I'm only going to be talking from personal experience here, so, because i haven't watched a lot of dubs, i know that there's probably much worse out there.
For english dubs, i'd like to nominate the Karneval dub by Funimation, i literally cried internally whenever Yogi would open his mouth! :(
You see, in the original he is voiced by the one and only Mamoru Miyano, and his voice is super charming, funny, dramatic and eccentric!
Of course, i know it's hard to find anybody even remotely as talented as him, but still, the guy they cast for the dub sounded absolutely nothing like Mamoru Miyano at all, absolutely 0!!!!!!!!!
And not only that, but his voice was devoid of any of the charm, dramatism and excentricism that made the character in the original sooo unique!!!!! In the dub he just sounded like a african american or something and i couldn't stand listening to him at all!!!!!
They also really fucked up the voices of Gareki and Nai, the two other main characters as well, Gareki in the original was played by Hiroshi Kamiya and sounded cool, mature and badass, while in the dub, his voice is much higher and he sounds like a whiny little brat!!!!
Then Nai, in the original he sounds young, pure and innocent but in the dub he sounds like a guy in his 40's trying to play(and fail to sound believable) a little boy, you can probably imagine how weird and awkward that sounds like, yes?
The other characters sounded oddly much better, but when you botch up the voices of the, you know, three main characters, what point is there if the side characters sound good?!
Plus, they did a lot of unnecessary changes to the script, and inserted a lot of american slang, sayings and even adding insults to try and seem more "cool" and "hip" to a casual american teen viewers probably.
Like, at one point, Gareki is annoyed with Yogi and tells him to, and i quote: "Stop crying like a little bi*ch!" in the dub. There was absolutely no need to inject such a derogatory term in there, in the original Gareki did not insult Yogi like that at all, he just tells him to shut up because he's annoying, there's no mention of the "b" word at all!!!!!!!!!!!!
I will never forgive them for this, and i also saw that they later dubbed other of my favorite anime such as Servamp and Touken Ranbu Hanamaru, i certainly will never subject myself to watching them brutally murder and shit all over my favorite franchises like that ever again, which is why i also wanted Crunchyroll to get Bungou to Alchemist instead of them, but alas, the butchers have gotten another one of my favorite things to ruin!!!!!
As for other language dubs, the dubs of anime(and actually all cartoons, animated series and movies etc.) in my language from the 90's, early and mid 20', were soooo awful that they can't even be called proper dubs, because there was only one person doing the "voices" for all of the characters, or rather it was more like a completly flat and emotionless narrator trying to pretend to be the characters and reading the lines over the original voices, because, yes, they where soo amateurish that they couldn't even mute the original voices and sounds, you could still hear what the characters originally sounded like in the background, ugh. >_<
A little while later, they got like two voices for some series, like the original Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. There was one male and one female voice, again, them doing the voices for all the characters. While the male voice wasn't completly emotionless and was doing a little better job than his predecesors, but was awfully annoying and squeaky for some characters. The female one, on the other hand, was as flat and unbelivably lame as those from the 90's!!!!!!!!
The only decent anime dub we got was Pokemon(well, untill they changed the voices of James and Ash, starting somewhere in the Johto region, that is. They made James voice sound like an old man trying to be funny(which i suspect the actor probably was) and Ash sounded more girly and annoying, while previously his voice had the perfect amount of childishness and boyish attitude.)
Then, there's the FMA dub, the only actual anime that wasn't for kids to get a dub in my language, i thought the dub was pretty good and the voices were matching great for the most part, but apparently i was the only one thinking this, because the dub was never finished, starting from the arc where Wrath was originally introduced in the 2003 version, it reverted back to the sub version!!!!!! I was completely flabbergasted and disheartened, i really wanted to hear what Wrath would sound like!!!!!!!! There was no need for me to watch the sub, as i had already previously seen FMA, the only reason i was watching it on TV was BECAUSE i wanted to see the freaking dub!!!!!!!!!!!
I can only think that the studio/voice actors or maybe the channel got threats, insults and crap thrown at them by the die hard otaku in my country that probably felt insulted that their precious anime got a, oh NO! Decent dub, Heaven forbid!!!!!!!!
So they had to interupt the anime out of fear, because otheriwse i don't know why they would literally stop dubbing in the middle of the series!!!!!! I wish they had at least finished FMA, sigh, thank you very much for spoiling any chance of our country ever getting anymore dubs, guys, you know who you are!!!!!!
Actually, scratch that, there were actually people, "concerned parents" and "good samaritans" who tought all and every anime is demonic and corrupts young people's minds, maybe that's why the only anime channel we ever had in my country, started showing less and less anime over the years, being replaced by crappy american game shows, untill it one day completely y disappeared and was replaced by a freaking cooking channel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >:(
I had dreams after that, still do, actually, about anime i like getting dubs in my language, like Katekyo Hitman Reborn(most often) and others such as Touken Ranbu Hanamaru, now all we have is fandubs, and even those are pretty rare, there isn't a dedicated community for fandubs in my language like there is for english ones.
Oh, yeah, forgot to say, dubs for animated series and especially movies(like those by Disney, Dreanworks, Illumination etc.) are now good quality, every character gets a different(and fitting!) voice now and there's no more original character voices in the background because they are actually done now by people who know what the hell they are doing!!! Often the characters are done by real actors, so of course the quality will be 1000000% times better than the lame attempts of the 90's!!!!!!!!!!
They thankfully have also re-dubbed all of the old Disney movies that had previously the embarrassing one narrator playing all the characters i mentioned earlier.
It's such a shame that now when we actually have good animation dubs, anime isn't shown here on TV anymore and hence why there won't be any possibility of new anime dubs being made! I wish anime was dubbed in my country now...... :(
Omg, i ended up writing a whole blog post, oooops, ahaha. ^-^;
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