So, beginning this week, we can finally say goodbye to the 4Kids dub of One
Piece once and for all! Huzzah!
Funimation will be handling One Piece from the current story arc (Skypiea)
onward.
My initial impressions:
Opening: Funimation has reversioned the Japanese opening from these
episodes
into an English-language version of the same opening theme, using the same
animation. I heartily approve of it, as Skypiea is as far as I've gotten
in
the fansubs, and the new dub opening really matches the Japanese opening
from this point in the series. Nicely translated, nicely sung, nicely
rearranged. Overall, nice.
Voices: All in all, the new voice cast is a VAST improvement over the
4Kids
cast. Luffy's actor is playing things a bit too rough (kind of like the
dub
Naruto), but this is made up for by the PERFECT voices for Sanji and
Robin,
which have ditched the horrifying accents the 4Kids version had. Usopp and
Chopper are PERFECT, and Zoro sounds...normal. As does Nami, which works
nicely.
(Is Robin being voiced by Meredith McCoy? Sounds like her.)
Most especially awesome is that CHOPPER HAS THE SAME VOICE IN HIS BRAWN
POINT FORM!! This ALWAYS bugged me about the 4Kids version, because
Chopper's voice *does not change* between forms in the original version.
The secondary characters (The Masira Pirates) have decent voices, which I
like...Funimation is very good at giving decent voices to secondary
characters.
And in addition to the English-dubbed opening, we get an English-dubbed
version of the ENDING, too! How awesome is that? And again, it's a VERY
good
rendition of the ending used for this part of the series.
Also, the "To Be Continued" ending title card and the proper next-episode
preview sequence have been restored, and the narrator (largely an
inclusion
exclusive to the 4Kids dub) has been excised completely .
The only real nitpick I have is that Funimation's version still calls the
Log Pose a "Grand Compass". But I understand that "Log Pose" doesn't make
sense in English (doesn't even make sense as Engrish, for that matter), so
this isn't really a major complaint.
All in all, I am highly impressed. As expected of Funimation, they have
succeeded in doing in 23 minutes what 4Kids didn't manage to do in THREE
YEARS: give us a good, quality English language version of One Piece.
--
This is a test of the Emergency Ass Dance System.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The Eternal Lost Lurker
www.lurkerdrome.com
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