Wednesday, June 11, 2008

East Vs. West: Why "Dubs Suck"

Lots of people blast dubbed anime for being stupid. No matter the quality of voice acting, rewriting, or whatever, you'll always hear at least one person announce "The Japanese version was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better."

Do you know why the Japanese version always sounds better?

It's because Japanese is an inherently cooler sounding language than English.

Anything and everything sounds cooler in Japanese, or spoken by someone whose first language is Japanese. (Well, almost. I'm sure people would find a million examples that weren't. But that's not the point.) Japanese is one of those languages that is just blessed with a "sounding cool" factor (another language that I particularly like is German).

I'll grant you, part of this is because I don't speak Japanese, and thus don't understand the really stupid parts. For that matter, for some reason, those silly Japanese think English sounds cool. But a Japanese guy shouting GaoGaiGar (actual pronunciation: GAO GAI GAH) is going to sound better than some guy, with perfect English enunciation, saying GowGuyGrr. (The clip of a dorky English-speaking narrator saying GowGuyGrr can be found here. Considering the quality of the rest of the VAs, where did they find such a dope to do the narration?) This particular dub was just really lucky to find possibly the only English speaker in the world who doesn't sound ridiculous shouting anime attack names.

EDIT: Okay, they improved on that really dopey narrator (the previously shown clip was apparently an online preview, and this is from the actual release), but he still doesn't sound as good as the Japanese one:



Seriously.

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