He likes PJ Masks, Scooby Do and especially Pokemon Master Journeys.
Now Pokemon is a Japanese phenomenon and I assume that what we see on TV is the dubbed show. Even so I personally found the dubbing unintelligible and the content I could fathom was complete gibberish.
I can't decide if this is a dubbing issue or my age or just my rubbish hearing. Junior seemed to get every word!
As a kid I watched what was maybe the only anime on British TV in the Sixties ( probably wrong about that) - Marine Boy - which I adored and I understood everything, so what's changed?
Do you struggle with dubbing readers? What do you think of modern kids' TV?
Over the years, the quality of the translation has improved but around late 90s/early 00s they started shifting from some localization to cheap one liners/in jokes that have not aged well. Add in that companies like Funimation are straying from the source story and inserting their agenda instead has made dubs a poison well imo.
ReplyDeleteI grew up on dubs. Speed Racer, Astro Boy, gigantor, Amazing/Wonder 3, Space giants, Ultraman, Spectreman, Starblazers etc.
Today's kids TV is made for quite short attention spans and runs off the idea that someone needs to be talking all the time or they'll lose their audience. There's also the mindset that kids can't handle serious subject matter so make the script full of jokes and farts because kids love that.
Remember, Thunderbirds was a 60 minute show that had a lot of drama and slow spots to not just help build up tension but to give the viewer spots to relax/calm back down. Then years later came Thunderbirds USA on FOX but I can't recall seeing that show. I unfortunately can recall seeing Turbocharged Thunderbirds on UPN. Devised as a comedy, Turbocharged Thunderbirds moved the action to the planet "Thunder-World" and combined the original puppet footage with new live-action scenes featuring a pair of human teenagers. A 60 min show cut down to fit a 30 min time slot, more like 24 to allow for commercials, probably another 4 minutes for the live action segments so we end up with just 20 minutes from the original show. It was horrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYGDeZ0UnYA
While TB was not dubbed, I feel it perfectly illustrates how the focus shifted from story building/telling to just flashy stuff and jokes with fast paced babble. Shows went from entertaining the viewer to just keeping asses in front of the screen.
Fascinating stuff lance, that explains a lot. I really do struggle with many of Junior's action shows as I simply cannot understand them and now I know why. It isn't just me! The voice masters seem to have left Scooby Do intact thank God and the characters appear to have more or less the same voices they had when I first saw the show in 1970 I think, which is sort of comforting when I see it now. I'd love to see Marine Boy back on the UK tellybox! Seven Arts rings a bell, the production company. You've seen so much more Anime than me. I assume there was much more on US TV in the 70's than there was here in Blighty. Thanks again for your insights.
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