And now that makes me remember the old Manga Entertainment dub of Cyber City OEDO 808 that was screened at Glasgow Film Theatre at the festival. It's... colourful — as I'm sure @Professor Irony would be able to attest to as well!
You know, before I went to see Alita: Battle Angel at the cinema, I remembered that one of my old Manga VHS tapes (yes, a VHS tape in this day and age) has a clip of the Battle Angel Alita anime in the trailer reel, so I popped it in for a look. (Yes, into a VHS player I still have set up.)
Oh my god, wasn't it just!
You’ve probably hit it on the head there Prof, I was thinking as I was writing my post “Was it just darker?” and while I was thinking colour palette rather than content, it's probably a bit of both. Then there's how alien the whole setting looks with all those organic buildings - I watched the first two episodes again today and was reminded how much I appreciated Buaku as an antagonist too, I think New Dominion suffers from his absence.
I have a genuine nostalgia for Manga's mangling in their old dubs. In a time where you can have multiple audio tracks on a disc (or even a stream) it no longer feels like quite the travesty to the source material it once did, more like added entertainment value. There's also something quite nice about hearing British VAs, even if most of the time they are putting on unsuccessful attempts at US accents.
That's all an interesting line of thought. For my own part, my anime collection isn't arranged alphabetically on my shelves: it's organised partly thematically, partly by creator. Because of all that, I have my Ghost in the Shell and Mamoru Oshii stuff next to the Masamune Shirow-derived titles, so sitting right next to New Dominion Tank Police is the pair of Patlabor movies. I guess that's because I had those two down as "maverick mecha", if you will, so I think the connection is undeniably there.
This is another interesting thing. Although I could never say I'm really a fan of the old Streamline dub of Akira, it's certainly nice to have it as one of the three audio tracks on the most recent UK BD edition of the film. I've never really seen the point of watching anime dubbed, but I'll admit that my view has softened in recent years. Part of that is probably from giving the dub of GitS Arise a try, which I reckon does give it a bit of a better script with some sharper dialogue, but also because of Miyazaki's The Wind Rises. That is honestly the best piece of dubbing work you will ever hear, I reckon; it's the closest you could ever get to just switching out the language while keeping the tone of everything intact, and the very few alterations there are to the script actually even make it a bit richer than the original, I would argue. But I still love Hideaki Anno's voice performance in the lead role in the original soundtrack too!
That was the very trailer I recently saw on that VHS tape I mentioned before, and just automatically assumed that track was included in the film!
It’s interesting you mention Arise, I find SAC to be one of the very few instances where I actually prefer the dub, almost entirely on the strength of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s Motoko, whose (frankly gorgeous) voice for me absolutely embodies the calm strength of the character. It’s certainly not perfect, as with a lot of dubs the English VAs sometimes have to rush through their lines at a somewhat unnatural pace (usually poor Richard Epcar, who I do also like a lot as Batou, but who often seems to have to cram about four words into the space of two because of the differences between English and Japanese) but I find it difficult to imagine those characters with other voices now, which is why I don’t think I could get into the Arise dub. It’s possibly a factor in why I’ve never really gotten into Arise full stop, the third and fourth OVAs have sat unwatched on my shelves for a while now and I don’t even own the movie.
In the Arise dub, Aramaki is voiced by Funimation VA John Swasey, and I think his voice just fits so well. The delivery of his lines is fantastic. You know a dub is hitting the right notes when the Logicomas are just as kawaii as they are in the original Japanese!
I'll take that recommendation, Prof.
I'll take that recommendation, Prof.
At the very least, I'd be interested in seeing it; I do like the clever analogue-era visual trickery that director Osamu Dezaki always seemed to conjure up. Hell, they even make Golgo 13: The Professional just about watchable!
The things he did by incorporating unusual lighting techniques into shooting the cels is really something worth seeing.
Are the visuals in Cobra anything along those lines? Any freeze-frame Dezaki sakuga in there?
Oh, totally. I mean, you'll have seen more Dezaki than I have, Prof., because I've only seen a pair of Golgo outings (The Professional and Queen Bee) and the Black Jack movie. I must watch Black Jack again.
I did actually notice Miyazaki's involvement when I was looking it up on MAL. I honestly had no idea of that before. I wonder what he made of the content!
Oh I thought that was on my end, it was doing my head in last week when I watched Mob Psycho, watched last nights episode without drops though so hopefully that's the case and it's was on their end.
Hopefully. I must admit sometimes I didn't notice, but then the subtitles appeared and then it was definitely noticeable.
And finally I find the opportunity to read all of @Scrambled Valkyrie's Casshern articles. They're very interesting. I've only seen Casshern Sins, so I really didn't know very much about the franchise as a whole. Reading these articles has given me a much better understanding of how Sins has played around with the long-standing elements of the Casshern story.
