Okay, so I'm not the first to discuss anime dubs. While the sub vs. dub debate almost always leans to the left, nothing can ever top the original amirite?, dubbing companies are interesting for both the right and wrong reasons. The creative culture behind these companies as well as the series of events leading to the dubs have provided an interesting perspective on why any of the dubbing turns out to be good or bad.
The stories are the same, but however you view the companies themselves is always different.
I won't hold any criteria, aside from how the placement of the companies on my list will depend on how they treat the consumer. A bad voice or edit won't kill anyone, and given my contrarian mindset... there's a reason I put a five instead of a four.
Getting Rid of the Obvious
I won't say I'd be avoiding the obvious throughout the entire list, but I just want to avoid people who still rag on these companies, as well as incredibly easy targets. This spot will just sum up frequent targets, and why I'm sick to hell of seeing them.
- 4Kids
The anime community's favorite punching bag. They censored anime, they hid Japanese culture, yadda yadda yadda.
Now look, I'm not gonna act like 4Kids had never done the things they did, but frankly I'm sick of hearing about it. 4Kids had done bad things to most of the anime they've acquired, but many of them were still bearable to watch. One Piece is still their worst effort, but they didn't set out to destroy it, they wanted another show and One Piece was included as part of a package deal.
Not to mention, that one time they changed a character's race, the character had a minstrel quality to it, between showing blackface on a cartoon and changing the race, they chose the lesser of the two evils, and it wasn't even part of the main cast.
4Kids still brought us Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the best Sonic cast by far, and some great actors too. Why was there a notorious fiasco involving the new Pokemon cast? Because the actors from the 4Kids era were that good.
So the reason 4Kids really slacked was because of a misguided perspective on kid-friendliness and broadcasting standards, at least that's what I'll tell myself because if I see 4Kids on any future listicles I will bite off my own hand.
- DiC Entertainment
Not as infamous as 4Kids, as early as the first episode Japanese writing was still present, but didn't hold up as well. People like to say DiC fucked up the show, but, ahem... there're people who still fondly remember this show. If they can forgive the many hiccups in regards to poor translations of the source material, you're all overreacting, and this is coming from someone who never saw the show, but is aware of the fandom it attracted.
Not to mention, this came out in the 90s, and back then marketing was an omnipresent bitch so they had to do what they can to get people interested. Given how the show is still known to this day, they did what they had to do. Besides, it's not like DiC is homophobic.
- Speedy Video
If you know Dragon Ball Z, you'd know about Speedy. If not, they are a Malaysian video rental store who also dabbled in anime dubs, this being one of their most notable efforts. Near as I could tell, Speedy's actors were employees at their store, and as a result we got some pretty hilarious results. It's sheer low quality, but how can I be mad at a company that doesn't have dubbing as its primary service.
And now onto the rest.
Cloverway, Inc.
Cloverway was a licensing subsidiary of Toei who dabbled in anime and manga, and that goes for dubbing.
Remember how Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, a gay couple, were turned into cousins? Well, it happened right around the time Cloverway got the license as far as I know.
Whatever the case, Cloverway didn't do any better than DiC on their dub, as people gravitated toward the latter more than the former. Also gotta love how smug their logo is, anyone declaring themselves as a superior representative in any category sucks by default.
Oh but did you know their Latin dub of the show was good? In case anyone comments about that.
Funimation
And of course I put Funimation on this list, but honestly how could I not? Yes their dubs were good back then yadda yadda yadda, but wherever you lean on social issues, Funimation is one of the most toxic dubbing companies on the planet. 4Kids' actors stuck with the company to the bitter end and I think like only one or two actors became assholes.
You may talk about how they saved the One Piece dub, and okay they did, but their good dubs are just a crumbly crust on top of a rotten apple pie.
Christopher Sabat is a Harvey Weinstein in the making, we have two women who take legitimacy away from gender-related causes, Sean Schemmel is the worst professional Goku of all time (Peter Kelamis for the win), they weren't even creative enough to make their own dub of Dragon Ball when it came to the original actors, they borrowed heavily from the Ocean dub.
Not to mention they suck at maintaining their streaming service and many of their dubs can't even be used for escapism anymore (my gripe with social political stuff being inserted into shows is that they keep us from going away with all that's fucked up in the world, at least when it comes to the LGBT an interesting story can keep our heads out of the IRL gutter.), and this would be a sign they couldn't think of anything more creative or original.
Whether or not they're justified for all they did, since they're the biggest brand in anime dubbing, it's fair to hold them to a high level of scrutiny and expectation. You can say drinking water is good, and still be a dick about it.
AB Groupe
You can have a competently made dub and it can still be considered one of the worst dubs ever. In the 2000s, the AB Groupe produced their own dub of Dragon Ball Z for a release on Toonami in the United Kingdom. AB Groupe initially distributed DBZ in Canada, where it fell under the guidelines for a broadcasting mandate where a certain percentage of programs airing there must have assistance from a Canadian company (case and point, Ocean Group from Vancouver back when Funimation were a smaller licensing firm.)
However, when AB wanted to dub the DBZ movies and have them aired on YTV, they were turned down, and since having a Canadian cast would've been pointless because of the decline, they decided to produce their own dub, utilizing American and British actors that lived in France, AB's home base.
The dubs were produced incredibly cheaply, using the original Japanese credits without any mention to the dub crew (and even that can be mastered through white text on a black background, if you can make a fully animated logo you can make custom credits)
If you want more information on these dubs, Phelous does an incredible job summing up the lead to and the finished product with his reviews of DBZ World's Strongest and Tree of Might.
For perspective, the AB Groupe's dub of the movies is called the Big Green dub, which I mention to show I'm on the up and up, Big Green is the name of Piccolo, among other silly name alterations. The cast had been disputed over the years, with only one truly confirmed. I can easily say the American/British actor theory holds true because if they had used French people who speak English, an accent would show. I can say David Gasman is an American living in France, and I can mostly trace his performances of Jim Morales and Herb from Code Lyoko to his roles as Goku and Oolong.
It'd be silly for me to place a low quality dub higher than Funimation, however, AB Groupe supposedly sent copyright takedown notices to TeamFourStar some time ago, and though I never watched a single video of theirs I imagine they poked fun at AB in their videos (and how could you not, these dubs are hilarious for all the wrong reasons.) I don't know if Funimation flagged down content, but flagging is like a direct attack on someone, and Funimation did have good dubs along with the other yaddas.
Odex
For perspective, 4Kids bit off more than they could chew when producing anime dubs for kids, but at the very least they never flagged content that could be considered beyond uploading a full episode. Videos during the heyday of the anti-4Kids fiasco are still kicking, with the only takedowns coming from the owners of the channel or non-related copyright strikes.
But Odex goes well beyond YouTube flagging.
Odex is a Signaporean licensor of anime, who also produced English dubs of their own. Interestingly enough, and a reason why I'm bringing up 4Kids so much, they produced English dubs for One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh. How well did that turn out? Laughably, on BehindTheVoiceActors, the 4Kids actors manage to rank higher than any of Odex's, even Sanji's laughable 4Kids voice is better than his Odex one. 4Kids' edits (and while I'm at it, Saban's edits on Dragon Ball Z) ironically shows a greater deal of effort to hide kids from something they didn't need to be sheltered from. Odex just put an English track to their dubs.
People on the internet in the mid to late-2000s may already know this, but it begs to never be forgotten. Odex took their property very seriously, so they resorted to targeting people who downloaded anime they've licensed from the internet. They threatened legal action against even the youngest of kids, who may have no clue over the wonders of piracy, and demanded renumeration.
The crusade against something that can't be stopped went on for quite a while, leading to a forum Odex opened to getting defaced, their website getting hacked, Odex's CEO making comments that only rubbed salt further into the wound, as well as allegations that they used fansubs for their subtitled releases.
If you want the full story, it managed to get its own Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odex%27s_actions_against_file-sharing
So with that, the lesson here is that there're worse things in life than censorship.
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