Kaeloo (Taab Productions dub)
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| Kaeloo (Taab Productions dub) | ||||||||||||||||
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 "Who in their right mind would watch crap like that?" - Mr. Cat, "Once Upon a Time"
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Kaeloo is a French animated comedy television series produced by Cube Creative Productions. The series stars Kaeloo (Frog in Japanese), a sweet and cheerful yet dangerously unstable frog who enjoys playing games with her buddies, Stumpy, an extremely stupid squirrel, Quack Quack, a ditzy duck with a yogurt addiction, and Hector (referred to as Mr. Cat), a destructive, psychopathic, cruel feline who is heavily implied to suffer from psychological issues from living in an abusive family. Unfortunately, said games tend to go from simple, happy children's entertainment to full-blown wars.
Between 2011-2012, the first season of 52 episodes was dubbed in English by Taab Productions for Australian audiences.
Why There's Nothing We Hate More Than This Dub
- To get the massive toad out of the room, the chief problem with this dub is that it has ATROCIOUS lip-syncing, with the 2 voice actors (Doug Rand & Mike Powers) not even trying to make it consistent or easy on the ears, and sometimes missing it entirely. For example, in "Prison Ball", after Mr. Cat fires a giant spike out of his bazooka at Quack (it makes sense in context), the duck quacking is completely missed, leaving awkward, dead air.
- It doesn't help that this scene also contains a loathsome case of slow, thoroughly-misaimed timing.
- For some discernible reason, the characters have mostly been flanderized to fit the bottomless standards:
- Kaeloo was originally an even-tempered, patient, kind-hearted and caring protagonist who only got angry on justified occasions for the most part (mostly caused by Mr. Cat). Here, she's a short-tempered, obnoxious, hypocritical, narcissistic, obsequious, defamatory, capricious, psychopathic jackass who outright torments her friends at times and treats them poorly, especially when transformed into Bad Kaeloo. On that note, here, she often takes sadistic pleasure in punishing Mr. Cat to the point of being extremely cruel, with the worst offender being "Justice Masters".
- Stumpy in the French dub is a charmingly mischievous yet well-intentioned squirrel who just happens to be a moronic comic relief. In the English dub, he's a whiny, egotistical, bratty, cringeworthy numbskull with not even the slightest amount of charisma, intelligence or likability, and comes up with the stupidest of judgments. He's also a huge jerk in this version, with many scenes having him be absurdly uncaring, occasionally even more than the French dub.
- Quack, while still the most likable and the least derailed, is mostly relegated to a plot device/comic relief. While this was present in the original, it was balanced and not made they focus of everything.
- Mr. Cat, while also likable and somewhat sympathetic, is inconsistent. The original version has him be an absurdly intelligent child prodigy, while the dub has him mostly of average intelligence, and sometimes stupidity. The dub also makes him slightly meaner (though he was a jerk in the original dub, he's even moreso here), especially to Kaeloo, despite being her best friend and love interest. With Kaeloo confirmed to be female beginning in "Happy Rotter", he now often makes misogynistic remarks towards her and girls in general, which is entirely absent in the French dub. For example, in "Prince Charming", he says "Just like a woman." in annoyance while Kaeloo is laughing, which is missing in the French version. The dub notably makes him incredibly larger-than-life and hammy, thanks to Mike Powers' absurdly charismatic and fun-having performance, whereas in the original he rarely hams it up, usually opting for being controlled, and sometimes being the only sane man in a sea of dunderheads.
- Consequently, sometimes the characters' changed personalities make scenes more awkward and uncomfortable than if they kept them as-is. A really bad example comes from "Guess Who?", where Mr. Cat tells Kaeloo that happiness doesn't qualify as a person in a game because he doesn't believe that happiness exists. That's...that's just heartbreaking. And while the French dub has Kaeloo horrified and extremely worried about her best friend's mental state, the English dub has her be angry rather than concerned about what he said.
- Simply put, the voice acting for most of the cast is subpar-at-best and terrible-at-worst:
- For some reason (and likely due to the low budget), only 2 voice actors were hired for the characters: Doug Rand as Kaeloo (who's a female, sort of, she's canonically a hermaphrodite), Stumpy and Quack, & Mike Powers as Mr. Cat. As a result, they all have flaws:
- For the first eight episodes and episodes 14-16, the voices are different in a horrendous fashion than the rest of the English version:
- Kaeloo is extremely high-pitched and obnoxious in-tone, making her sound less like a girl and more like a chipmunk on helium, almost to the point of being flamboyant. When she turns into Bad Kaeloo, she is incredibly deep and masculine in both tone and voice.
- Stumpy, the worst offender, sounds like a deep and mature teenager, complete with a raspy voice, though its somewhat more tolerable than his later voice beginning in "Cops 'n' Robbers" & "Peace, Man!!!".
- Mr. Cat is hilariously hammy, over-the-top and exuberant in-tone (and to some extent characterization), and you can really tell that Mike Powers was having a blast recording his lines (though you can also see this as a good thing).
- As a result, most of the dialogue is extremely laughable, confusing and unprofessional to the point where this feels like a fandub than an actual licensed dub by a studio. Perhaps the biggest and worst example is from "Ecologists", where Kaeloo angrily yells "There's nothing I hate MORE THAN WASTING FOOD"!
- The most glaring error in this English dub has to be the abuse of it being incredibly unfaithful to the original French dub's script, with the translation and script being so terrible they're kind of hilarious in how sheerly bad it is.
- Errors are present throughout, from the aforementioned lip-syncing issues to entire plot points being retconned like absolute crazy. Sometimes established things set-in-stone are replaced with others. In "Doctors" for example, Stumpy getting a fracture from a hammer and getting a double-fracture when Mr. Cat runs over the nutcracker with a stretcher is changed to him getting a concussion from the hammer and a broken leg from the stretcher.
- The worst offender of this is the running gag of Kaeloo's friends (and probably not even herself) being completely in the dark in terms of what gender she is. Both dubs have this joke, but with different executions: While Kaeloo is frequently referred-to as (and sometimes calls herself) female in French, a translation error in the script resulted in Kaeloo being rewritten as male for the first ten episodes, giving the unintended implication of her being homosexual (whereas in the French dub she's later written as bisexual) at the end of "Reading Books". Thankfully, this is corrected beginning in "Happy Rotter", the eleventh episode, but the previous 10 are for some reason left dubbed as is.
- Many times, comedic energy is vapid as a result of the dub's flaws, and sometimes new innuendos for this supposed children's show are introduced. For example:
- Kaeloo shown being attracted to Mr. Cat's implied private parts (which is made worse when you realize she's meant to be male in this episode) in "Reading Books".
- Mr. Cat's advice on how to be a good weather presenter being "You've either gotta be sexy, or bald" in "TV News!".
- Stumpy and 2 clones of him using "Squirrel Power Fart" on Kaeloo's clones (to wit, farting on them, complete with visible anuses on their butts) in "Hide 'n' Hunt!".
- Kaeloo's creepily romantic and unintentionally downright pedophilic behavior towards Quack (the fact that he's implied to be a baby and she's canonically 12-years-old doesn't help) and Mr. Cat yelling "HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKIN' CANDY-WEED?!" in "Danger Island Survivor".
- Him going a profanity-laden tirade in "Peace, Man!", complete with Mike Powers' swearing barely even being censored-out, unlike the originals.
- Him saying "crap" in "Spies" and "Once Upon a Time".
- The title announcer nearly yelling "son of a b*tch" in "Driver's License".
- Mr. Cat yelling "What is this, a Russian mail-order bribe?!" through a phone in "Justice Masters".
- Him nearly singing "'cause he keeps breakin' my balls" in "Basketball".
- Many of the adult jokes, situations and overall scenes in the original French dub are kept as-is, instead of mildly-changing them to fit this dub being slightly more family-friendly in nature. For example, the ending of "Basketball" where Kaeloo and her friends sing about how they'll probably go to Hell is kept perfectly-intact, including Kaeloo's suggestive dance moves. Another instance is the end of "Art Class", where Quack shows Kaeloo a painting he made by-hand, and she notices a naked lady in the front, complete with visible breasts that the audience see.
- The attempts at localizing the series are all very flawed:
- While this is an Australian dub of a French cartoon, the characters speak in American accents and participate in American customs. They still screw it up every now and again, such as the running feature of referring to trash as rubbish.
- Most of the time, the text from the organic French dub is left as-is. A good example is "Reading Books", where Mr. Cat fires "War and Peace", a book, from a bazooka (it makes sense in context, again). The French version translates it to "Guerre et Paix", which is left as-is in the English version.
- Another instance of how atrocious this dub is will be the quality of the comedy and writing. Thanks to the combination of the lacking-in-luster voice acting, capricious translation and less-than-stellar localization, the humor is more-often-than-not extremely unfunny in its repetitiveness, and a shell of the comedy that the original version of the series possesses, especially the comic relief provided by Stumpy.
- Granted, the original version of the series has an overall dark, sadistic tone and relies frequently on gratuitously exaggerated over-the-top violence in-lieu of slapstick, but it almost never reached the insanely high amount of sadism this incarnation of translation possesses. This can even hinder the process of some episodes overall:
- "Danger Island Survivor"'s plot is "Kaeloo and her friends participate in an (incredibly lame) game show the former set up.". The conflict (as with most Season 1 episodes) comes from Mr. Cat, the deuteragonist & main antagonist, who causes calamity out of warranted jealousy towards Kaeloo blatantly-favoritizing Quack over him and Stumpy. In the French dub, after Quack "saves" Kaeloo, the latter (rather creepily) fawns over him and calls him a friend for rescuing her. In the English dub, she (even more creepily) calls him her BEST friend, which triggers Mr. Cat considering she has the aforementioned for that purpose. This therefore results in Mr. Cat coming across as far more justified and unintentionally sympathetic and likable with his behavior, even though he went disproportionate in his rage.
- Despite just being another version of the series, this dub's logic makes absolutely no sense, even by the standards of the Kaeloo franchise and cartoonish reasonings.
Redeeming Qualities
- The dub overall is so terrible, low-budget, quantity-over-quality-reliant and unfaithful that it's unintentionally hilarious, so bad it's good and can even make for unintentional comedy.
- Despite all of the negativity the amateur-spewing voice acting endlessly echos, it slightly improves over time beginning in "Peace, Man!!!". In fact, this is when the dub itself gets legitimately better, with more competent voice acting and principles, and hearing to how the original show worked to begin with, especially the better and more accurate translation.
- On occasion, there is a diamond in the rough of good content within all 52 episodes of this English translation. In particular, the dub's series finale, "Bye Bye Yoghurt" is rather faithful to the original French version, and is overall a fitting end to this dub (ironically, the original series was supposed to end here, possibly due to a 52-episode order, but it was renewed for Season 2).
- Out of all the butchered of the cast, Mr. Cat and Quack are the most likable, and they're the least bad/derailed. Mr. Cat is also really fun to watch, in-part to Mike Powers' great performance.
Reception
While the series as a whole is mostly positively-receieved, the same cannot be said for the English dub, which was heavily and UNIVERSALLY-panned and is conisdered the absolute worst incarnation by many due to the extremely low, inept spirit put in by the voice actors, translators and English editors/proofreaders. Almost all of the critiques and constructive panning of this dub are all targeted, but are not limited to for its unnecessary changes, extremely poor production values and budgets, horrendous writing that doesn't even try to stay true to the series (especially in the earliest episodes, more specifically the first sixteen, ludicriously dark, exaggerated and cringeworthy tone, awkward timing and gags that absolutely decimates the potential of this era with comedic timing and the entire point of the original French version's gagwork (which can even lead to unfortunate implications like Kaeloo and Quack's relationship), incredibly tame and simplistic characterizations, failed localization, and subpar at BEST dubbing (being cast to late-night airings by ABC didn't help its case), and was canceled after Season 1 was completed thanks to the immensely-negative reception and low ratings (and possible creative burnout).
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