I just had this convo with my bro over aim. Cause he wanted the old akira tape I stole from him. And I wanted to borrow the old Castle of Cagliostro tape. Last night while I watched the Akira vhs, I thought to myself, "Hey, if I give the tape back, I can always get the dvd." However the more I thought about it, the more I thought back to Castle of Cag's dvd version. They redid the dubbing!

But no, they couldn't redo the dubbing on Akira. Sides for 1 out of sync politition in the movie, everyone's voices were PERFECT. Every voice fit the characters PERFECTLY. There were no annoyingly whiney voices, the people who did the dubbed voices for the tape did them professionally oldschool.

So Here I am, talking with my bro over aim who wants his akira tape. I brought up the tape exchange issue and he said he couldn't find the castle of cag. tape. Since the redubbing for Castle of Cagliostro on dvd was AWEFUL compaired to the first version, that put me at a loss. And, almost as if he read my mind, he said that they REDUBBED AKIRA! ON THE DVD! GRAH! He also told me that the redubbed akira was Nasty compaired to the original. So that begs the huge question... Why? WHY redub an oldschool anime when the first dubbed version was PERFECT.

Btw, for those of you who can't comprehend what I'm talking about, lemmi get into detail. Castle of Cagliostro was a pre-ghibli miyazaki film about Lupin the 3rd. There was even a very old computer game that came out for it about 20 years ago. It was one of the first good anime films that came to america and it's dubbing was fantastic. It set up loads of people to watch lupin and get into his other movies. Due to the characters, plot, music, and extremely incharacter-good dubbing, it was one of my fav anime films in history. A few years back, they rereleased the movie on dvd. I was hyped, old Lupin movie with Extras! So my bro gets it, I watch 5 minutes into it. And learned the horrid fact. They redubbed it. The chilvelrous voice of Lupin III that fit him so well was replaced by the guy who did 'Vash the Stampede'. And I'm not even going to get into the other characters. All I can say was that the voices were now completely out of character for the characters, and the redubbing pissed on the beauty that was in the old dubbing.

Onto Akira. I have not seen Akira redubbed, but I can trust my bro when he says that it was horrible. I still can't even conceive what crack some liscensing group was smoking when they threw akira on dvd and said, "The old akira dubbed was good, but I can make it perfect!" then follow the same mistake as Lupin. Case and point - I would rather want to puke and roll in my own partially digested slime and set myself on fire than buy the dvd of Akira Just because they redubbed it. Specially when I've had second hand word that thre redubbing was nothing nearly as spiffy as the first version.

So this begs the question. Why? Why redub a perfectly good anime movie? Specially when the first dubbing rendition fit the anime in such a way as to Make it a classic.

Probably licencing issues. Although I thought the Akira DVDs had both audio tracks on them. (Or was it just the special ed.?)

*goes off to find his autographed DVD to check*

It could be licensing issues, yes. It's also possible that they got a lot of people saying that anything dubbed before 1995 was horrible, and should never have been changed from the original language. (I just pulled that year out of thin air). Aldous Huxley once said, "62,400 repetitions make one truth." If you say something often enough, people start to believe it.

So, maybe it was a problem of licensing the dubbed version with the original people, who didn't want to let go (which is royally annoying). Or, maybe the execs honestly though the dub was bad simply because of when it was made (which is equally annoying). Either way, bad localizers, no biscuit.

Well I can think of another reson, bad sound quality from the first one and they were forced to get new people. /shrug

Also I do like the new dubs for Akira better that the old verson, I think they are easier on the ear by far. Not to mention the redone dialog make more sense.

Ah My Goddess only got liccensed for a few epps untill recently when an entirely diffrent company liccensed the whole series.
So I expect they'll redub becouse the voice actors don't sound the same anymore (years later) and work for someone else and they don't have access to the original audio in the first place.

Digital recording equipment is better.

Some of the old stuff was done pritty badly so they may be hedging the bet by doing a new dub. However this dosen't help if the new dubs are also bad.

I think some translation studios have a bit of an agenda and muck with the translation a bit.

I hear people are conserned Club To Death Angel will be mucked with becouse it's been liccensed by a studio known to do that sort of thing.

I'm looking forward to Ah My Goddess being redubbed. The original wasn't done so well. At least that is my opinion.