Beck and that Koyuki Jerk

Man, between volume one and volume two of the Beck anime, that jerk Koyuki got way better at guitar than I did. Me, I’m stuck with the holy rock trinity of power chord progressions, E-A-B E-A-B-A. Well, no not really, I’m a little less sad than that, but not much less. It’s fun picking up the guitar again after a long time away. It’s different this time around — I’m just picking because I like the act of learning how to play…again ^_^;. My tuner must be broken, because it always says the guitar is in tune and it surely doesn’t sound like it is.

Anyway it’s kind of hard to spoil this set of episodes as it’s more about watching Koyuki grow and seeing how Beck, the band, starts to form, the ins and outs of how that goes. Really, there isn’t much more that happens over the course of five episodes on this dvd than to watch some kid play guitar. Yet, there’s worlds going on even though nothing really happens. Music is so trivial and yet so vital. It’s got nothing to do with survival, yet it’s life.

So many times in high school I felt like music was my only friend. It’s easy to think that way when you’re young and dumb.

Dubbie Land

The English language version of Beck is handled by two of my favorite ADR Directors, Chris Bevins, who assembles a cast better than just about anyone, and Talesin Jaffe who took no prisoners with his direction of ROD TV. Anyone who has seen any of Beck in the original Japanese knows there’s a good deal of engrish dialogue in the original dub. This poses a problem when scenes with both English and Japanese are now all spoken in English.

A decision was made to alter the dialogue in these dual language scenes rather than translate the dialogue and make a note that it’s actually in Japanese (or change the English in the Japanese dub into Spanish or something for the English dub). I kind of knee-jerked at first, shaking my head that the scenes were altered when I watched the English dub after first hearing the original Japanese dub. After seeing it, I think they made the right decision (both directors spend a bit of time in the volume one commentary talking about how they arrived at that decision). Without going into a huge discussion about the merits and flaws of each possible solution, I think the choice they made makes the most sense for viewing the show in English. I also feel as if the alterations don’t change things too much on a larger view.

It’s a fantastic English dub if you’re inclined to give that track a spin. Greg Ayers is great (what’s new) as Koyuki. And R. Bruce Elliot as Saito owns. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one voice that sounded out of place — not necessarily a match with the original dub, just saying the voices don’t seem inappropriate for the character. Besides, I don’t think a tonal match is always an accurate translation anyway, but that too is more appropriate for a different discussion.

See ya.

*Goes back to the six string.*