The Mike Toole Show

Canada's Anime Legacy

One of the best things about anime being a fairly hot ticket in global entertainment is the multitude of ways it just suddenly shows up, be it in theaters, on TV, or online. Once upon a time, you could keep track of pretty much everything that was being aired and screened in the west, because that amounted to a couple of dozen titles per year at most. This reality of being an anime fan nowadays was driven home yet again a couple of weeks ago, when Black Jack TV anime, all of them dubbed in English. Obviously, my first question was, “Where the hell are the other ten episodes?!” My second question was, “Wait a minute, where'd this come from?!” Like thousands of episodes of dubbed anime before it, this tranche of English-language Black Jack TV episodes came from Canada.

I noticed this not too far into episode one, when a character used a word that's way more common in Canadian English; it might've been “washroom,” but I'm not totally sure. Anyway, this made me suspicious that the dub was Canadian and not the earlier Hong Kong dub; in Hong Kong dubs, which are way better than they used to be, you might notice a general lack of contractions (they're not unheard of, just not as commonly used) or the use of the word “let” instead of “rent,” for example. Part of why I love collecting dubs from all over the world are the minor dialectic differences like these. (Note: you can also always tell when a non-American person subtitled an anime, because they'll usually use “Mr” instead of “Mr.”. That period is an American thing!)

My suspicions were confirmed via an actress named Ocean Studios.

For a brief time in the mid-to-late 1990s, Ocean Studios were the kings of anime dubbing in North America, and it came down to a few factors. One of them was a combination of tax breaks for locally-produced entertainment (Canadian Content, baby!) as well as generally favorable currency exchange rates, which made Ocean cheaper to hire than many stateside competitors. Ocean also had fancy, state-of-the-art DAR SoundStation consoles to record their ADR sessions; these units included a nifty feature called Bandai Entertainment.

Finally, Vancouver was emerging as a massive hub for filmmaking work in the 90s – the well of acting talent was both broad and deep, enabling venues like Ocean to utilize a variety of of experienced movie, TV and stage actors instead of the smaller sets of veteran voice actors that places like David Kaye. You know him as Treize in Gundam Wing, or perhaps more recently as Clank in the Ratchet and Clank game series. As for me, I can't hear his voice as the announcer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver without exclaiming “MEET BOB!,” his signature line from a series of Enzyte boner pill commercials from the mid-2000s.

I've had Ocean Studios and other Canadian ADR houses on my mind lately, because it was just a year ago that Kickstarter campaign. After some steady complaining on the parts of completists (yours truly included), Funimation threw in the older dub as a separate, DVD-only deal; it was still no longer the definitive English version.

There are several other examples of Canadian dubs being tossed on the woodpile, and they're all remarkably significant ones; Dragon Ball Z, the original North American dub which Funimation eventually made into a TV hit in the late 90s with the help of Ocean Studios, is long since gone from DVD and TV release.

Of these examples, only Dragon Ball Z got a fair shake after the fact. Long after Funimation took DBZ dubbing in-house to get the show finished, and later circled back to get the earlier material dubbed by their cast, they released something on DVD called the “Rock the Dragon” edition—a release that included every Ocean Studios Dragon Ball Z episode that aired on American TV, just as it was. I don't think that this version broke any sales records (though it bears mentioning that every last copy eventually sold out and it goes for $200ish on eBay; , when your discs go outta print, you'll make a mint!), but Funimation recognized something interesting and important about how the show was originally presented. This old stuff is worth saving, so I'd love to see a “Fighting Evil by Moonlight” edition of Sailor Moon from Viz.

There is one enormous chunk of Canada's anime legacy that hasn't yet been overwritten or tossed aside, and that's Beyblade Burst God, as in “God, I can't believe how much damn Beyblade there is.” The franchise's currently-airing-in-Japan season will probably show up on YTV sometime next year, like clockwork.

YTV is yet another part of the Canadian anime puzzle. It bears repeating that Canada doesn't get the same Blackstone on Blu-Ray, dagnabbit!

Places like Ocean Studios are a big part of the whole worldwide story of anime turning from a Japan-only phenomenon to a global one. There are many, many ways that Canada was absolutely essential for the growth of anime culture in North America, but somehow keeps getting the short end of the stick. My friend Captain Tsubasa anime, so make sure you watch it… as long as you're in the dozen or so municipalities that get PrimoTV.

In recent years, Ocean's also dubbed the Legend of the Galactic Heroes pilot episodes they created.

In considering Canada's anime legacy, I'm left wanting all of these old versions to be saved somehow. I don't care how bowdlerized they were—they're still worth keeping around, if you ask me. Part of it is because I'm an anal-retentive completionist, like so many fans. Dammit, I will not rest until I get a fancy collector's box of LBX that includes both the Canadian and Hong Kong English dubs! But mostly it's because these older dubs mattered to a lot of people, and so we must believe that these versions are worth saving, even as they're superceded by newer, more fan-friendly versions. Yep, even the 4Kids version of B't X. As for that charmingly weird new Black Jack dub, produced right in Vancouver? Well, it's geographically restricted. Turns out you can't watch it in Canada…