some monsters were inconsistent from episode to episode, and also inconsistent with the toys! This is going to be especially apparent and frustrating to kids who want to memorize everything about a character. This is not that hard to get correct, the localization crew has no excuse.
- The writers clearly couldn't remember what the plot was from episode to episode, causing wild inconsistencies in the stated goals of villains. This is really bad form for a kid's show, where the audience may need the characters to have simple, consistent, easy-to-grasp concepts. This only could've happened if the writers were so half-assed they never bothered to make a story bible... or didn't use it.
- Monster names that were relatively easy to pronounce were often changed to names that would be even harder for young English-speakers to pronounce. Some names weren't changed that really should have been if they wanted kids to be able to talk about that character. The writers clearly had no idea what they were doing here and probably not even a basic background in child development.
- Jokes were flagrantly inserted into sad or dramatic scenes, causing obvious dissonance between the footage and how characters are acting. This will just confuse a young audience, causing their attention span to run out. Snark entertains older viewers only; it was unprofessional to include these sequences at all.
- Jokes were often removed from sequences that were comedic in the original, making the scenes feel slow and boring. What the hell? Write different jokes or just cut the damned footage-- about three minutes has to go from anime episodes anyway for US broadcast!
- Fights have to be edited for US S&P in American broadcasts. This is a fact of life. But the edits for Digimon were more amateurish and obvious than the edits in stuff I saw broadcast in the 80's, for ****'s sake. It was clearly just a matter of whatever was the cheapest way to alter footage, with no effort put into making things seamless or professional-looking. DiC's Sailor Moon fight scene edits were more watchable than Digimon's!
What is baffling to me is that the Saban Digimon production team did such a half-assed job of the first four seasons-- this slipshod approach was consistent through all four goddamn seasons-- and then they let largely the same people screw up Season 5 in the same ways.
Of course it flopped over here, what kid in their right mind would watch this crap when the quality of US-made kids cartoons has improved dramatically in the past ten years? If you want to make a kids' property a hit now, you need to pay to hire people who know what the **** they're doing.
garfield15
Kamen Rider Meta
Season 4 was Disney.
And honestly, Frontier had the most consistent dub to me. I mean, it's not like it was "great" but I really felt the VA's did a good job. With guys like Stephen Blum and the guy who played Matt in season 1, that was some good acting. I'm not saying it was perfect since I definitely remember crap like "It's petal-pulling time!" and changing the attack names (I could understand the ones that were in German like Kouji's or the tribal ones from Takuya's evolution's but why do they insist on changing attacks already in English) but it was the dub that I was the least annoyed by. Plus, they were pretty good with emotional scenes too.
The other ones were...not as good. I can't even watch 02's dub anymore.
Quark
Bandito Shake Cometh
I'm with you on the dubs problems, but this... this isn't a fault exclusive to the dub. Maybe you're thinking of a specific example that i'm not remembering, but... Digimon is guilty of this in all it's forms.
The first and especially the second season are guilty of all the problems you stated.. but three and four really reigned in the jokes, the excessive digi-dialogue, basically everything fans disliked (aside from the edits, which, not much you can do about that). Like Garfield said, Frontier probably got the best treatment. I don't think half-assed is a fair critique of the show, but then again I liked the cornball jokes and unnecessary puns
garfield15
Kamen Rider Meta
One more plus about Frontier's dub. I can't believe I'm saying this about an anime that changes the original OST (because I really hate when they do that), Frontier had some really kickass evolution music.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jqg0qSAf6k[/ame]
Not only was it fitting, they made a different one for each stage of evolution. That's five different jingles. Even Japan only had two. (With the Will and The Last Element. Both incredibly good songs nonetheless)
Actually, I find the dub OST for Digimon nearly compatible to watch. It doesn't really have anything on the original music, that's a given, but it's not like 4Kids in which their
"redone" music is generic crap. I mean, if it had better voices and a much better script, I could totally watch the show with the dub music.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jqg0qSAf6k[/ame]
Not only was it fitting, they made a different one for each stage of evolution. That's five different jingles. Even Japan only had two. (With the Will and The Last Element. Both incredibly good songs nonetheless)
Actually, I find the dub OST for Digimon nearly compatible to watch. It doesn't really have anything on the original music, that's a given, but it's not like 4Kids in which their
"redone" music is generic crap. I mean, if it had better voices and a much better script, I could totally watch the show with the dub music.
konrei-sama
白き月姫 ファンタズムーン!!
Add AiM (Maeda Ai) for an ED song too. :anime:
DigDoug
Member
I would be cool with it even if they just released dub-only box sets.
Lynxara
Nice post!!
Season 3 kind of erred by listening too much to the forum fans... who were much older than the dub's target audience. At the time Tamers' dub hit, for instance, I had a 7-year-old nephew who loved Digimon and loved watching it with me... until that season.
That was the season where they stopped trying to change Japanese names that would be repeated a lot simply because they sounded too Japanese. They even coached the actors to say them correctly, which was laudable! But my seven-year-old nephew couldn't understand why Takato's name was hard for him to say.
He called Takato's name "long", but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it didn't fit his developing mental script of what a name should sound like the way Tai ("Ty") and "Davis" did. He was still a few years away from being able to learn a new "kind" of name by mimicking the syllables.
Because he couldn't talk to me about Takato without stumbling over the character's name, he stopped wanting to watch the show. I don't think we even finished that season together and by Frontier he didn't care about Digimon anymore. The ratings at the time suggest a lot of other kids may have had similar reactions.
Tamers and Frontier were a step up from the first two seasons, but they were still dubs with a lot of problems in terms of adequately localizing the material for its US target audience at an acceptable level of quality. I would still consider the script treatment of Tamers and Frontier basically unprofessional.
The points about music are well-taken, but you'll notice I never complained about the altered soundtracks for the Digimon shows! The audio in every original Digimon season was cheap, crappy, and basically forgettable except for some of the vocal songs. For me one of the high points of all of the dub seasons was getting much better BGMs, with more real instrumentation.
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