Watching Haruhi Dubbed

I know a lot of people both in real life and online that indiscriminately hate all English language anime dubs. I used to be one of those people. But then, I was bored and came to the realization that if I already own the series on DVD, I've already purchased the dub. So for a while I've had this stagnant project of watching everything I have dubbed.

I started with Steel Angel Kurumi and that's where I immediately got sidetracked. The dub is great. Both seasons. From watching the extras, it's apparent that ADV just fell in love with the series and wanted to do it justice. I have some minor complaints, such as Saki's voice being a bit nasal (Rie Tanaka's original voice work wasn't), and the pronunciation of a few of the names was off. But in the grand scheme of things, Saki's voice is tolerable and the rest are very minor details. The one thing that stood out was Karinka's voice. It just sounds like Hilary Haag got Karinka's personality dead on, and when you do that it's hard to go wrong. I dunno if any of her lines were ad-libs or if that was the translated script she voiced, but it's really good.

So for a while, I just watched the Kurumi dub, alternating watching the series once dubbed, then again subbed. It still feels strange to watch something that's animated that doesn't have subtitles. Hell, even when I watch The Simpsons, which I own the first 8 seasons of on DVD, every now and then I find my eyes scanning the bottom of the screen for subtitles.

So tonight, as the subject of this post may have implied, I am embarking on another dub, this time The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I've already watched my favorite episode, The Day of Sagittarius, so I kind of know what to expect, but some of the characters weren't in that episode. My impression after watching that one episode is that Crispin Freeman's Kyon is great. He got Kyon's sarcasm down perfectly.

What puts a slight kink in the plan is that I want to watch the dub in broadcast order. I own the limited edition versions of DVDs 2-4, which each have a second disc in the case with the episodes in proper broadcast order, but those discs lack the dub. Now, I know how the broadcast order translates into chronological order, but figuring out the DVD swaps was a small barrier. A slightly larger barrier is that they renumbered the episodes so that The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00 is episode 0, and then the rest are numbered 1-13. Until a few minutes ago when I realized all I needed to do was chuck the relevant information into a spreadsheet and sort by broadcast order. I'll reproduce my findings here (to assist anyone else who might want to do the same thing), and edit them if I find that I fucked up. If this table looks odd, keep in mind that:

1. they renumbered the episodes (this makes episode 12 not match up in both orders), and
2. it's looking at chronological order sorted by broadcast date. Broadcast order sorted chronologically gives the familiar 2, 3, 5, 10, 13, 14, 4, 7, 6, 8, 1, 12, 11, 9 episode order we're all used to (yeah, I typed that from memory). When you pull 1 out, number it 0, put it at the beginning, and then renumber the rest from 1 to 13, and then sort the order by broadcast date, you end up with the numbers below.
   

Put in this DVD	and watch this episode,	and you'll be watching this broadcast episode
1	0	1
1	1	2
1	2	3
2	7	4
1	3	5
3	9	6
3	8	7
3	10	8
4	13	9
2	4	10
4	12	11
4	11	12
2	5	13
2	6	14

This is obviously facilitated by having a multi-tray DVD player, and at points you'll have to hit the Menu button on your remote to go select a different episode.

This is also useful for if you only have the RE DVDs and want to watch the series in proper broadcast order.

Much, much later edit (April 8th, 2009, lol): If you don't want to marathon the entire thing, which is a reasonable assumption, you can split it up into four separate viewings that only require two of the discs for each. Just watch it 4-4-3-3.