False Prophet wrote: ↑Sat Jun 30, 2018 11:00 am
So is there any other butchered dub/sub of Macross that I should be aware of?
Well, as far as official butchered dub/sub jobs for
Macross go the list is rather short because so few titles made it across the pond before Harmony Gold USA decided to start blocking all
Macross distribution. You'll find the vast majority of them come from Harmony Gold in one way or another anyway.
Many
Macross fans would be inclined to point to Harmony Gold USA's pet project turned industry laughingstock
Robotech as the most prominent example of a bad dub, and arguably the codifying example of the Macekre: the localization so badly executed that it becomes a mockery of the original work. Another, more obscure example made during that same period was Harmony Gold USA's non-adapted dub of
Macross. Prior to their getting involved in salvaging Revell's shitty
Transformers knockoff, Harmony Gold tried to do a more or less straight dub of
Super Dimension Fortress Macross (at least by their painfully low standards) and completed about three episodes when they changed gears to make the "original"
Robotech series instead. Completing Macek and Harmony Gold USA's hilarious hat trick of incredible incompetence is the VHS release of
Robotech done by Carl Macek's Streamline Pictures. Promoted under the amusing misnomer "The Perfect Collection", the tapes had both the
Robotech TV edited and dubbed episodes and their corresponding uncut Japanese versions with subtitles. The two problems the Perfect Collection had were that it was canceled partway through the series, and that the subtitles were so famously crappy that they bordered on being a Blind Idiot Translation. Streamline and Carl Macek predictably tried to shift the blame for the Perfect Collection's shit-tier quality (even by the standards of the day) to Tatsunoko, claiming that they received poor quality scripts.
Outside of that, there's the Toho-commissioned Hong Kong dub of
Macross: Do You Remember Love?. There are two versions of that, one being a straight but hilariously bad dub of the movie and the other being a cut of the film that was made by Celebrity Home Entertainment that was retitled
Clash of the Bionoids and had nearly 30 minutes of the film removed.
Some
Macross fans would probably also argue that the US Renditions dub of
Macross II was a bad dub, as it came out in the early days of accurate dubbing when the practice of rewriting finally died and the OVA was one of the earliest experiments in simultaneous US/Japan releases. The quality is nowhere near as bad as any of the above, but the dub has a few truly lulzy moments like the SHOT5 bartender's terribad Arnold impression and some instances of terribly stilted delivery.
Macross Plus's OVA edition US release has an instance of one episode in an otherwise good dub being a bit on the wonky side. The fourth episode had some issues with the audio tracks and had to be remixed by the sound engineer, resulting in a rather different feel from the original Japanese edition.
Fanmade material is always a bit spotty. Speed subs suck as a rule, though when I was first branching out into fansubs of
Macross titles that weren't available in the US I found a really just absolutely abhorrent Blind Idiot Translation of
Macross 7. [Central Anime] were the ones who published the torrents, but subtitle script was IIRC some kind of a Hong Kong affair that misspelled and mistranslated names, insistently rendered the song title "Planet Dance" as "Parry Stands", and generally came across as the kind of translation job that could only be done by someone who ate and awful lot of lead paint as a kid. When [Central Anime] released DVD transfers of the series, they did their own subs for it and those are a LOT better.
Other than that, there aren't really any stand-out awful ones that I'm aware of. There are a bunch that hit on some of my pet peeves like translating the wrong rank system or getting key terms translated wrong, but that's just me being anal about correctness and not really their fault since it's usually casual groups rather than fans doing it.
False Prophet wrote: ↑Sat Jun 30, 2018 11:00 am
(Also, Kaiba, a personal question: When exactly did you get into Macross? When was the fandom back then? Was there any different between the merchandises of then (models, DVD, etc.) and now?)
On a mission to make me feel old, are ya?
My first exposure to real, undiluted
Macross came in the form of
Macross II: Lovers Again, which I found in my local video rental store back in '99. I'd seen
Robotech, having had the tapes loaned to me by a friend who'd taped it off cable (since my luddite parents didn't have cable, and indeed only finally broke down and got it THIS YEAR) and had shared the tapes with me at school. Watching those abused old VHS tapes of
Macross II was a real eye-opener for me... and swiftly thereafter I was seeking out literally anything I could find on the series.
My first real hit was the Palladium Books
Macross II RPG, which I roped some of the guys from that same friend's
Robotech RPG group into trying. Still, we noticed a lot of seemingly incorrect info in the RPG text that got me to thinking about fixing the stats. So I started to look for other materials.
This, right here, was the moment I set foot on the slippery slope.
The more books I obtained, the more questions I had, which led to me seeking out more books. By my freshman year of college, I jumped off the slippery slope entirely after I'd started dating a gal from Nagano who started teaching me the language in a bid to have me make a favorable impression on her parents. After I'd built up basic proficiency, I found an alarming number of my fellow students were willing to PAY for translations of whatever manga or doujinshi they had in their possession, which quickly turned it into a self-sustaining hobby as I improved my proficiency through practice and the money I earned practicing on those translations for my fellow students got funneled back into my
Macross hobby leading to MORE practice and improved proficiency that attracted more customers. 30 GOTO 10.
When I first started, it was damn near impossible to find anything because the only places carrying
Macross stuff were my local hobby shops that carried model kits imported from Japan. Those kits were frigging expensive, so as a broke-ass kid I couldn't get many of them. Once my hobby achieved critical mass and started paying for itself, things had changed and internet commerce via sites like MacrossWorld, Valkyrie Exchange, Alibris, eBay, and so on made it fairly easy for me to get my hands on most anything provided money was no object. International shipping and the fan headhunters demanded a high price, but thanks to fellow fans selling parts of their collections or bringing stuff back to resell after trips to Japan, I was able to get my hands on most anything I wanted. Around about the time I finished my first Master's Degree, we had stuff like HLJ, HMV, and CDJapan coming onto the scene catering to western buyers of Japanese hobby goods, which drove the prices down and really made hobby goods accessible (made even easier by having moved from providing tech services to small businesses to consulting on government-funded experimental vehicle programs, which even afforded me paid trips to Japan to talk to suppliers via an overly trusting business travel agency that seemingly had no problem with me booking hotels almost within literal spitting distance of Akihabara).
