Evangelion's Netflix Dub

[Henyo]

it's finally upon us. a new dub for the original TV series and the Movies. and just like in the 90s, lots of people went into RAGE mode. here are 2 links i've come upon

https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/neon-g ... 2900-2899/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcPIHPkXx6s


the first are just nitpicks of you ask me. there's also the wee bit thing about Shinji's new VA being a trans..why is that important to bring up? i could care less what kind of person voices a character. the most important part is that said person performs the part as good as the original Seiyuu.

the youtube video is a dood who claims EVA is what changed anime and manga forever...yeah, gonna watch that when i have nothing better to do.

at any rate, what are your opinions on the new dub? i liked what i've heard from the first episode. oh and i could also not give a damn about the ending credits not using Fly me to the moon.

[Chris]

Its almost been 25 years since Neon Genesis Evangelion premiered in Japan. Before 1995... anime was very different. It was mainly focused on children shows instead of the thought provoking anime we get today. Thanks to Studio Gainax Anime & Manga was forever changed! It inspired countless series afterwards and made way for Anime Studios to experiment with niche anime.

I've seen this comment making the rounds, but also seen similar comments for many years. This is probably one of the stupidest statements I've ever seen, made by someone who clearly is lacking in knowledge of anime. It's just blatantly wrong in every single respect.

Regarding the dub, I only watched the first episode dubbed and found it....serviceable. Not amazing, but also not something bad like how the diehards of the old dub will likely dismiss it as. Didn't have much interest in continuing with the dub and switched back to Japanese for episode 2.

[Seto Kaiba]

it's finally upon us. a new dub for the original TV series and the Movies. and just like in the 90s, lots of people went into RAGE mode. here are 2 links i've come upon

A lot of folks I've spoken to seem unhappy with Netflix having not been able to obtain the rights to the original ED song "Fly Me to the Moon", with the new sound effects, and with the new voice cast in general. Some have made comparisons to the ADV Films Macross dub, which many Macross fans suspected was deliberately done poorly.

the youtube video is a dood who claims EVA is what changed anime and manga forever...yeah, gonna watch that when i have nothing better to do.

Well, it did establish a new low water mark for audience self-awareness... a whole generation of otaku too dim to realize the series they were watching was actively mocking them at every turn. I feel really bad for Hideaki Anno, since the entire message he was trying to get across in the series fell on deaf ears and he has to now pretend that he wasn't making fun of his audience via the This Loser Is You audience surrogate Shinji Ikari.

at any rate, what are your opinions on the new dub? i liked what i've heard from the first episode. oh and i could also not give a damn about the ending credits not using Fly me to the moon.

All told, it's not the worst dub I've ever seen... but I'd still say it's not as good as the original dub. There are a lot of really stilted lines in the first episode. It's also got that bad dub problem where they add additional lines that were not in the original because they can't live with scenes where nobody's talking for some reason.

[False Prophet]

the youtube video is a dood who claims EVA is what changed anime and manga forever...yeah, gonna watch that when i have nothing better to do.

IMHO, Space Battleship Yamato, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion are four shows which changed the way anime is delivered to the fans, and the fans themselves. Their impact on the content of succeeding shows however are somewhat confined to the mecha and sci-fi genres alone. If you want something that actually changed the content of anime and manga following it, then look at Rumiko Takahashi's work. That woman is born with the intuition of a trend-settler.

[Seto Kaiba]

IMHO, Space Battleship Yamato, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion are four shows which changed the way anime is delivered to the fans, and the fans themselves.

Ugh... no, Evangelion doesn't belong on that list. It came SO long after those first three set up anime as a medium you could do serious dramatic storytelling on and it didn't really do anything to change how anime was seen or how its audience got access to it. It gets a lot of credit it doesn't deserve in the west because it came in after the anime boom had already started and was basically just that one incredibly pretentious show that people mistook for deep, so it was one of the favorites of the gatekeeper-y otaku.

The one thing it did, IMO, was demonstrate that anime's audience was no longer looking at anime as art with meaning that should be considered, but rather as shallow entertainment. Neon Genesis Evangelion was an author tract by Hideaki Anno on the subject of how otaku are failures at life. Shinji Ikaru is a useless, whiny, immature, socially inept doormat because he's an audience surrogate... Hideaki Anno's message was This Loser is You. The whole series was nothing more than a scathing deconstruction of the entire genre as a vehicle for expressing disgust with the audience. That message somehow flew completely under the radar, despite practically being written on the back of Shinji's head, and his frustration with the point not getting across and the bitching about how the show ended found its vehicle in the End of Evangelion, a feature-length F-YOU to the fans.

Unfortunately, that absolutely beautiful exercise in expressing disgust gets overlooked because people got caught up in the faux depth of the completely meaningless religious trappings. Thus all it really achieved was proving that audiences were no longer interested in making an artistic or philosophical point, they just wanted to be entertained.

[Henyo]

great! now i have an excuse to talk about Madoka AND Hugtto PreCure. because they're pretty much in the same boat as Evangelion. Minor Hugtto Rant Incoming!!!

Both Magical Girls are lauded at doing what people think has never been done before in the genre. Madoka's dark anmd mature story and Hugtto's..okay Hugtto doesn't even have that. it just gave what a lot of PreCure fans seemingly want: a Male Cure. i will say right now that i have never and NEVER probably want a male Cure after what Hugtto did.(Kirakira did it better even if the dude isnt officially classified as a Cure)
i mean all that walking propaganda character did was transform. Madoka i will admit did take the mature and dark themes on new grounds. but they're ground that have already been covered by older serie like Mai-HiME, Tutu, Utena, Shamanic Princess..

now that i got that out my system let's get back to our always scheduled Evangelion discussion.

i let a few days past to see how many vids about the Netflix dub would surface. four suspects in know popped up.

Gigguk
Digibro
Mother's basement
IGN

gigguk i most likey will watch. Digibro's is a year old but i mentioned it because he's also one of them doods who thinks Eva reshaped anime as a whole. heck the title of his vid is "How Evangelion Altered Anime Eternally"

i really haven't watch any of his vids but this one just put the nail in the coffin for me to avoid him no matter what. same for mother's basement. i have not heard good thing about the channel. IGN's is just nitpickings.

on this note, are there any actually good youtube channels about the mecha genre? the only 2 i regularly check is Mechatalk and Professorotakud2.< this one only is kind of good but line of his about being a great critic ticks me off.

man, some of those youtube channels thinks their' opinions are facts because of their popularity..what a world line we live in..

[False Prophet]

Ugh... no, Evangelion doesn't belong on that list. It came SO long after those first three set up anime as a medium you could do serious dramatic storytelling on and it didn't really do anything to change how anime was seen or how its audience got access to it. It gets a lot of credit it doesn't deserve in the west because it came in after the anime boom had already started and was basically just that one incredibly pretentious show that people mistook for deep, so it was one of the favorites of the gatekeeper-y otaku.

The one thing it did, IMO, was demonstrate that anime's audience was no longer looking at anime as art with meaning that should be considered, but rather as shallow entertainment. Neon Genesis Evangelion was an author tract by Hideaki Anno on the subject of how otaku are failures at life. Shinji Ikaru is a useless, whiny, immature, socially inept doormat because he's an audience surrogate... Hideaki Anno's message was This Loser is You. The whole series was nothing more than a scathing deconstruction of the entire genre as a vehicle for expressing disgust with the audience. That message somehow flew completely under the radar, despite practically being written on the back of Shinji's head, and his frustration with the point not getting across and the bitching about how the show ended found its vehicle in the End of Evangelion, a feature-length F-YOU to the fans.

Unfortunately, that absolutely beautiful exercise in expressing disgust gets overlooked because people got caught up in the faux depth of the completely meaningless religious trappings. Thus all it really achieved was proving that audiences were no longer interested in making an artistic or philosophical point, they just wanted to be entertained.

I would be incline to disagree. To me it feels like the line between reality and fiction was really thinned out by Evangelion. Yes, it was not the show to start it, but it contributed awfully lot to it. Reading about things surrounding the shows when its originally ran, from the way they marketed merchandises in a post-General Products, Internet 2.0 world,Anno receiving death threats, or how Evangelion gave sustenance to an entire generation of Shinjirui raised on the high streets but always denied what was behind the glass counter (the so-called Lost Decade).

I know that Evangelion is explicitly against that, but then money is money. In this regard it feels to me that Gainax had a more hand-on approach in cultivating its fanbase/guaranteed customers; while before Gundam 0079 and even Zeta were catered more to one-off-customers: You buy the Gunpla, and it is done. Kind of like the precursor to today hype-and-spoiler culture.

on this note, are there any actually good youtube channels about the mecha genre? the only 2 i regularly check is Mechatalk and Professorotakud2.< this one only is kind of good but line of his about being a great critic ticks me off.

No offense, but ProfessorOtakuD2 does have an admittedly bad taste in MS design. And there hasn't been a MechaTalk episode for a long time.

[Seto Kaiba]

I would be incline to disagree. To me it feels like the line between reality and fiction was really thinned out by Evangelion. Yes, it was not the show to start it, but it contributed awfully lot to it. Reading about things surrounding the shows when its originally ran, from the way they marketed merchandises in a post-General Products, Internet 2.0 world,Anno receiving death threats, or how Evangelion gave sustenance to an entire generation of Shinjirui raised on the high streets but always denied what was behind the glass counter (the so-called Lost Decade).

IMO, it gets a lot more post-facto credit than it actually deserves. It wasn't a prime mover behind the 90's anime boom or anything that came with it, it was just a highly visible participant in it because the gatekeeper-y otaku were constantly insisting that it was proof that anime was "deep" and "sophisticated" and that you weren't a real fan until you'd seen it... ironically all in blissful ignorance of Anno having made it quite clear that the religious symbolism was meaningless set dressing picked because it would look and sound exotic to the predominantly non-Christian Japanese audience.

From my experience, the truth is less "Evangelion did ______" and more "Evangelion arrived just in time to jump onto the trend of anime doing ______".

When you get right down to it, Evangelion was a failure. Not commercially, but artistically. It tried to make a point about its medium and its audience that fell on deaf ears, and via Rebuild became the very thing it argued against... cheap, shallow, exploitative, waifu-driven bullshit created for no purpose other than to milk the almighty yen from that socially maladjusted otaku audience Anno was making fun of via Shinji Ikari.

[DragoMaster009]

Speaking of the films, here's the latest update on the last one: https://hypebeast.com/2019/6/first-10-m ... japan-expo

[SonicSP]

All I can say is that I really love the anime, regardless of whether it did change anime or not. Just enjoyed the story and setting (including EoE) despite me myself personally rejecting Anno's message.

[Quiddity]

A little late to the party, but I've been slowly working my way through the new dub (22 episodes in), and while the original Japanese language version is still clearly the superior version, the new dub is considerably better from a casting standpoint than the original ADV dub, which was absolute trash. No real complaints at all performance wise. The few things that frustrate me are the fact that they call them "Xth" children instead of "Xth' child (which is more faithful to the Japanese script but is poor English) and some of the pronunciations like SEELE, Longinuss and Fuyutsuki sound quite off and at times are said inconsistently.

As for Fly Me to the Moon's removal, it is quite unfortunate; I still remember back when they released Zeta Gundam in the US for the first time and those of us opening our long awaited for box sets were horrified to find the opening and ending songs replaced. I do understand why they did it at least. But, to be honest, I never particularly liked the song anway. The bigger tragedy is the removal of an instrumental version of it from 2 critical Misato scenes in the show, which negatively impacts the effect of the scene.

The quote Chris highlighted from Youtube Guy just goes to show the continued delusion over Evangelion's place in the mecha genre and anime as a whole. Never has a show been so wildly proclaimed to be something that it just cannot be. It never ceases to bewilder me how 95% of those commenting on Evangelion's influence and originality have virtually no understanding of mecha anime or the stuff came before it. Watching Evangelion as your first mecha anime or first anime overall and ignoring the stuff that Tomino, Takahashi and other titans of the industry had been doing for 2 decades before is both wildly ignorant and insulting. As for Evangelion's audience failing to get its point/it falling on deaf ears, there's probably no better example than Rei Ayanami, who was intended to be weird and creep people out and instead became the show's most popular character because people fetishized her. A big part of the show's popularity that the elitists in its fandom don't want to admit.

There is a lot to like in Eva, especially End of Eva for me, but those meta aspects of the fandom/commentary on the show drive me nuts.

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

I finally had time to watch all of Netflix Evangelion with the new dub.........Yeah it was ok but I still prefer the original one. Same thing with Gundam Seed and Escaflowne HD, still prefer the original. Eva is a great show but it was Akira that really made anime be known outside Japan alongside Ghost in the Shell 1995. I remember people in the 90s talking about those two movies more than Eva.

[Henyo]

^ does that include the compilation films? is there any merit in watching them if I've already went straight to End of Evangelion?

another thing i'd like to ask about is about Kaworu...peeps are complaining about his i love you line..does that mean majority of the fans have accepted him being into Shinji since the beginning?

[Dark Duel]

^ does that include the compilation films? is there any merit in watching them if I've already went straight to End of Evangelion?

If you're referring to the Rebuild films, I will say right now it's probably best to regard those as an AU take on the series entirely separate from the original Evangelion anime and EoE.
I mean, the first one more or less follows the series with IIRC only minor changes, but the second one starts diverging pretty significantly.

does that mean majority of the fans have accepted him being into Shinji since the beginning?

I do not and cannot speak for the majority, but from where I'm standing, at least on that particular point I always thought Kaworu had the approximate subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I always recognized that he was pretty obviously into Shinji, and frankly it didn't bother me or anyone I've ever discussed the series with except one dude, and he was a pretentious homophobe in general.

[Seto Kaiba]

another thing i'd like to ask about is about Kaworu...peeps are complaining about his i love you line..does that mean majority of the fans have accepted him being into Shinji since the beginning?

Truth be told, the alleged uproar over Netflix's translation of that line is pretty much entirely limited to clickbait articles and the kind of person looking for reasons to be offended and uses phrases like "queer erasure" unironically. I've seen exactly zero regular fans complain about that aspect of Netflix's translation. That's not to say they don't have loads of other complaints about the translation... but that's mostly to do with the godawful overly-literal translation's grammar that flows like a river of bricks.

I'd doubt that there are all that many viewers who were even remotely invested in Kaworu's supposed orientation. He's not around for very long, every second of his interaction with Shinji is intensely creepy, and he's quickly outed as being an Angel who infiltrated NERV so the whole thing could easily be taken as him being a manipulative prick. The fujoshi likely got a kick out of it though.

[yazi88]

If anything the biggest legit complaint I've heard is the use of Third Children in the translation instead of Third Child... Kind of seems like a robo translation cause of how rough and literal it is.

But studio Khara was adamant about the translation and it was their work on the subtitles/localization, not Netflix.

[Henyo]

If you're referring to the Rebuild films, I will say right now it's probably best to regard those as an AU take on the series entirely separate from the original Evangelion anime and EoE.
I mean, the first one more or less follows the series with IIRC only minor changes, but the second one starts diverging pretty significantly.

I do not and cannot speak for the majority, but from where I'm standing, at least on that particular point I always thought Kaworu had the approximate subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I always recognized that he was pretty obviously into Shinji, and frankly it didn't bother me or anyone I've ever discussed the series with except one dude, and he was a pretentious homophobe in general.

the other compilation film. this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Gene ... 26_Rebirth

but speaking of Rebuild..i actually haven't watched all of them. i skipped Rebuild 2 for some weird reason and went straight to Rebuild 3. on a side note, i managed to make Dearest Mother watch Rebuild 1...she just ended up confused as expected. and i recently asked about what she recalls about it...ZIP!

[Dark Duel]

the other compilation film. this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Gene ... 26_Rebirth

Wow. I'd somehow never even heard of this one. I guess this one recaps the series and leads into EoE, then?

I confess I've never actually seen EoE. I've heard of it, and frankly what I've heard of it grossed me out enough that I didn't really want to see it for myself.

[Henyo]

the other compilation film. this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Gene ... 26_Rebirth

Wow. I'd somehow never even heard of this one. I guess this one recaps the series and leads into EoE, then?

I confess I've never actually seen EoE. I've heard of it, and frankly what I've heard of it grossed me out enough that I didn't really want to see it for myself.

well there's something you don't see everyday.
but yeah, from what I've gathered they're like Ideon's Films. Although A Contact is weird IIRC, it only recaps the plot around episode 33 or so. my free time has become limited so i'd rather not watch a recap movie that doesn't have much new content. don't want a repeat of the star Driver movie(to be fair, it was mostly my fault that i didn't look it up being a compilation movie)

as for EoE..i stumbled upon it when someone opened shop where you can watch some anime. that was also where i first watched The Transformers the movie(in VHS to boot) i was yucked out too..maybe you can try watching it with some comrades. so that you wouldn't be alone in tilting head while going WTF?

[Quiddity]

The Death and Rebirth "recap" movie originally came out because Gainax wasn't able to get End of Evangelion completed on time. They put it out to hold people over. The first part, "Death" is a recap of the TV series, with a framing device (the children playing musical instruments) as well as either new scenes or re-animated scenes. The second part "Rebirth" was around the first 20-30 minutes or so of End of Evangelion, which was what they had finalized at the time.

There is no real need to watch the movie. They eventually went back and put all the new footage from Death outside of the framing device scenes into the TV series release, this was known as the "Director's Cut" version. If you have the original ADV release (as I do), you have the original TV airing version; to my knowledge all versions issued after that include the extra footage. The only difference with the "Rebirth" version of the film and what is in End of Eva is that the Rebirth ending theme song doesn't appear in End of Eva.

(Interesting anecdote: the delay of End of Eva caused Gainax to get a lot of complaints including death threats; Anno then went and put these in End of Eva. Some people have falsely claimed Anno made End of Eva solely to stick it to the fans who complained about the TV ending, using this footage as evidence, not realizing that the threats had nothing to do with the TV ending.)

On Ideon: A Contact, I completely agree, the set up of the "A Contact" movie is quite odd. If you watch just the movies (which was the case when I first saw Ideon, so far back that it wasn't even fansubbed yet), there is a character who completely vanishes between movies because they died in an episode after the point where A Contact went. They also completely removed all references to a Buff Clan faction, only for that faction's leader to play a key role in the "Be Invoked" movie.