AnimEigo
faces a big challenge in 2003: finding a new Lum. The North Carolina anime
importer has been translating and distributing Urusei Yatsura for years,
and most of those episodes have been subtitled. Only a handful of those
shows have been dubbed, with Roxanne Beck playing Lum. Now the company
plans to dub their planned release of the "Only You" movie and they're
searching for a new English-language cast. Producer Scott Carlson said
AnimEigo has been searching for the lead voices of Lum and Ataru Morobishi,
but they've had no luck so far. "We've had a couple of Atarus who were
phenomenal but they weren't going to be available all the time," Carlson
explained. As for Lum, the challenge is finding the right voice and the
right portrayal. The original Lum in Japanese speaks with an accented voice,
but it's an accent that doesn't directly translate into any sort of accent
that would be recognizable to English speakers. "That's so subjective.
We have a lot of discussion in the office. We've have people do everything
from a very Zha Zha Gabor to a high pitched sound."
With
the rising popularity of anime on broadcast and cable television, AnimEigo
would like to join the importing companies that get their shows on the
air. Carlson is looking for that broadcast exposure, but AnimEigo doesn't
have broadcast rights to some titles - because that wasn't part of their
original release licenses. The company also didn't have DVD rights to some
series, which explains why some shows which AnimEigo released on VHS haven't
moved to disc. Since AnimEigo was one of the first companies to move exclusively
to DVD releases, they've heard plenty of complaints about the quality of
their discs. The Urusei Yatsura originals had a replication error and an
authoring flaw, Carlson said, and the Kimagure Orange Road discs had "cosmetic
problems." Carlson said the better the dvd player, the smaller the chance
of problems with discs. "Some lasers can read through a coffee stain without
problems," he said. And that shows in AnimEigo's checks of returned discs;
about 60 percent of the discs that are returned to AnimEigo play without
problems, Carlson said.
AnimEigo
faces a big challenge in 2003: finding a new Lum. The North Carolina anime
importer has been translating and distributing Urusei Yatsura for years,
and most of those episodes have been subtitled. Only a handful of those
shows have been dubbed, with Roxanne Beck playing Lum. Now the company
plans to dub their planned release of the "Only You" movie and they're
searching for a new English-language cast. Producer Scott Carlson said
AnimEigo has been searching for the lead voices of Lum and Ataru Morobishi,
but they've had no luck so far. "We've had a couple of Atarus who were
phenomenal but they weren't going to be available all the time," Carlson
explained. As for Lum, the challenge is finding the right voice and the
right portrayal. The original Lum in Japanese speaks with an accented voice,
but it's an accent that doesn't directly translate into any sort of accent
that would be recognizable to English speakers. "That's so subjective.
We have a lot of discussion in the office. We've have people do everything
from a very Zha Zha Gabor to a high pitched sound."
With
the rising popularity of anime on broadcast and cable television, AnimEigo
would like to join the importing companies that get their shows on the
air. Carlson is looking for that broadcast exposure, but AnimEigo doesn't
have broadcast rights to some titles - because that wasn't part of their
original release licenses. The company also didn't have DVD rights to some
series, which explains why some shows which AnimEigo released on VHS haven't
moved to disc. Since AnimEigo was one of the first companies to move exclusively
to DVD releases, they've heard plenty of complaints about the quality of
their discs. The Urusei Yatsura originals had a replication error and an
authoring flaw, Carlson said, and the Kimagure Orange Road discs had "cosmetic
problems." Carlson said the better the dvd player, the smaller the chance
of problems with discs. "Some lasers can read through a coffee stain without
problems," he said. And that shows in AnimEigo's checks of returned discs;
about 60 percent of the discs that are returned to AnimEigo play without
problems, Carlson said.
