Anime/Manga Worst Anime Dub you've ever watched?
- Thread starter Lysander
- Start date
pkmin3033
Guest
- 0
- Posts
You don't know what suffering is until you've seen Glitter Force. Trust me. I watched it so you didn't have to. Also Yuri Lowenthal being cast as Simon in the TTGL dub makes that one of the worst dubs I have ever seen. Made even worse by TTGL being a really good anime.
Obligatory Ghost Stories dub since it's simultaneously the best and worst English dub of all time. I also think the Akira dub is really bad.
More thought goes into casting for Japanese dubs so they're just typically better.
More thought goes into casting for Japanese dubs so they're just typically better.
- 9,639
- Posts
- 7
- Years
- Sootopolis City
- Seen today
A lot dubs have bad voices. I am more surprised when they are actually good. To me the worst dubs are the ones that not only sound bad, but cut out story content or deliberately alter attributes of a character. If a scene is explicit then I will overlook moderate editing to make it less graphic like reducing the amount of blood visible if it's a particularly violent event. However, I think you should at least get the idea of what happened. It shouldn't be changed so much that there isn't any suggestion of what is really going on.
Sailor Moon is the worst offender that I know of. The relationships of characters and the way they look and were referred to werechanged all because of homophobia. Several male characters were dubbed to be female because DiC and Cloverway didn't want to portray same-sex attraction or any exploration of gender identity. The most notorious example of the butchered English translation was changing Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus to cousins, instead of letting them stay a couple to make their intimate relationship appear plutonic and not the lesbian pairing it was.
I can live with some changes to the names of characters or their abilities to make them easier to pronounce by Western audiences, or not showing as much detail of the anatomy of the girls when they are transforming and briefly nude, but the substance of the content shouldn't change.
Lots of scenes, full episodes and back stories that gave characters more depth were removed from the dub, and that's not acceptable to me. We also missed out on several running jokes, the dirty ones and slapstick comedy especially. Characters that were supposed to die aren't dead in the translation. Some characters and plots are just dropped altogether like the entire final season Sailor Stars.
The English dub for Card Captor Sakura is also terrible. It commits some of the same crimes previously mentioned like dumbing down the series so that there's no danger of death, and erasing same-sex attraction from the show as well as censoring all sorts of other relationships like arranged marriages, pairings with age differences and marriages between blood relatives. In general the show is not romantic at all. Even the love between the main little girl and boy Sakura and Syaoran isn't ever fully developed and acknowledged like it is in Japanese.
The whole tone of the English dub is in fact very unlike the source material, and the cuteness and delicateness of the series is stripped away in a cash grab to promote it as something it's not, down to rewriting the theme songs just to make it feel more like shonen instead of the shoujo series it is.
Sailor Moon is the worst offender that I know of. The relationships of characters and the way they look and were referred to werechanged all because of homophobia. Several male characters were dubbed to be female because DiC and Cloverway didn't want to portray same-sex attraction or any exploration of gender identity. The most notorious example of the butchered English translation was changing Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus to cousins, instead of letting them stay a couple to make their intimate relationship appear plutonic and not the lesbian pairing it was.
I can live with some changes to the names of characters or their abilities to make them easier to pronounce by Western audiences, or not showing as much detail of the anatomy of the girls when they are transforming and briefly nude, but the substance of the content shouldn't change.
Lots of scenes, full episodes and back stories that gave characters more depth were removed from the dub, and that's not acceptable to me. We also missed out on several running jokes, the dirty ones and slapstick comedy especially. Characters that were supposed to die aren't dead in the translation. Some characters and plots are just dropped altogether like the entire final season Sailor Stars.
The English dub for Card Captor Sakura is also terrible. It commits some of the same crimes previously mentioned like dumbing down the series so that there's no danger of death, and erasing same-sex attraction from the show as well as censoring all sorts of other relationships like arranged marriages, pairings with age differences and marriages between blood relatives. In general the show is not romantic at all. Even the love between the main little girl and boy Sakura and Syaoran isn't ever fully developed and acknowledged like it is in Japanese.
The whole tone of the English dub is in fact very unlike the source material, and the cuteness and delicateness of the series is stripped away in a cash grab to promote it as something it's not, down to rewriting the theme songs just to make it feel more like shonen instead of the shoujo series it is.
Last edited:
Leo/Kimba the Lion.
To be fair, it came out in the mid 60s but even then, it is quite noticeably horrendous. A lot of the voice acting simply does not suit the characters as well as the fact that the voices are either too dramatic at the wrong times or are lifeless all together.
I'll never forget the part when an antagonistic character is in the midst of an avalanche and the most we get from them is a monotonous "aaaahhhhh." It's hilariously awful.
To be fair, it came out in the mid 60s but even then, it is quite noticeably horrendous. A lot of the voice acting simply does not suit the characters as well as the fact that the voices are either too dramatic at the wrong times or are lifeless all together.
I'll never forget the part when an antagonistic character is in the midst of an avalanche and the most we get from them is a monotonous "aaaahhhhh." It's hilariously awful.
Those are the same two that I was thinking of, though in both cases those two dubs were pretty much just parodies of the originals, and were supposed to be bad. Though, Ghost Stories is still one of the best things I've ever seen - the dub, anyway. I pretty much forced all my friends to watch it some years ago, and they thanked me after.
Otherwise, with dubs that took itself serious, the original 90's Sailor Moon dub was pretty bad. I grew up with it, don't get me wrong, but it really was technically terrible in regards to the acting, and the cuts and edits that were made.
Also Digimon's dub turned everything in a joke, and we were robbed of a few of the movies, and they fused two or three other movies into one single film. That was actually pretty well put together, but still kind of necessary and left out a lot of things.
---- Strike me down if this was too old to reply to, I just wanted to poke some life into the area. It feels pretty quiet. ;w;
- 853
- Posts
- 3
- Years
- Seen Nov 9, 2023
was just about to say the same thing.
Uecil
[img]https://i.ibb.co/4jfYrCT/tHdpHUB.png[/img]
- 2,568
- Posts
- 14
- Years
- Unknown.
- Seen Jan 9, 2024
I came here to post 'Ghost stories' too lolol
Besides that, the Yuri on ice dub, hah. Viktor's accent they gave him really reminded me of Gru from Minions and I cannot stop thinking about it. It felt like such a disappointment, due to the fact that I wanted to rewatch it in English too. I loved the show.
I can't just call it all bad tho. It was 'Okay'. I was going to say Gravitation. It's the only one that came to my mind right now. I don't watch a lot of English dubs, to be honest. I don't totally despise the dub of Gravitation as I do tend to find it rather amusing, but there's something so over the top with the voicing. Then again, I feel that it does fit in nicely for the time the anime series was released and the characters, just in general.
Sometimes, now, when I rewatch it in dub, I feel that some of the voices are just oddly placed, For example, I felt like Yuki's was the one that really felt, extremely out of place from time to time and that the voice actor kind of makes him sound grouchy 24/7. Which isn't entirely true, in comparison to the portrayal in the original jap dub. I also felt like his voice actor should've swapped with Hiro's. That's just my view on it.
Other than that, there are times, where some of the lines they say in replacement of the original one-- I always end up thinking sarcastically, 'Well done, Sherlock', or even sometimes with Ryuichi I get the same thing. I feel that at times, while I like the change in character, I feel in the dub, it's just been over the top done. It's really hard to say (The show itself is a bit over the top at times, but still.)
When there actually IS a serious or sensitive moment during the story, it feels like they just add in a silly extra line for a joke, or they say what needs to be said in a joking tone, which can be slightly hindering.
Another one I can think of as well, there were a few of the newer Yu-gi-oh! seasons, where I can't necessarily watch them in English like I use to, due to similar reasons.
Besides that, the Yuri on ice dub, hah. Viktor's accent they gave him really reminded me of Gru from Minions and I cannot stop thinking about it. It felt like such a disappointment, due to the fact that I wanted to rewatch it in English too. I loved the show.
I can't just call it all bad tho. It was 'Okay'. I was going to say Gravitation. It's the only one that came to my mind right now. I don't watch a lot of English dubs, to be honest. I don't totally despise the dub of Gravitation as I do tend to find it rather amusing, but there's something so over the top with the voicing. Then again, I feel that it does fit in nicely for the time the anime series was released and the characters, just in general.
Sometimes, now, when I rewatch it in dub, I feel that some of the voices are just oddly placed, For example, I felt like Yuki's was the one that really felt, extremely out of place from time to time and that the voice actor kind of makes him sound grouchy 24/7. Which isn't entirely true, in comparison to the portrayal in the original jap dub. I also felt like his voice actor should've swapped with Hiro's. That's just my view on it.
Other than that, there are times, where some of the lines they say in replacement of the original one-- I always end up thinking sarcastically, 'Well done, Sherlock', or even sometimes with Ryuichi I get the same thing. I feel that at times, while I like the change in character, I feel in the dub, it's just been over the top done. It's really hard to say (The show itself is a bit over the top at times, but still.)
When there actually IS a serious or sensitive moment during the story, it feels like they just add in a silly extra line for a joke, or they say what needs to be said in a joking tone, which can be slightly hindering.
Spoiler:
Another one I can think of as well, there were a few of the newer Yu-gi-oh! seasons, where I can't necessarily watch them in English like I use to, due to similar reasons.
Last edited:
Palamon
Silence is Purple
- 8,158
- Posts
- 15
- Years
- Age 27
- he/him
- Snezhnaya, Teyvat.
- Seen today
There aren't any that are inssuferably bad to me, but the Full Moon Wo Sagashite dub was an embarassment to watch. Also the Ensemble Stars dub was garbage we don't talk about.