#dub edits

Savers Celebration Week, Day 2 (Prompt: Digimon)

If you know me, you'll know that I HAD to show some love for my very special dub-only awful boy today 🧡 If Citramon has ten fans, I'm one of them. If Citramon has one fan, that's me. If the world is against Citramon, I am against the world, etc. CITRAMON!!!!! 🍊💣🍊

It always bugged me that this scene from Fairy Tail has Natsu clearly burping after pigging out on all the food, but the SFX was never added. So, I decided to mix in a burp, but unlike the other edits on youtube where they clearly don't jive with the rest of the scene, I made sure to mix the burp in so it feels like it's part of the scene. I also added an extra flap at the end to give Natsu a little afterburp too.

For awhile I just chalked it up to an odd quirk- and hey it means they don't gotta try and translate/edit all that text - ngl I don't mind the look.

But truth is its not like 4kids purposefully changing it cause lazy or something. They're changed- to this day because they have to do it.

They legally can not keep the cards as due to FCC regulations -movies being in their own special category so they can get away with it.

So even if everyone at 4Kids/4KMedia wanted to leave things as is they can't.

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Now does it excuse how sloppy some of those edits are or how they manage to edit in the wrong card in- somehow. No.

The dub of SM118 paints the shurikens pink and adds a ring around them. When they hit the targets, they changed the sound effect to make it sound less sharp.

Considering the nature of the edit, this was done by OLM themselves.

So @wereah and I have begun to watch Heaven’s Official Blessing together. The topic came up when we were discussing examples of Asian characters in a cartoon or animated form. Specifically Chinese because drawing Chinese characters have kind of always been Were-Ah’s white whale, with Cael and his father being the latest characters Were-Ah is determined to draw.

For those not aware, in the past several years there has been a rise in Chinese animation studios telling stories for a Chinese audience. We’ve seen a few of these hit movie theaters, with a 3D animation style heavily inspired by the likes of Pixar. However, there have also been animation studios heavily inspired by Japanese animation and recently have been picked up by streaming services.

And… the thing I was not expecting when we got into this, was finding out that apparently doing edits to animated shows to make them more ‘understandable’ or ‘acceptable’ for a western audience was still a thing. 

For those who are not as old as I am (and fuck am I old), it was not uncommon in the late 90s and early 2000s to make edits to anime during the dubbing process to make it more understandable or more acceptable for a western audience. Part of it was censoring because the anime translated used to be for TV, and was often meant for an older demographic than what it was marketed to, due to misunderstandings on who cartoons were for. However, another part of it was a distrust of the audience not understanding that this was translated from another culture, and as a result certain cultural references or tropes were cut or re-edited with western sensibilities in mind.

When we first started watching Heaven’s Official Blessing, we actually started on the Funimation website because the two first episodes were for free. Due to a cliffhanger however, Were-Ah searched for where else the series might be posted so neither of us had to get a Funimation subscription. 

It turned out, it was on Netflix (which Were-Ah had), and that it was cut differently than what was on the Funimation website. And when I talk about being “cut differently” I mean where the episodes start and end. We had left off on the Funimation website on episode 3, but upon watching it, it looked part of episode 2. When we looked at the run time for each episode it didn’t look like Netflix shortened any of the episodes. This could only mean one thing.

The version that Funimation had, which was a dubbed show, had removed bits and pieces from the original show.

So we ended up watching the first two episodes again, which was in the original Mandarin language with subtitles. Which I really recommend, not because I’m snobby about dub versions, but because it can be easy to miss references verbally, even if the dub was true to the translation.

It was fascinating to watch, because what had happened was that the pacing of the story was quickened by removing bits and pieces that would have drawn the storytelling out. Some of these were very small bits of animation, like a shot of koi swimming in a pond or the pouring of tea. Others were weirdly important to the story, like when the main character Xie Lian was explaining the story behind a ghost he and his group were cutting. During his explanation, it cut to a storybook style paper cut scene as he explained what had happened, which we didn’t see before.

Were-Ah commented on how the Netflix version made it more serious and had also noted how the Funimation version seems to be a bit more comedic in tone as Xie Lian seemed like a hot mess. Whereas in the Netflix version it was pretty clear this was man playing the fool. That being said, there were also a lot of context clues that were missing in the dubbed version.

Some of it was certainly the result of trying to fit the voiceover with the mouth movements, but some of it was also just not bothering to put it in, or changing it to change the context. It was a fascinating watch, and I stayed up longer than I should have last night, but it was fun.

Huh for real? I never knew how is it different then? 😮

Here: http://dogasu.bulbagarden.net/comparisons/movies/mov05.html

And another: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/M05#Dub_edits