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October 02, 2004
you can't please everybody...
...but at least use some common sense.
It's not often that I get to see Cartoon Network's broadcast of .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, but - as usual - I was up late moving this blog to MySQL.
Right off the bat, LOTTB proved to be a slightly schizophrenic dub experience. During the OP the credits were in Japanese - heck, the show's title was in Japanese. Pity the fool who can't read Japanese. (and double whammy - it was in kanji, not kana.) The dedication to authenticity is admirable, but they could have at least turned on the subtitles.
As it happened this was the Tanabata episode, wherein an important part of the festival is to write down a wish on a piece of paper and hang it from a tree. We are shown everyone's wishes. Fine and good, but this being a Japanese production everyone was, naturally, writing in Japanese - and there were no subtitles. Since the wishes were a crucial part to understanding the characters, couldn't they at least have turned on the subtitles for that? Aaaand the ED was again all-Japanese credits.
I would consider LOTTB one of the "gateway" anime - simple enough plot, cute character designs, fairly non-controversial story (aside from occasional weirdness between Shuugo and Rena's online characters
), and short. So it's a little frustrating to see things like this, that make anime even less accessible to the average viewer. No one's going to appreciate it, least of all the "purists" who are all off watching fansubs anyway. For the rest of us - channel-surfers, mainstream Middle Americans who are new to this heah furrin enn-ee-may thang, and dub-tolerant people like me - it's just plain weird.
I'm not sure what CN/Bandai were trying to prove; I'm not even sure if they were trying to prove anything. It was just as bizarre - for different reasons - as Funimation's insistence on giving Anglicized names to everyone in Tokyo.
Posted by Innocent Sidekick of Evil at October 2, 2004 07:43 PM | Posted to Anime, American Style
