German Digimon's music is awesome · 2:17pm Mar 27th, 2018
You know, I'm often enjoy a lot Latin American anime singers. We have legends like Adrián Barba and Cesar Franco, who're still producing to this day. If you listen to their covers, it's pure enthusiasm and energy. Here you have Barba's take on Ultimate Battle, for example. Try to not get excited by it:
Now, by far my favorite suite of songs is Digimon. Nostalgia may be a big factor on it, but I really love the songs from the the first four series (Adventure, 02, Tamers and Frontier). Again, the Latino dubs of said songs rank high in my list, and I even have a separate one in my i-pod/phone. There, Cesar Franco's version of Biggest Dreamer is one fine piece of art.
But lately, in between work and family, I've been caught in a nostalgia trip. That's how I found through TV Tropes about the german dub of Digimon Tamers having their own remixes. Different instrumentals, with different keys.That's pretty much what happens in Latino America, so I got curious. I went and played the three main songs (Biggest Dreamer, EVO and One Vision) to listen what was all about. It's amazing. Here's the three of them. My immediate favorite is Eine Vision.
And not only that, they went on with Frontier. To be honest, With the Will, while still pretty good, is basically the one I like the less. Nothing against, it, but I've always feel that, for an evolution theme, it falls short on hyping it up. Pure subjective opinion. However, the German version is so energetic in comparison to the original and Latino versions, that it deserves a mention too. Enjoy:
German anime dubs have a habit of partially or complety replacing music and theme scores like that, more so in the past than they do today. The German version of the Dragonball title theme is a particularly interesting one. Dragonball, not Dragonball Z, that. I don't know what you'll be expecting when you hear it, but it probably won't be what you get. Its very calm and borders on outright melancholic in places.
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Yep, I was not expecting any of it. It sounds like David Bowie in his techno era (.1 Outside). The different tone from Fantastic Adventure altogether is still quite catchy, to be honest.
We used to have alternate intros for anime in the 80's. Most notably made by author Guillermo "Memo" Aguirre. This may be unsurprising, but my favorite ones are for mecha series. Very 80's, with lots of guitar, synthesizer and high tones. Borderline between hair metal and electronic. In my opinion, it fits better with the imagery of giant robots than their original disco/big band openings, which I still like anyways.
Compare and contrast:
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If you could, please just give me plain links to Youtube videos. My browser has a number of custom security features that limit off-site embedding a lot. I can't actually see any of that.
Yeah, the whole Dragonball theme is really interesting in German. It sounds outright wistful, both in the melody and the actual lyrics, which is pretty interesting because it's the kind of thing that someone would come up with if they had never seen the show, but gotten a written description of Son Goku's life story at the beginning of the series to base the theme song on. You probably didn't look up the translation, but it conveys a feeling of a child lost in a hostile world, looking for a magical power to make everything right again. The Sailor Moon theme, as I remember it, was very different from the English opening in most of the same ways.
Just in case you didn't hear the same one I remember, I talked about this one:
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Whoops. And there I was using the embedded to made it simpler. Here are the links:
Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4O5ZjjdcUI
Latino American: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS5QrGejVWk
Yeah. I just assumed they took the general idea of Fantastic Adventure on a different style. The changed lyrics do give a bit of perspective to think about Goku's life and uprising.
On Sailor Moon, from what I get, the original theme was supposed to be wishful and emotional in the first place. It's the US one that got into a more action theme.Thankfully, we got the wishful one in Lat.Am. I really liked it, along other 90's anime themes that are melancholic, yet optimistic. Ironically, Evangelion's theme really fits in that description.
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Much obliged. It's really interesting how incredibly different those are. I enjoy Latin rock bands like Extremo Duro and it's interesting to see how many basic chords and the same kind of chill, relaxing theme those share. Makes it feel much more like a local trend rather than a fashion trend.
Well, that's certainly interesting to know. Especially our ending theme borders on outright "sad" in tone to a degree that the show itself wouldn't seem to justify. The manga certainly seems to do so, but I've never read that one myself.
I also just realized that even over 25 years later, I am still capable of whistling Dead Moon Circus tone-perfect. Maybe I really should take those music classes.
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I think you would enjoy Los Jaivas, although their style is way more folkloric than anything. Still worth a listen, if only because of how representative they are of their generation.
Bah, Sailor V and Sailor Moon have been in my list's list, but I never feel motivated enough to read/watch them through. And yeah, nostalgia can be quite a thing. I still find myself whistling/humming Pegasus Fantasy from time to time.
I still enjoy the German Dub of Digimon. They gave Impmon/Beelzemon a great VA. Only... they also made Renamon a guy.
I used to think it was very progressive when Vajramon called "him" beautiful.
Well, I guess it still kind of is.
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Well, that definitely paints a lot of scenes under a completely different light. Though, Japanese culture (as far as I understand), does consider beautiful, or at least traditionally desirable, a man with soft traits western culture associates with feminine. So that's a thing.
It reminds me of Airazor, from Transformers. She in the west, he in Japan. It got 'interesting' since she and Tigatron (male) were a couple. Still, I really like when different dubs give their series a spin to give it an identity of its own.