Okay you dub haters, I took up a challenge of yours. Now, granted, I'm not much of a Dragonball fan, seeing as how all I like are a few DB games and Dragonball Z abridged. Oh, but you dub haters, I know how you just love pissing on every English dub of DBZ there is. Well, you may not be exactly on the mark. I've had the opportunity to watch youtube vids that play DBZ scenes in several different languages. Here are my findings:
The original Japanese dub is not the best dub. Goku sounds like a ninny, (probably because he's voiced by a woman instead of a man) Piccolo doesn't sound cool, and, while some of the villains sound neat, I can't reccomend the Japanese dub. On the other hand, the Saiyan characters in Funimation's English dub all sound better than in Japanese. Goku is actually voiced by a man! Holy cow! Unfortunately, as we all may painfully know, the Funi dub is not one of their better ones, what with the blatant over-acting and. Awkward. Pausing. Between. Every. WORD!
In my honest opinion, there are two DBZ dubs that are number 1: the Mexican Spanish dub, and the German dub. Yes, by golly, the Mexicans and the Germans not only outdid the original Japanese cast, they beat us Americans as well! In these languages, all of the characters sound their part, and I couldn't detect any over-acting or weird pauses or other errors common in foreign language dubbing. And also, FYI, I can speak a little bit of Spanish in real life, and I can tell they did a really good job with that.
But guess what? There are some languages that sound way worse. Most of the European dubs that aren't German sound worse than both the English and Japanese dubs. The European Portuguese dub in particular not only sounds bad, they took even more liberties with the script than the English dub. Huh. Even if English isn't #1, at least we weren't a total screwup. And for the record, in the recent redub and the newer video games, Chris Sabat sounds much better as Vegeta; he's almost as good as the Mexican and German versions of the character. He certainly beats Brian Drummond's version of Vegeta from the older Ocean dub. (don't worry; I still respect Brian Drummond; he played Ryuk in Death Note, and he sounded a lot better than the Japanese version of Ryuk.)
But wait, what if there are other shows and movies I like that sound better in a language other than English? And better than Japanese if you count anime? There might truth in this; one time I was watching Steamboy, I flipped between the five different dubs (Japanese, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. That's quite a lot for one movie.) on my DVD, and the Portuguese dub sounded really good. (I'm guessing it was Brazilian Portuguese; most Latin anime fans I know say Brazilian Portuguese dubs usually sound better than European Portuguese dubs.)
So yeah, just thought I'd leave you with that bit of trivia.
P.S. I like the soundtrack of Funi's version of DBZ more than the original Japanese soundtrack. Sure, it may sound excessively "American", but somehow, I find it more fitting for the show.
P.P.S. Oh, but it's hard to beat the English voices of DBZA. "Kick his ass, Nappa!" "YAAAAAAAAAY!"
