Funimation (pre-2019)
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Crunchyroll, LLC. (formerly Funimation) is a foreign licensing company known for its dubbing of various anime. It was founded in 1994 by Gen Fukunaga and his wife Cindy and was bought by Navarre Corporation in 2005, then Sony in 2017, though Gen is still president and CEO and owns a 5% stake.
Why They Used To Be Fun
- Very faithful to the source material, only making minor changes that still get the point across.
- Their in-house dub of Dragon Ball Z is a huge improvement over the Ocean Group dub, which was heavily censored and edited by Saban Entertainment.
- Christopher R. Sabat (the voice of Vegeta and Piccolo) was definitely a much better person in this era.
- Very skilled and talented voice actors that add emotion and realism to the dubs, in addition, most are even better than their original Japanese version.
- They redeemed One Piece in the eyes of Western audiences after the flop of 4Kids Entertainment's dub of the show. Though in all fairness, 4Kids only dubbed One Piece because Toei Animation legally forced them to as part of a package deal.
- Many of the anime they've dubbed are from Shonen Jump.
- Sean Schemmel is considered by many western Dragon Ball fans (as well as some Japanese fans) to be the voice of Adult Goku.
- Owned the rights to Initial D shows until Fourth Stage and redeemed the show after it was utterly bowdlerized by Tokyopop, who removed the Eurobeat (a genre that defines the show) soundtrack and replaced it with generic hip-hop/rock songs (that made it come off as a Fast and Furious rip-off), changed the characters' names to the ones from the English releases of Initial D: Arcade Stage, and added unnecessary special effects that ruined the aspect of the races.
- Started "simuldubbing", the practice of dubbing an anime into English and releasing it alongside the original Japanese version, in 2014. This practice became popular because of them, with Aniplex of America and Sentai Filmworks the following suit later.
- Their dubs have garnered mostly universal praise, with the director of My Hero Academia calling the dub perfect.
- They stopped censoring anime in September 2003 and started to keep their acquired anime faithful to the original version. (the simulcast censors are not from Funimation but free cable TV providers).
- The reason why they used the censored simulcasts is that if they used the expense and paid AT-X uncensored version they would need to increase the subscription payment so they wait for the Blu-Ray/DVD release to acquire the uncensored version without increasing the subscription price.
Bad Qualities
- They went horribly downhill since 2019. Even before the company's downfall, they still did have some flaws.
- They had a very poor reputation among many anime fans in their early years due to heavily censoring and altering their dubs like the Dragon Ball series. As they had to have heavy censorship of extreme violence and death, soundtrack replacement, and changed names for their dubs to comply with network regulations. However, this was mostly due to their partnership with Saban Entertainment at the time, as they were the ones that had adherence to broadcasting standards.
- The first few episodes of their Dragon Ball Z dub weren't very good (though in all fairness, they'd just taken over from the Ocean Group).
- Some of their other dubs aren't too great either. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! (while decent) is probably the most infamous case of this.
- Not even Funimation was dubbing all their titles. As they left some with subbed only releases. In fact, their first sub-only release Oni-Ai was sold out....TWICE.
- On most of their Blu-ray releases, they lock subtitles into place when the audio setting is changed to Japanese. This is intended to prevent Japanese fans from importing their releases (Japan and North America have Region A-coded Blu-rays, and American sets are cheaper than Japanese sets), but is a huge and complete disservice to people who understand Japanese without the need of subtitles. Even Viz Media and Sentai Filmworks are guilty of the same practice. Fortunately, they stopped doing this in 2018, as the Blu-ray releases of the second seasons of Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia allow the viewer to watch those shows in Japanese without subtitles.
- They used to have online videos on YouTube of their various anime dubs, but now they don't really have much anymore, and some have even been private.
- They licensed Chuck E. Cheese in the Galaxy 5000 which was a terrible film.
- While their dub for Dragon Ball GT is decent, for some reason, the voice actors that reprised their roles as their characters, like Sean Schemmel, Chris Sabat, and Stephanie Nadolny, sounds more phoned-in than very confident, which makes them sound bored and even doesn't want to be there.
Trivia
- Their dub of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt was made even more vulgar and raunchy than its Japanese counterpart due to Gainax requesting it so.
- Funimation actually distributed home media sets of some western animated shows back then like "Braceface" and "Timothy Goes To School".
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