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Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Does A New Distributor Get Permission To Reuse Old Dubs?
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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When a publisher like CPM goes into administration, wouldn't their original dubs be assets that the administrators sell off during liquidation?
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Good question! Technically the answer is “yes” but those rights are pretty worthless to, say, Bank of America because they’re a dertivative work of the original show AND can’t be used without it. If they attempted to sue over its reuse, they might lose. And since most administrators are banks, there’s a good chance they don’t even know they have those rights. They’re a line item on a piece of paper buried in cold storage file archives, and it’s likely nobody at the bank is even aware they exist. The bank usually doesn’t have any masters or even copies of those dubs either. So their “ownership” of them is really just procedural at best. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2560 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Apparently, there's also an added wrinkle if the dub includes any sort of original music score, as that winds up becoming the property of the original creator, and not the Japanese licensor. For example, I was told by the head of Anime Midstream that the new B't X dub was originally meant to simply be a continuation of the original Illumitoon dub, but since Midstream couldn't get the rights to that dub, they decided to just start from scratch. I was later told by Mike Toole during Otakon that Illumitoon likely incorporated original music for B't X, alongside some bits & pieces of Akira Senju's music, so that the dub would remain the property of Illumitoon & its owners, instead of returning back to TMS once the license expired. The fact that only 8 of the 14 episodes are easily accessible today (who knows where the master M&E tracks for those last 6 are now) also made this original nigh-impossible to include in its entirety, anyway.
That seems to be Discotek's most common response, because they go through all the trouble of actually putting old dubs that are likely only available via old VHS tapes to newly-HD-remastered video, like for Arcadia of my Youth or the Baldios movie (& then even re-cutting the footage so as to make the dub viable in the first place!). Sadly, though, they're the only company really willing to go that extra mile, as both Sentai & FUNimation likely would have had no legal troubles with including the unfinished Streamline dubs for Nadia & Zillion, respectively, yet didn't bother to include them, likely due to the extra work needed.
This is apparently why Maiden Japan's re-releases of Black Magic M-66 & New Dominion Tank Police are sub-only, even though both had old English dubs from the 90s. It's possible that Bandai Visual Japan, or maybe even Masamune Shirow, really doesn't like those dubs & decided to bar MJ from including them for the re-releases. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 349 Location: Manchester, UK |
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Hi Justin, I don't suppose you could clarify what the situation with the Manga UK dub of Patlabor 1/2 is? I've repeatedly heard vague but confident reports that they're in some kind of limbo, which is why Bandai & Section 23 were unable able to include them in their releases (apparently S23 is re-authoring a bunch of disks for the tv show in their upcoming complete collection set, but there's been no word on whether the films will get a similar treatment). Is this a universal issue? I know Manga UK still operate, although their hold on older rights is probably shaky from all the mergers and breakaways? Could it be possible that they, or another international company would be able to release that dub without falling foul of somebody? I figured this would be the best time to ask; one Peter Marinker fan to the other
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TheMorry
Posts: 658 |
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Isnt this already well known? I've been only watching anime since 2014 but I knew about it ...
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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I’ve often wondered if ADV still has the rights to their early Shinkai dubs, as no one has been able to release them in recent years. I know Anime Limited mentioned they had some difficulty securing the dubs for Place Promised In our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star. Plus 5cm has only ever included the Bang Zoom dub.
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5344 |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2026 |
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It's almost certain that the DiC version of Sailor Moon will never see the light of day ever again, likely because they (or DHX Media, who owns their assets) owned the original music they created for it, plus it's possible that Naoko Takeuchi simply doesn't approve of it, despite the other old inaccurate dubs of the show (Italian, French, etc) still being available worldwide. Charlene's explanation of the dub's masters being damaged is probably true, but they could always just rip the files from the ADV DVDs if they had the rights to the material. Cloverway's dub for S/SuperS and the movies could probably be brought over though. Viz is just choosing not to include it.
The only reason FUNimation was able to release their Rock the Dragon set of the old short-lived Dragon Ball Z dub was because they owned the legal rights to all its assets, including the original soundtrack. I don't think the rights to the old 1988 Akira dub released by (but not produced by) Streamline went back to Kodansha, explaining its (legal) disappearance for almost 20 years. FUNimation says they weren't going to include it on their Blu-ray until someone from Intersound (or whoever was in-the-know) approached them to arrange a deal to make it happen. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1820 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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IIRC the problem with using the Manga UK dub of the Patlabor movies is an audio/video sync issue, since the dub was synced to a 25fps PAL video transfer. |
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PurpleWarrior13
Posts: 2026 |
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^ It was on Manga Entertainment's original US DVDs in the late 90s, so I don't see why it couldn't be used. It's probably absent for the same reason the original Japanese track is also no longer used instead of the more recent re-recording. The licensor just won't allow it for some reason.
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Nodz
Posts: 524 |
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The difference is that the Italian or French versions of Sailor Moon didn't completely change the musics. They changed the names of the characters and attacks (to be honest, lots of attacks are kinda difficult to translate), and also, there were a lot lot lot of translation mistakes, but the essence is the same than in Japanese: they didn't make Zoisite a woman, Michiru and Haruka were not cousins and the musics are the japanese ones. |
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PurpleWarrior13
Posts: 2026 |
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The French dub did that weird thing where Sailor Uranus was disguised as a male in normal form (with a male voice actor) and was female in senshi form (with a female voice actor) and was undercover "pretending" to be Michiru's lover, and the Italian dub made the Sailor Starlights summon their twin sisters instead of changing genders (that season wasn't dubbed in French until recently). I guess they were closer to Cloverway's S/SuperS dub, so I guess the cuts were the big problem.
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NJ_
 Posts: 3021 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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^Yeah, the Italian dub had it's own issues and people there wanted a redub of their own when it got relicensed in 2010 and unfortunately because of money (that's what Dynit claimed on their Facebook years ago), the original Mediaset dub was what they got and in the case of the R movie, without the redub that Shin Vision did before the license originally got pulled.
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Aphasial
Exempt from Grammar Rules
Posts: 122 Location: San Diego, CA |
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I don't know that that's completely true that those rights are sealed away. An authorized performance of arrangements of some of those tracks was released last year, after all: http://www.originalsoundversion.com/experience-90s-north-american-sailor-moon-music-with-serasymphony-ii-half-moon-album/ With ViZ, I totally understand them wanting to take this opportunity to rerun from scratch, as an unedited Season 1 and 2 would have been inpossible to produce with the existing one ; having a true-to-original modern dub is a major selling point for the re-release. That said, the original DiC version obviously has a certain nostalgic charm, and I can't imagine that a while after the re-dub is finished and complete that no one would look at putting out a compilation of it. Unless Naoko Takeuchi simply truly doesn't want it to be seem again, of course. |
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