This is the first musing or rant that I have written during this summer vacation. I had planned to do a lot more, but you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men...

One of the topics that seemed to jump out at me was the idea of dub-bashing, this idea floating out there in anime fandom that the quality of anime is inversely proportional to the amount of dubbing that has gone into the production to allow it to be seen in your locality, wherever that may be.

And although that description is probably a bit general, I'd submit to you that it works within the broadcast industry. Broadcasters are not likely to show a program in a place like the United States if that program is straight from Japan, or Germany, or Israel. The reason of course is that these shows are almost undoubtedly going to be in a foreign language, and while some people may hate this, the job of television is not to educate, it is to entertain, and generally, people have a hard time being entertained if what they are watching is not in their native language.

None of this takes into consideration the morals or taboos of a given locality, and the United States is a particularly hard case because there are people in this country who like pushing the envelope of technology, morality, religion, or what have you, and there are other people who have valid reasons for not pushing the envelope and for keeping the people they care about from doing so too.

Which is where dubs come in.

Taking this a bit off-topic for a paragraph or two, I just thought that the dubbing process is a lot like the way laws are passed in the United States. A proposal is introduced. The proposal is sent into a committee, where it is debated, edited, and amended. Assuming the proposal passes, it goes on to the larger body (either the House or the Senate), where it is again debated, edited, and amended. Often at roughly the same time, a similar bill is being introdued in the other larger body, and it too is going through this process. Assuming both bills pass through their perspective larger bodies, they are brought together in a conference committee, where the differences between the two bills are ironed out, and the entire thing is sent back through the system for more debate, more editing, more amendments. After this, the resulting bill is sent to the President, who can sign or veto the bill. If the bill is vetoed, there is one chance for the veto to be over-ridden. If the bill is signed, it becomes a law.

I realize that I have simplified the legislative process a great deal in the above example, and I ask the forgiveness of those of you who are now shouting at your monitors about what a complete and utter fool I am, but the point of the matter is this: a bill never makes it through the process unscathed. There is always some new angle, something missed, or in most cases, something someone just wants to tack on.

Anime and the broadcasting company are the same way.

One of the most interesting things to me is shows where they tell you how a particular movie was made, and of course, in these shows, they break through the "reality" of a movie like Star Wars or The Matrix and tell you the viewer a bit of the magic that went into making a few thousand popsicle sticks look like a roaring crowd in to see the Sunday pod races.

One such show was put on the latest release of the "Legend of Lunar" series, which was sold in a Playstation format. For at least an hour, the production people tell the viewers what went into the making of the game, and in this case, this is significant because the Lunar series is anime.

The producers went into how a virtual database is built from the words and phrases used in the original Japanese and how those might be translated into English. It went into the actual dubbing process itself and then into how some things are added in to appeal to the culture of the targeted audience. For example, at one point early in the game, you can go talk to a cow in a barn, and this cow will say something about the main character in the game and remark something along the lines of, "Milk must've done his body good."

The producers also explained that some things had to be edited out of the English version of the series because they were things you simply didn't do in a production aimed at children. An example here would be during one of the movie sequences put into the game, one of the characters gets really mad and flips off another character. Well, you can't have that happening in a production that is geared for children, so they replaced that with the character shaking his fist at the other character, which in the context of English body language, means basically the same thing.

Which brings me to the real subject of this eitorial/rant, and I can hear you now: "My god, he's just getting to it now?" I know. I know.

The thing is, the same thing happens to anime series and movies. In order to have a chance with the general public in a given place, and in this case, we'll use the United States, anime is translated into English. Some productions may have bits of local culture added in. In the United States, the editing process is prominent because people in this country have held the view that anime are cartoons, and cartoons are for children. It is the duty of parents to protect their children, and some of these groups have made themselves quite active when it comes to policing what children are exposed to.

All of this combines to widely varying results. Some dubs are good, others are considered to be very bad. However, sometimes the impact or popularity of a dub is out of proportion to the quality of the dub. For instance, the English dub of Sailor Moon is widely viewed as horrible, yet many purists will admit, sometimes very grudgingly, that they became a fan of the series through the dub. The Gatchaman series was dubbed into English as Battle of the Planets, then later, it was redubbed as Ace Goodheart. Battle of the Planets was one of the best anime dubs ever released in terms of its popularity in this country, but it was also one of the worst dubs in terms of the amount of editing that happened to it. Other popular dubs such as Robotech and Voltron also are lacking the kind of quality that purists look for, yet again, Robotech was very popular, and in fact, it helped kick off the explosion of anime popularity that happened in the mid to late 80s. Without this, I for one, might not be an anime fan today.

SO, before you bash a dub...any dub...stop for a second and think. Where did your love of anime come from? Unless it was from a show where they spoke in Japanese, you are as much a part of the dub phenomena as the people you complain about are.

In closing, I would like to advise the following: remember that "dubbies" are people too. I realize that sounds extremely obvious or perhaps condascending, but quite often, I think people forget this when they get mad enough to chew nails because some dubbie can't or won't see that the original of such-and-such is better than the dub.

Rather than you being right and the other person being wrong, perhaps a better approach would be to think about the dub as a particular brand of something and that the original is a better quality brand of the same product. Your job as a purist is to sell the original just like a salesman would. You don't shout at and berate your perspective customers. You show them the virtues of the better product, and demonstrate why your product is better than what they have right now.

And guess what. If the customer doesn't buy your product, if they don't switch from the dub to the original, leave them alone. Don't shout after them, and don't make them feel stupid.

After all, not every customer is a garanteed sale.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at lunahq7@yahoo.com and I will post your comments here as well.)