You could have all the best actors in the world, but if the director sucks, your actor sucks. Initially, though, it was downright awful, and even later in the show, it would have its awful moments. To be honest, not too much, as after the first several episodes, Digimon’s dub was perfectly listenable. Despite this, some lines still lack emotion, or at least realistic emotion, and other line deliveries fall into so-bad-it’s-hilarious territory, so… what went wrong? Digimon has an astounding amount of these double-threat voices in its cast every single season, including the three dynamos I mentioned earlier. This is the rare “double threat” that makes people like Steve Blum, Mary McGlynn, and Crispin Freeman irresistible, and mastery over both sides of voice acting is pretty rare. Digimon has consistently been packed chock-full of some of the best voice actors in the business – talented folks who could maintain multiple unusual animated voices and convey complex emotions at the same time in other words, people who could be great actors. Still, while I remember the music being loud and distracting at age nine, I don’t remember the voice acting being bad, so clearly, the music must be the series’ greatest handicap. Worst of all, the music never shuts up there aren’t any dramatic or comedic moments of silence, there aren’t transition or special-occasion pieces it’s just loud, generic, fully-orchestrated fervor blaring away all the dang time.
#DIGIMON TAMERS ENGLISH SUB WHERE CAN I WATCH FULL#
The English dub sounds like a party full of instruments yakking away through every single episode they may be having perfectly interesting musical conversations, but they don’t have much direct relation to what’s on-screen except maybe a general mood, and sometimes they don’t even get the mood right. But then once all that work had been put in, the editor or producer or whomever slathered it all over the show with no rhyme or reason to its placement and no pauses in between. I mean, the scores themselves weren’t that bad, but like I always say: “It’s not what you have, it’s how you use it.” Saban took the trouble to compose some pretty exciting, dynamic (and most of all, loud), fully-orchestrated pieces to use for Digimon. I can deal with the sometimes campy voice acting, the unnecessary edits, or anything else about the English version of the show when you compare it to what they did to the musical score. And don’t even get me started on Card Captor Sakura.īut, the dub’s music – at least for the first two seasons – was by far the worst part of the series’ translation to the West. Believe it or not, that was actually RARE back then the early dub of DBZ had about 15 episodes’ worth of footage removed (they didn’t skip any episodes, they just did a LOT of editing), resulting in completely different episode counts. But the episodes themselves were left almost completely intact - the episode count was actually the same in both the US and Japan for once. Sure, there were name changes, censorships, and cringe-worthy puns. The English-language versions of, say, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Escaflowne, and Card Captor Sakura had entire episodes cut out and/or rearranged, relationships between characters edited, and in the case of Escaflowne and CCS, tried to hide the fact that the main characters were female by editing the scenes so the male characters had more screen-time.Ĭompared to all that, the dubs of Digimon actually made a lot of positive steps toward giving us accurate, true-to-the-original dubs in many anime to come. Back in 1999, English dubs were, with a few exceptions (Cowboy Bebop), known for being absolutely horrendous and disrespectful to the source material.
Honestly, the English dubs of Digimon weren’t all that terrible, especially compared to its contemporaries.