The Dubbing Horrors of Dark Cat (and others)

[fokkusu]

So I watched part of Dark Cat in English...



... and couldn't keep from laughing/cringing.

Egads, this is horrid. It sounds like they had thoroughly lifeless, uninterested amateurs doing all the voices. Especially Hiroki, who sounds like a sleep-deprived zombie. I could also swear that some of the girls had the exact same voice, but maybe they just had such similar soul-draining voices that it's hard for a person to tell the difference.

Are a lot of older dubs this awful, or just a few? What are some of the worst older dubs you've seen and why are they so bad?

Also, I'm not bashing dubs in general, so we probably don't want comments like "all dubz suk" and such.
Some, like Lily-C.A.T., are fairly good.
Dark Cat just isn't one of them.

[Oktam]

I'd say that anime voice acting are on average low quality simply because the market isn't wide and profitable enough that the distributors think it pays up to hire professional voice actors, unless that anime is sufficiently high profile like Miyazaki's that it can reach potentially a wide audience in movie theaters.

The worst voice acting I've heard is Bubblegum Crisis. It's unbearable. I stopped after five minutes. As if you're watching a different show; the entire mood is altered. One of actors belonged to the distributor's staff, and others were allegedly chosen on a 200+ people audition. Yeah right.

[Jing Wu]

Aug 10, 2011 8:32:28 GMT Oktam said:

The worst voice acting I've heard is Bubblegum Crisis. It's unbearable.

I'd have to disagree. Most of the dialog comes off pretty stiff because it's barely rewritten from the subtitle translation, and the lip sync is off sometimes for the same reason, but aside from that it's a pretty decent effort. Not something I go out of my way to watch, but it's not even in the same ballpark- nay, not even on the same planet as some of the other stuff I've seen.

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that they had to recreate the entire soundtrack from scratch, meaning they tossed in what music they could from a soundtrack CD and re-did the sound effects from scratch. The new soundtrack, while alright, tends to lack the oomph of the Japanese original. Shame the separate M&E tracks didn't exist anymore, but the dub studio did a pretty decent job considering the circumstances.