ANN’s Michael Toole opened the panel with a brief tribute to the late Osamu Dezaki. For this, he broke his long-standing policy of never showing a title more than once in the panel, and presented segments from a dubbed adaptation of Space Adventure COBRA, Dezaki’s first work. Unlike his original presentation of the feature, which was a Streamline dub for America, Toole opted to show a rare, UK-exclusive dub of the film.
After his brief tribute to the late director, Toole declared that this incarnation of the panel would continue with a tribute to mermaids. In particular, he opted to show scenes from Rumiko Takahashi’s Mermaid Forest, Mermaid’s Scar, and The Little Mermaid. Both Mermaid’s Forest and Mermaid’s Scar were dubbed by Viz, though The Little Mermaid’s dub producer wasn’t specified.
The panel was rounded out with presentations of two Urban Vision dubs: Wild 7, a police OVA that revolves around a crew of rough-around-the-edges motorcycle cops who are above the law, and DNA Sights: A Leiji Matsumoto film that packed in every Matsumoto trope one can think of, including Captain Harlock, and still managed to suck. The panel closed off with a segment from Hakushin Daimao’s 1994 UK dub, which ran on television under the title Bob in a Bottle.
The dubs, as one would expect, were comically terrible, with bad acting, badly paraphrased scripts, or worse. The absurdity of each was pushed even further, as Toole offered his own commentary for each of the dubs. As one would expect, he didn’t hold back on the signature snark, or the tongue-in-cheek jokes as each clip rolled. Toole’s encyclopedic knowledge of each dub, including the rarity, availaility, and release of each dub was particularly impressive, and offered something to those who may have been rolling their eyes at some of the titles.
