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An doubt I always had about anime dubs

Last posted Sep 03, 2014 at 10:54AM EDT. Added Sep 02, 2014 at 09:21PM EDT
9 posts from 7 users

This is a question I want a response both from North-American users to South-American. I see that from the 90s to this day anime shows (with some exceptions) have different msuic (opening,ending msuic, etc) in North-America, yet when that same anime distributed by the same company in South-America they used dubbed versions of the original music?

This is something that always confuse the heel out of me, specially in particular anime: Digimon

When Fox Kids was around and started to transmit Digimon, in Noth-America they used this song (while catchy, just way over-repetitive):

But when the latin american dubb came, we got a fully dubbed version of the original opening song:

And was funny the most, that all the other songs like the evolution songs are all the original ones without even dubbing! This happened from Adventure 1 to Frontier when Fox Kids dissapeared.
But something extrange, when we got the latin-american version of Savers, all the songs a dubb changes come from the North-American one, not the japanese. And now Xros Wars/Fusion doesn't even have a dubbed song tha's still the one from northamerica (to makes things even strange, Digimon Fusion is transmited in Cartoon Network in the same cartoon block that pokemon xD)
I also noted this with Dragonball Z, Saint Seiya, Samurai X, Hunter X Hunter, etc.

Does someone knows why things like these happen?

Last edited Sep 02, 2014 at 09:26PM EDT

Like Snickerway said, it's more than likely copyright laws or a huge licensing issue. A similar music situation happened earlier this year with the release of Space Dandy, where the opening would be an instrumental piece, but later on it became Viva Namida around episode 8. Adult Swim is also known to sometimes just play one series's opening instead of some of their other ones, mostly due to budgetary or licensing issues. It just depends if the distributor and the channel it airs on feels the need to use the original opening or openings.

Songs don't tend to get dubbed anymore, the last one I remember was Ouran in 2006, which is infamous at this point for it's awful dubbed opening

EDIT: If I recall, it wasn't that they couldn't get the licensing for Space Dandy, it's that there just wasn't enough time in the block at that point to add the full op in, It was added in eventually after they pushed for it.

Last edited Sep 02, 2014 at 10:15PM EDT

The last anime opening I know of to ever get properly translated for the English version of it's release was Dragon Soul for Dragon Ball Z Kai, which turned out pretty good. Well, it's to be expected. Dragon Ball Z is probably still the absolute most valuable Anime IP outside of Gundam, so of course budget would go into Localization.

My favorite translation to English though would be Ring a Bell for the intro to Tales of Vesperia:

It's probably because it's sung by the exact same singer of the Japanese Version, adding an extra level of authenticity.

Last edited Sep 03, 2014 at 04:32AM EDT

songs made for dub openings etc. are the best thing ever, listen to this gem:

if you don't believe it, we also wouldn't have infamous highlights like:

srsly though, this iosn't really an issue for me since i mostly listen to the openings once and then skip them, and since you can always listen to the original elsewhere, who knows, maybe some neat/sobaditsgood opening may be made for the dub

Last edited Sep 03, 2014 at 10:57AM EDT
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