While the concept of comedic fandubs of anime isn’t exactly new, the way anime fandom interacts with them is changing in a major way, thanks to TikTok and its estimated 1.06 billion active users. The hashtag “#Voiceover” on the platform features countless dubbed-over videos of pets, cartoons, and—of course—anime, all created to elicit laughs from eager audiences. The comedic fandub, itself, has a fascinating history that is being written to this day, as “abridged” series evolve to meet the needs of current viewers. This series will explore the genre’s evolution from the anime Pliopithecus it once was, into the proverbial homo-sapien it is today.
The concept for what would inevitably become an “abridged series” began long before anime even hit North American shores. Letterist International was a collective of radical artists and cultural theorists active throughout the mid-1950s in Paris, France. This collective proposed the technique of détournement, which could be described as, “turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself.”1
A perfect example of this arises in one of the earliest comedic fandubs — DIRTY PAIR: The Arrest of Mr. Macek. In this edit of the first episode of the Dirty Pair OVA series, Carl Macek, founder of Streamline Pictures and the mastermind behind Robotech, kidnaps anime fans and takes them to Jupiter to force them to watch his show. Kei and Yuri are sent to arrest Carl Macek for, “the ruthless butchery of Japanese animation.”
Despite Macek’s innumerable efforts to pave the way for anime’s success in North America, many early comedic fandubs took shots at his “Macekreing” three anime into Robotech while working for Harmony Gold. In other words, they were using the very medium he strove so hard to promote to criticize how we went about doing so — a détournement.
“Producing the parody dubs in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to be a natural progression of the anime fandom we were engaged in,” explained Dave Merrill, who co-founded Atlanta’s Anime-X club, chaired Anime Weekend Atlanta’s inaugural event, and served as a member of indie filmmaking group Corn Pone Flicks. “we were already spending our weekends wiring VCRs together and watching anime and making wisecracks, we’d seen commercial voice-over, re-edited mash-up comedies, why not do it ourselves?”
Corellian Jones and Phillip Sra of Sherbert Productions even originally planned to parody Robotech II: The Sentinels, but Jones begged them to switch to something else as he, “couldn’t stomach looking at the cheap, cheesy animation.” The “overwhelmingly positive response” for The Arrest of Mr. Macek at Westercon 42 convinced the two to continue producing parodies through the 1990s while screening their films at various conventions and encouraging other groups to form and make their own comedic fandubs.
One such group, Studio Sokodei, would go on to create the closest modern ancestor to the modern abridged series, which premiered at FanimeCon in 2000 — Evangelion: ReDeath.
To be continued…
- Douglas B. Holt (2010). Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. Oxford University Press. p. 252. ↩︎
