Watch! What time is it? RANT TIME! (Or, When You Can't Watch Yo-Kai Watch) · 5:10pm Aug 5th, 2016
This is a rant about a specific case of epic dub fail. This is not intended as a general dubbed-anime-bashing rant. Please keep this in mind when reading and responding.
So one of the things viewers of the Yo-Kai Watch anime dub have to contend with on a regular basis, especially those who are savvy about Japanese culture, is the fact that the basic premise of the entire franchise is heavily rooted in Japanese culture. There's no getting around the fact that at its core, Yo-Kai Watch is heavily Westernized for American/Canadian audiences, strips out a lot of cultural context, and doesn't acknowledge or explain its roots in Japanese mythology.
And for the most part, that's okay. Well, it's not okay, but it's understandable--when you get right down to it, it's being marketed towards children who simply don't know anything about Japanese culture, and would be massively confused if the dub tried to dump a bunch of foreign culture on them they have no context for understanding.
I mean, when you get right down to it, Youkai Watch is a bitch of a thing to have to adapt for Western audiences. As heavily grounded in Japanese culture and mythology as it is, making something out of it that makes sense to American/Canadian audiences is a hell of a chore, and I'm frankly amazed they do as good a job of it as they do on a regular basis.
But as with all things when it comes to localization, there's a limit to how far you can push the line. In the dub of episode 30, they stretched a foot across that line when they acknowledged Nate was watching a samurai movie, but went out of their way to de-Japanify the comments he and Whisper were making about the movie, even going so far as to call the main character "Sam Steel" instead of, you know, leaving a Japanese name in there because they were talking about a samurai movie and that's understood to be a Japanese thing even by little kids.
Episode 31 jumped over the line, took two steps back, dropped its pants, and took a massive shit on the line, and this is one of those instances where I just can't make excuses or apologies for something stupid the dub did.
You see, episode 31 of the Youkai Watch anime has Nate and some of the Youkai forced into doing a silly spoof of Journey to the West. There's no getting around that one. It's an ancient and well-known fable, its trappings are readily apparent any time it's referenced, and it does not translate into another culture in any way, shape, or form without falling apart and becoming a complete mess. Not if you're doing a straight-up spoof of it, anyway. Dragon Ball dubbed into English worked only because Toriyama took JttW and built an entirely new universe and fable around the basic trappings, so broader knowledge of the fable itself really isn't necessary to appreciate Dragon Ball on its own merits.
The Youkai Watch parody of Journey? Not so much.
Simply put, this is an episode they should have just skipped dubbing. Without the appropriate cultural context, the episode falls apart. Not only that, but the horrendous choices they made in adapting the episode make it so painful to watch I wasn't able to make it halfway through the episode. There's only so much of a really bad localization of a spoof of Journey to the West one can take when one has the cultural awareness to know how horribly wrong things have gone.
Honestly, I can see American kids who don't know the first thing about the fable just...being completely confused by this episode. Because it doesn't make sense without cultural context, and if you have the cultural context to make sense of it, it's just painful to watch.
This is one of those rare instances where they really should have just skipped the episode entirely.
Hmm... Guess I'll have to get used to Japanese Whisper. Which is a shame, since his voice in the 3DS game has grown on me. It's kinda like Thanatos from Kid Icarus Uprising, but if he were gay. Actually... Correction, more gay than usual...
But yeah. I know full well how much of a chore it can be for dubbing to be hard to do without mistakes, and even when they do get it right, it's still too little too late. Right now—and I know that you're not interested in this—Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc V is on Episode 117 in Japan, and America just got started with Season 3 (Episodes 50-75), which incorporated imprisonment, slavery, gambling, and even japanese-themed and named monsters (Henceforth Enjoy Choujiro.). So I know full well that it's going to be quite shocking to hear the English dubbing of that show again, even when we're on episode 117 in Subbed. I also know how cheesy as f**k it's going to be with all of the american cast returning. And the fact that it's probably going to be as stripped down and bare-bones as it can be with how it's supposed to be safe for teens in the USA...
Oh well. Let's just hope Roger's got a decent American VA, because Roger was a savage villain in Seasons 3 and 4...