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Wow I'm hella late but also very touched! Shame I have no musical creative ability, would love a chance to be able to play with the sound assets though pff.For a long time now I have suspected Felipo to be the anime fandom's MVP. Now I know he is. How'd he even find this extract?! Can Hayashi, Goldfarb .et al just be replaced by him please?
If I were to make an educated guess, it's less out of cheapness/even greed and moreso... cuz it's proven to work. When the dub cast changed in 2006 there was still a ton of staff behind the scenes that transferred over. Even if the production companies had shifted, the PRACTICES hadn't. And as a result, the dub has essentially remained in the same state (to varying degrees) since the 90s because that 90s production still hasn't ended.I have a question. The Pokemon Company is in a far different state in 2020 than it was in 2006, where they replaced the dub handlers and ignored most of the original score. TPCI makes billions each year, and one has to wonder why are they still cutting corners? Why does the dub come off as cheap, when they obviously have the finances to fund a stronger localization. I mean, The Pokemon Company is making more money in 2020 than what they were during Pokemania, yet the Dub has never been in a weaker state. I think this is indefensible and there really is no excuse for there being a weak dub with little to no japanese music left in.
If I were to make an educated guess, it's less out of cheapness/even greed and moreso... cuz it's proven to work. When the dub cast changed in 2006 there was still a ton of staff behind the scenes that transferred over. Even if the production companies had shifted, the PRACTICES hadn't. And as a result, the dub has essentially remained in the same state (to varying degrees) since the 90s because that 90s production still hasn't ended.
We look at other anime projects from TPC being dubbed nowadays and see them being presented a lot more faithfully from a sound/uncut standpoint, because those are BRAND NEW productions that started in the 21st century with more modern sensibilities when it comes to how to handle their localizations. The main anime if anything, while at times has proven keeping more music can easily work in terms of licensing (TPCi being more than willing to do it), the overuse of wall-to-wall dub cues, if anything, I would assume is from them playing it safe. Why license the JP music to make money off it while still paying some of the returns back to the original owners, for POSSIBLY high revenue, when the dub music can bring them in GUARANTEED high revenue? Like it really sucks for sure, and by all means TPCi should not be seeing it as a risk at all in 2021 to be just... leaving the music alone, but from a super safe overprotective standpoint... I sorta understand the possible reasoning behind still holding onto such an outdated business practice, because for them that's playing it safe, and it works.
To be honest I'd have more faith in the dub keeping the music entirely if they were to somehow impossibly shut down production today and start over completely as a modern dub, but I don't see that being possible until whenever the day would come for the anime to properly end for good. But that's all just my musings, lord knows I could be missing something major lol
I still remember how BW started off with all the BGM intact for the first five episodes, and even afterwards, wasn't nearly as heavy-handed with replacing it as it is now. I can see why they do it, but I wish they handled it the same way done with BW.
It is somewhat amusing that Goldfarb's disastrious music could bring in such a high amount of revenue
Hence why I think it's being done more out of tradition and "playing it safe" than really much else at this point. The dub music being so excessive nowadays too could weigh in favor for it not being all too lucrative by itself, could be them trying to squeeze more potentially out of itBut does it though? I feel like if this "make new music so we can charge royalties for it" business model was so lucrative then other companies would be shamelessly ripping it off. Yet the number of English dubs who have replacement soundtracks in the year 2021 is at an all-time low.
The replacement soundtrack obviously earns TPCi enough money for them to keep shelling out the money to have new songs made, but beyond that?
If I were to make an educated guess, it's less out of cheapness/even greed and moreso... cuz it's proven to work. When the dub cast changed in 2006 there was still a ton of staff behind the scenes that transferred over. Even if the production companies had shifted, the PRACTICES hadn't. And as a result, the dub has essentially remained in the same state (to varying degrees) since the 90s because that 90s production still hasn't ended.
We look at other anime projects from TPC being dubbed nowadays and see them being presented a lot more faithfully from a sound/uncut standpoint, because those are BRAND NEW productions that started in the 21st century with more modern sensibilities when it comes to how to handle their localizations. The main anime if anything, while at times has proven keeping more music can easily work in terms of licensing (TPCi being more than willing to do it), the overuse of wall-to-wall dub cues, if anything, I would assume is from them playing it safe.
As an avid watcher of Yu-Gi-Oh, the dub score sucks compared to the japanese score, even if the dub has some solid tunes here and there. The worst case is probably 5DS which has arguably the best score in the entire franchise, but all that got replaced with far inferior music.It also explains why Yu-Gi-Oh (who Stuart also worked on) and Digimon also changed a majority, if not all, of their musical scores too; it's a practice they kept, I guess.
Hypothetical question here. If the people at Pokemon decided to start a gofundme (or any similar online donation sites) where if they get enough money they'll agree to start keeping the original OST in the show, and if they get even more they might even start giving us English covers of the Japanese openings/endings, would you actually donate? I'm curious here.
There are only 3 dubs that I know of that continue to do dub music in 2021 (Pokemon, Yugioh, and Bakugan). Only Konami has provided an "official" reason, with their press release for VRAINS on Pluto TV stating that the replacement music was for "American audiences", which John Loeffler back in the day claimed was the reasoning too.
Also keep in mind Eric Stuart has been off the show for 15 years now, while his reasons are most likely the reason TPCi does so, other things might've changed too. Goldfarb once said on Twitter it was "liscensing issues". So *shrug*
I don't know if anyone here is still seeking answers, but I do think I can contribute here. A YouTuber by the name of TheCartoonGamer8000 did a video on the history of Pokémon's dubbing process, and it does provide a little extra insight into why the musical score is replaced, especially today.
View: https://youtu.be/FGZlMSS8fR8
But to summarize the part about the music, essentially, the company that owned the anime's music during the Black and White era (Media Factory, under the label of Pikachu Records) was more relaxed about letting others use their soundtracks. When that company was bought out by Katakawa Corporation, the company responsible for the anime's music became Sony Music Japan, who are stricter about their music usage. Now couple all of that with what's already been discussed here about the little bit of extra money the dub makes with its own music scores, and I don't think it's that hard to see why the dub barely uses the Japanese musical score anymore. Even if Pokémon makes more than enough money to afford the Japanese score, if you are a big company whose goal is to make even more money, what's the smarter move? Keep the Japanese musical score to ensure quality, but spend money in the process? Or use your own musical score to make extra money even if it lowers the overall quality of the dub?
As for why M21 and M22 still have the Japanese musical scores... Don't make fun of me, because I'm totally going "friend of a friend" here, but one of my friends on Discord actually spoke with (or at least read an account written by) an employee of TPCi, and those movies come down to being outliers with different circumstances. M21, if I remember right, something came up with their composer that would have kept the dub score from being done by their deadline, so they just used the Japanese score to save time. With M22, it wasn't a TPCi decision. Netflix paid the extra money for the Japanese score themselves. Why they don't do that with Journeys too? Beats me. Maybe they figured once for a movie is fine while once per every Journeys episode is overkill? I don't know.
I hope my contributions were valid.
Actually just want to clarify from Movie 4 onward to the very end of their dub in Movie 8, the original 4Kids Pokemon dub (their studio is still alive believe it or not, the Konami NY branch now essentially is where they are at these days) kept the OST for their final 5 Movie dubs in a row (IMO, this really redeemed them in the mid Johto-AG run given the Anime handling in terms of music-- not that TPCi objectively being worse in this facet, the last 10 years than they were at the very end in the Anime dub from late BW onward into JN hasn't as well, but this is also something that stood out from that Era).This actually makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that other animated Pokemon projects (Twilight Wings, Generations, Origins) don't have this problem in their dubs. I assume they have different teams working on them since the regular dub staff is busy working on the main series. But since it's all part of the same company, if TPCI needed the dub music revenue in any way surely these dubs would have been forced to replace the music too, right? It really does seem like some higher-ups are fixated on always replacing the background music.
It still doesn't explain why the amount of original BGM/silence being kept has fluctuated so much over the years- why did season 13 keep so much silence and 14 kept an all-time high of roughly 90% of the original score, why have the films across both dubs gone back and forth on replacing the score- but at least we have a better idea of why it's still a problem after all these years.
At least DBZ's music was better by a mile.
Absolutely fine.I suppose I could have been a bit more clear- what I meant to say when I wrote that over two years ago was looking at the dub holistically- meaning across all 20+ years- the level of original BGM has fluctuated.
My post was already rather long-winded, and this point was a brief point at the end of it, so I did not want to go through the entire history of the dub’s movie scoring and point out every small detail.