Why I don't like most dubs

I have been thinking about this. I have been thinking about why I was bored with Baccano! when so many people think it's great. I have noticed that if I have only ever seen a show dubbed it tends not to hold my interest at all. I often drop series that I have only seen dubbed because I don't like them or they don't interest me. It not just dubbed series. I dropped Mouretsu Pirates at episode 8 while it was still airing and was fansub only. It happens a whole lot with series I have only seen dubbed though.

One reason is that the pool of actors doing anime dubs is not very big and consists mostly of C and D list actors. I know this has been said many times before but that's because it's true. When that guy who used to play the Black Ranger in Power Rangers is the most prominent actor in the cast, it's a pretty D list bunch.

Because there aren't very many people actually doing this, the same people seem to be in everything. They all have the same people in them and a lot of them don't differentiate their characters very well so all their characters sound the same. Sometimes it seems like there are only 10 or so anime characters total and they just change masks to be in different shows. Gee this Soul guy sure sounds like that Lelouch guy in that other show who sure sounds like that Ichigo guy in that other other show who sounds a heck of a lot like that smug guy in Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and so on.

A lot of the dialogue in dubs is clumsy, awkward and just bad. Maybe it's because they have to match the mouth flaps as well as translate the lines but I have heard a lot of really off sounding, awkward and bad dialogue in dubs. This goes for dubs of Japanese live action stuff too. Some of the stuff they come up with in the Godzilla movies is spit take inducing. It'll go through you like crap through a goose!

So we have a small pool of mediocre, D-list actors with limited acting ranges who are in everything and do the same voice over and over again doing clumsy dialogue. It's not a good combination. I think it has killed several shows for me including D.Gray-Man and Baccano! I can't think of a single show that it has improved.

There are other, more trivial things that also bother me. It bothers me when dub voice actors don't pronounce the names of their own characters correctly. It's one thing for a fan to say it wrong. It's quite another for a professional voice actor who is getting paid to play that part to consistently say it wrong.

Often dub voice actors seem to be rather lazy about getting to know the characters they are being paid to play. They get them basically wrong and the more I know about a character or franchise the more wrong they seem. I have heard several dub voice actors say that they had never seen an episode of the show they are playing a leading part in before they started dubbing or even that they had never seen it at all. No wonder their characters all sound the same. They don't know the character they are playing or the show they are in.

There are exceptions. Someone inevitably brings up the Disney Ghibli dubs but they are hardly typical. They use a whole different pool of actors and have much bigger budgets. They are not representative of the typical anime dub at all.

I am going to try watching Baccano again with the original dialogue and subtitles this time. Maybe it won't make a difference after all. I have certainly lost interest in series that don't even have dubs to watch.

ps Don't say that I need a deep understanding of the subtle nuances of the Japanese language to judge Japanese voice acting in anime. I don't buy that for a second. Anime voice acting isn't a subtle thing. It's not difficult to gauge delivery when it is as over the top as is usually is in anime.

What I "really" mean in the title is exactly what I really wrote and nothing else so don't comment saying that I "really" mean that all dubs suck or that I "really" mean that dub watchers are poopy heads or anything but what I actually wrote.