May 11, 2014

They Couldn't Just Hire A Couple of Russians?

The Girls Und Panzer DVD has been sitting on my shelf for months and I suddenly realized I have time to look at it.

The dub is a bit uneven and rather rough at the beginning (Miho pronounces Oorai as O-O-R-I amongst other things) making it look like it was done on one take. To be fair, the voicework rapidly gets a lot better as the show progresses and Molly Searcy absolutely NAILS IT with her portayal of Mako. After about episode two the dub is pretty decent.

Then...suddenly.

They'd avoided the temptation of wacky accents...until the Pravda battle at which point there is an ill concieved attempt...from time to time...to affect something that probably sounded Slavic to somebody late one night in the studio when they were all strung out on Red Bull and Mountain Dew. 
It gets worse...There is that moment in the Pravda battle that Crunchyroll edited out the Katushya song. Crunchyroll just cut the scene...the dub keeps the footage (minus the mouth movements) and replaces Katushya with an unrelated accordion solo.

" Well...THAT was regrettable. "

The accordion solo is present on the subtitled track too, indicating that they were not able to resolve the rights issue. However, it's unclear why the scene wasn't simply cut (like Crunchyroll did with the sub) as the result is most jarring. 
Wait...
Can someone explain to me how a commie song from before 1945 is a copyright issue anyway.


Sentai has done some pretty good dubs (and Highschool of the Dead was absolutely superb) so this is more galling than it ought to be. 


UPDATE: The dub on OAV  release is actually excellent. Even when a silly accent raises its head, it's intentionally silly and fits perfectly. 

I'd not seen any of them previously. They are entertainingly odd.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:22 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 307 words, total size 3 kb.

1

The copyright laws are ridiculous now. Pretty much anything from less than a hundred years ago is still in copyright, and some stuff older than that is too.

Every time Disney gets close to losing copyright from its earliest cartoons, it bribes a senator and they pass another extension.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun May 11 16:38:09 2014 (+rSRq)

2

In the Pravda battle, at the very end, they run Katyusha without vocals as background music during the scene with Anko and Hippo chasing the Pravda flag tank around that town. (And with Yukari up in the tower.)

Did they change that music, too?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun May 11 17:22:25 2014 (+rSRq)

3 Everyone wants to preserve their copyright if it's worth money--look at the dueling Marxists over in Europe, fighting over, ironically, the works of Marx himself.

Posted by: RickC at Sun May 11 20:03:38 2014 (0a7VZ)

4 They've done that before - I know that they had Turks to come in and do bit parts in Spriggan, and the Yugo the Negotiator dub has a lot of minor characters played by Urdu speakers. But yeah... nobody really noticed, huh?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sun May 11 20:23:36 2014 (ZeBdf)

5

"Katyusha" should have been PD in the US. However, like many USSR songs that got popular, song publishing companies published and copyrighted their own US versions. Soooo it's copyrighted in the US, or at least enough to make it annoying to hunt down a way to make it PD.

Also I think there have been some retroactive copyright things in the EU and Geneva that we've signed onto, and maybe Russia got roped into that too.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Wed May 14 12:52:15 2014 (nh8FR)

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