#but this video was about celebrating heiji and funimation's dub

[marshmallowgoop]

#ALBERTA????????????????? THEYRE IN OSAKA???????????? HELLO???????

Amusingly (or not), FUNimation's English dub didn't seem to know what to do about Osaka initially. Before deciding on Alberta in Episode 118, they called it "Ocean View" in Episode 77:

But Osaka is properly referred to as Osaka in their dub of the third film, The Last Wizard of the Century.

In any case, I was teasing the outlandishness of the ridiculous localizations in this video, but on a more serious note, I do think the name changes and alterations are disappointing and sad. Christopher Sabat once said in a Tweet:

"I was in many of the planning meetings for Case Closed [Detective Conan] and fought to do a pure adaptation of the show, believing that viewers were becoming interested in Japanese culture and that excessive Americanization was unnecessary and problematic. I was outvoted."

And I wholeheartedly agree with him. I wish he wasn't outvoted. A part of me can't help but feel that Detective Conan would have fared so much better with audiences in the US had it not been so altered. This wasn't even a 4Kids deal. The show literally aired on Adult Swim.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in the history of the English-language scene for Conan—and how there may genuinely have been an attempt to essentially 4Kids all the graphic murders!—Mike Toole’s “The One Truth, And Nothing But the One Truth: An Oral History of Case Closed” is a thorough, detailed read.

I also want to point out that while I probably complain about FuNi's dub as much as I praise it, this video was sincerely made with love. Underneath the unnecessary changes, I do think there's (generally) a solid script that does well to make the (in my opinion) often very awkward-sounding more literal translations so much more sensible and natural in English. (And that's why, with the content FUNimation dubbed, I always subtitle my GIFs with FuNi's script, just changing the names back when needed. Without that, I think there's a lot of good stuff here! Cheesy, yes, but this is a cheesy show. It works for me.)

But I completely understand feeling differently. I initially refused to watch FUNimation's dub solely for the goofy names. Bang Zoom! is now dubbing more recent films and specials in English, and this is a much more faithful, accurate production. So, not all Conan English dubs are like this. But problematic as it may be, I do have a lot of fondness for FUNimation's dub and wish it hadn't been bogged down by such unnecessary localizations, no matter how much I might laugh at the absurdity of them.

no thoughts just Heiji Hattori