[Fish Sandwich]

I didn't feel like I had too much to say about episode 3 of Blazar that wouldn't apply to every other episode so far (it's quite entertaining!), but on the subject of English dubs, I've been watching every episode of Blazar twice, and have recently finished getting all the way through Z again with its dub, so I really want to take some time out to say that the quality of both has been extremely commendable, top marks work.

I'm watching Blazar episodes again like the day after, with the Japanese voices still fresh in my head, and as someone who is listening to both audio tracks, rather than only mostly reading one of them, I'm hard pressed to tell that much of a difference in the experience so far. I think the decision to translate 「俺が行く」 as "I've got this" kinda says it all. There's clear thought and care being put into the localization, and that's a good thing for a show that was made the same way.

It's been a while since I've sat down and watched Z in Japanese, so there's more room for me to be forgetting some particular bit of amazing subtlety that ~maybe~ got lost in translation, but on the same token, meeting the English audio more as its own thing thanks to that distance, I can again say it felt like it captured the show's spirit pretty much perfectly. There's a lot of fantastic comedy and heavy drama alike all over the place throughout Z, and it never came off to me like the new voices were failing to do justice to the humor and the heart that made that show the instant classic it became.

I'm pretty sure I've expressed some skepticism about the idea of dubbing a tokusatsu show into English on these forums before, and these two shows have gotten me to change my stance on that just by themselves. There's definitely a potential audience out there for whom quickly reading line after line of text is a big ask, which I'm maybe out of touch with as someone already so into this whole scene. (I recall someone making the very smart point that these particular shows are aimed at children, which seems a pertinent thing to bring up.) If Z and Blazar's dubs get people who otherwise couldn't be bothered to experience these great shows, I think that's only a good thing, when the versions they're experiencing are putting in the effort to live up to the originals.