Aki and I have been watching the English dub of Tiger & Bunny. Neither of us expected to get this into it, but here we are. Dying for episode 9 dubbed.

The start with the dub was pretty bumpy – which I think was a combination of the voices sounding unfamiliar after seeing the original so many times (read: we lost count how many times), and the voice actors themselves still settling into the roles. By episode three that had evened out. The translation has some minor issues and a couple of derps a fan will notice, but we can forgive those. As a whole it works, and the important character chemistry is still there.

The dub cast is also really good. Wally Wingert may not sound anything like Hirata, but he’s gotten the feel of the character down. Yuri Lowenthal is excellent as Barnaby. What really blew us away was Liam O’Brien as Lunatic. Yusa Kouji was awesome in the original, but the dub version is better in our opinion. Yuri Petrov and Lunatic actually sound different in the dub, and the choice of voice and style of speech for Lunatic make him more menacing. Or as Aki put it…

Aki_the_geek: NO LUNATIC YOU SHOULDN’T SOUND LIKE YOU WANT TO BANG EVERYONE

Yeah. I was going to add some snippets of our dub watching chats here but since they mostly consist of capslock keysmashing because of FEELS, I’ll just leave it at that. The dub has gone from being an excuse to rewatch the series to something we’re looking forward to every week.

Live-Action Buddy Cops

Earlier this month, ANN posted some news about T&B’s character designer Katsura Masakazu appearing in a TV series written by Nishida Masafumi. So far we’ve seen two episodes of Jikken Keiji Totori. Nishida seems to like the age gap theme, this time the rookie is the older of the duo. For a Japanese drama, Jikken Keiji Totori doesn’t really have that j-drama feel, it’s more Western. That’s not very surprising, though, Tiger & Bunny wasn’t the first Western style thing Nishida wrote. He’s also written and directed one of the few Japanese sitcoms filmed in front of live studio audience. The acting in Jikken Keiji Totori is pretty good, too. We’re really enjoying watching it, and if you like Nishida’s writing it’s definitely worth checking out.

(I tried to keep this short and sweet, because I’ve been down with a flu for the past week and that doesn’t really enhance my ability to stay coherent.)