Haruhi Dub Impressions

I'm currently eight episodes through the dub, so that leaves six episodes remaining, and only a few minor characters (mainly the members of ENOZ) whose voices I haven't heard.

All episode numbers herein are original broadcast order episode numbers.

As soon as I started watching, I remembered that between broadcast and DVD production, they remastered the entire series and added new scenes to some episodes. This is slightly important since I haven't seen the new scenes before, in any language. Most of them are just logical extensions of conversations, and nothing important happens in a new scene that was therefore left out of the original broadcast.

So far, I've really liked two voices, Kyon's and Shamisen's. Next would be Arakawa's and Itsuki's, they're pretty good. Haruhi's sounds good, but something every now and then just doesn't feel right. Mikuru's has the whole timidness thing down, so it's good too. Yuki's is actually also good, she is emotionless but doesn't have a monotone (just barely not a monotone). Kyon's sister (she's never named) isn't that bad. Tsuruya's... sadly, they just gave her the "typical high school girl" voice (from The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya (episode 4), she has a line that just feels wrong, it should have a "liek omg" before it. "Can I take a picture of you with my phone?" (emphasis on the "o" sound in phone) Not the nicest thing to do to my favorite character, considering the original line is more like "Can I take a picture?") The minor characters... I guess they're good, they don't really have enough lines for me to tell. Same with Mori.

Overall, it's a pretty decent dub so far, I just wish Tsuruya had a less generic and more energetic voice. She had a weird speech pattern in the Japanese audio, with special nicknames for some people ("Nagato-chi" when she drops by the clubroom when only Yuki is there), an extra "sa" at the end of some words ("nandemonaisa!" just before giving Kyon a cloth to dry himself off with), and occasionally shortening words (she says "arigato!" as "agato!" when Yuki "tells" her where Haruhi and the others went, the fansubbers subtitled this as "Thankie!"). All of that is from Someday In The Rain (episode 9). There's also the infamous "nyoro" in Live Alive (episode 12), I can't wait to see what they did with that.

All of that has to be more or less replicated in some manner in the translation. I'm thinking mainly about what Kelli Cousins did with Kurumi in Steel Angel Kurumi, Kurumi has this "kyuuin!" noise she makes (I believe it's the Japanese onomatopoeia for a tight hug), which kinda gets lost in the translation, so there needed to be something else there to make up for it. And there was, she has all these youthfully exuberant squeals (to steal some words from the dub's director in the extras) that capture that same part of her character.

I'm kinda annoyed with how honorifics are handled in translations, this ends up with everything being really formal. For instance, it's usally "Miss Suzumiya" or "Miss Asahina". Honorifics don't really have a true equivalent in English that I'm aware of. Something needs to be done with them, and at least they're trying, but it's annoying to hear "Miss whoever" every couple of seconds. Also, if they could decide where to place the accents when saying character names, that would be great. For example (italics indicate the accented syllable): Sometimes it's Mikuru, and others it's Mikuru. They decided to use Kunikida instead of Kunikida. And I believe I've heard Nagato instead of Nagato every now and then, though maybe that's just my imagination. I personally think that names should be accentuated the same way as they were in Japanese. It's a small gripe, and nothing that would completely tank the quality of a dub, but when you're used to hearing the name spoken one way for so long and you suddenly hear it spoken differently, it's like "what the...?!?"

As I said before, I still have six episodes left, and I intend to watch the entire series dubbed. Most of what I've said here is minor gripes, so all in all it's doing pretty well so far, no major complaints except Tsuruya.

Completely unrelated: Somehow I managed to not notice that Christmas was coming up until around 1:30 AM on the 23rd, when it was mentioned in #magfest on IRC:

[01:30:16 AM] <~P2E> 2 days til christmas
[01:30:26 AM] <~P2E> I guess that means I make pizza soon
[01:31:47 AM] <XT-8147> holy fuck, you're right, it's december 23rd... the days before christmas go by really fast when you're not paying attention to them at all

Usually Christmas takes forever to get here, but this year, it just sorta snuck up on me. Not like it matters, all I really want (and all I've informed my parents of my desire for) is money (so I can buy what I actually want) and gift cards to electronics/video game stores (Best Buy, Circuit City (lol, our Circuit City is one of the ones that's going out of business)) and restaurants (Applebee's, etc.). There were a couple other things I dropped hints about as well (nice warm fuzzy slippers of some sort because I'm the only one in the family that doesn't wear shoes inside and the floor is cold this time of year, and the Read or Die OAV, which is one dvd and is pretty cheap almost everywhere). I've been pretty blatant about "Xbox 360, Mirror's Edge, Guitar Hero World Tour with instruments" even though it's not happening.