After a small dose of writer’s block I’m back with a really juicy top ten, in fact I have a double feature this time with the top ten best & worst dub voice acting.
Before I begin these top ten lists are a judgement of voice acting & scripting not the full dub itself so I cannot use cuts & edits as an argument for poor dubbing nor can I use the excuse of the anime being bad. One of my dishonorable mentions will sum it up better. So now I start with the list of the ten worst dub voice acting.
Our voices shatter your speakers
Dishonorable Mentions
One Piece (4Kids): As bad as the dub was, most of the criticism aimed at the 4Kids One Piece dub was to do with the horrific cuts & editing, when your left without cuts the actors aren’t that bad at voicing the characters, and I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks a Brooklyn accent suits Sanji.
The Wallflower: This series doesn’t have a volume button, everyone shouts louder than a Dora the Explorer episode, but a great script managed to save it.
Virtua Fighter: Dub acting was pretty bad but then again so was the anime and I cannot use bad anime as an excuse.
10. Wedding Peach
Wedding Peach needed some tender loving care and it never got it, one decent lead voice but the other two leads don’t back it up well, especially Angel Daisy where she is a tough bruiser type girl with the voice of Velma on laughing gas; the script isn’t any better with inserted Americanisms that so plagued early ADV dubs.
9. Yumeria
A series where one word is mentioned so many times that the impact is lost before the series even begins. The trailer for Yumeria never helped them to begin with, it was like Love Hina but Keitaro is being punched every minute of the series rather than every ten minutes.
8. Sister Princess
The voices of the numerous female characters are creepy and in a series where it is such a big plot point to have an extended harem, I don’t feel comfortable watching it.
7. Disgaea
The anime had some of the most irritating voices I’ve ever heard. Now I don’t know how significant the verbal tic “Dood” is supposed to be in the franchise but I do know that I don’t want to hear it ever again.
6. Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal
I only watched two episodes of this series and I wanted to rip out my ears. Was the fallout with 4Kids so bad that they felt the need to punish us with such a horrible dub of Zexal? Seriously I used to give the 4Kids voices free passes because despite working for a company that destroys the integrity of anime, it was never the fault of the voice actors, they were just doing their job but even they must of thought that the acting they were doing in Zexal was terrible.
5. Jubei-Chan
I believe I mentioned this one in my review; Jubei-Chan has some of the most emotionless voice acting I’ve ever heard, the amount of scenes I went through which needed some emotion was many and only once did they get it right. It also felt as though all the actors were exhausting themselves with the long winded explanations they had to give.
4. Goldenboy
This is one of my favorite anime of all time but the dub is one big mistake, a character eager to learn in every job he does, who is also very intelligent, a bit of a pervert as well, but big-hearted and yet they give him the stupidest voice in dubbing history. To further emphasize this, his original voice in the Japanese is brilliant.
3. Street Fighter II Victory
This anime had two dub attempts to get it right and failed them both. The scripting is a mess, both voice casts were two dimensional in their performances and even those who did get it right never stayed any longer than one episode. I’ll say again, two attempts!
2. Any Anime ADR Directed or ADR Written by Gary Dehan
ADR stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement, and it’s up to the ADR Director to make sure the dubbing goes smoothly without any problems. Gary Dehan worked in the early ADV Films era and he lent his talents to a number of their earliest dubs.
But his list of work is the likes of the Tekken Movie, the Sonic Movie, Sakura Wars TV, Sakura Diaries, Legend of Crystania, City Hunter, Shuten Doji, Maps, Variable Geo & Ninja Resurrection and a few low grade anime; all of which are quite bad dubs and some are notoriously bad anime as well but even better shows like Queen Emeraldas & 801 T.T.S Airbats didn’t really do very well either. The problem is the casting wasn’t particularly good, the voice acting in many of them were either two dimensional or emotionless. ADV Films were lucky, they had strong links to Evangelion to keep them afloat but poor runs with low grade anime came back to bite them when they went down.
1. Needless
But Needless is the worst dub I’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to, the script writing was awful, the dialogue was vomit inducing and these are well known professional dub actors as well, with a full list of decent credits among them, a lot of them were also ADVFilm veterans around at their prime and many of the others are current first choice Funimation employees. There are only three decent voices in the whole series. Adam Blade was good, Disc was very well done & Kuchinashi who is a mute and only says two words in the entire series. It comes to something when a mute is the best character in the dub; the rest are either lazy, try too hard, don’t try enough, utterly irritating or plagued by a horrible script.
Not even some of the worst anime in existence can claim to have a worst dub than Needless.
