Abridged series have been part of the fan culture of anime for a number of years now having turned poor quality dubbing into a joke, but a number of series have been dubbed in such a way that it turns from something fairly straight into a gag comedy.
Arguably the most well known gag dub is the Samurai Pizza Cats, the story goes that the original script and audio were not sent to the dubbing team at Saban, so instead of trying to work out what was going on they decided to turn it into a spoof comedy which worked so well that the creators of the original considered it better, but there are others.
ADVFilms & Funimation were notorious for reworking a number of shows into gag fests, either as DVD extras or as part of the show, most notably and more recently, Hetalia Axis Powers; it was obvious that the group wanted to put as much gags as possible so they got heavy with the accents and the stereotype jokes but the winner is the narrator for her sharp-tongue humor.
But when we British do dubs, we certainly go the extra mile; I've already mentioned Catgirl Nuku Nuku in a previous post but we have more.
Super rare dub "The Enemy's The Pirates" (the rarest in the world) was packed to the brim with gags especially with wise cracking characters such as space cat Apulo, sounding like a cross between Mother Brain from Captain N the Games Master and comedian Chris Rock. Ultimate Teacher another anime film differed between American & British dubs with the British one having more gags, Ultimate Teacher of course is the one series deemed un-reviewable by Bennett the Sage from the thatguywiththeglasses team.
But the winner and most obscure was BBC's take on Urusei Yatsura, as part of a cultural weekend celebrating Japan the BBC attempted to dub Urusei Yatsura but the way it was edited and scripted it became more like an abridged series. It was even called Lum the Invader Girl instead of it's Japanese title Urusei Yatsura. In fact see for yourself.
For those unfamiliar with the rarer titles in this feature, I will do my best to explain them in the comments if asked. Until next time.
Urban Legends: Gagging the Dub
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