Behind the Scenes: FUNimation’s Gamble In Broadcast Dubs Pays Off

• Title: FUNimation’s Gamble In Broadcast Dubs Pays Off
• Publication Date: 2/14/2015
• Author: Samantha Ferreira

Before I begin, I have to take a moment to step back and admire how far we've come. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly four years since Funimation launched their SimulDubbing initiative, as it's just grown to become such an organic part of the hobby as a whole. Funimation changed the anime world, and it's really helped to make the industry a bigger, more inclusive place. 

That's just amazing.

But anyway, back to adventure.

When I first wrote this, the industry was in a vastly different place than it is today. Back in those days, Crunchyroll and Funimation were bitter rivals, fighting for supremacy in the streaming world, as they eagerly grabbed at the biggest titles. 

The Anime Network, meanwhile, was the place where happiness went to die. Also, they had You're Under Arrest!

And really, catalogs aside, the two platforms offered the same basic slate of services, with subbed simulcasts, discounts for subscribers, and the like. It wasn't really uncommon to be subscribed to both, as they had content worth watching.

Funimation’s biggest benefit came from its deep existing catalog, which included dubs of shows new and old. The publisher’s recording infrastructure was enviable back then, and their turnarounds seemed to shrink with each passing quarter.

Still, I don’t think anybody was expecting the Texas-based organization to announce that they would be producing simultaneous dubs for shows in 2014. But, well, that’s exactly what happened! The publisher dabbled with the idea in the past, having produced the English dubs for Space Dandy, which aired on Toonami just hours before its Japanese broadcast. 

But that was just the one show. Nobody expected Funimation to go much further outside of the occasional one-off. To imagine otherwise would be like asking pigs to start flying, before making you breakfast using the meat from their own bodies. 

And yet, here we were, in Fall 2014. Funimation announced that they’d launch an initiative called “Broadcast Dubs” (later SimulDubs) with two shows: Psycho Pass 2 and Laughing Under the Clouds. All eyes were on them, at the time.

Insiders watched the following months intently, as performance would dictate exactly how the market would shift in the coming months. Many of us knew that Funimation was chasing something huge. This was a holy grail of anime fandom at the time, and generally seen as impossible due to the inflexible and generally heel-draggy nature of the Japanese side of things. 

With this in mind, many of us saw the move as a power play. To succeed would revolutionize the industry, opening the anime world to an all-new world of fans. Failure would be seen as an utter embarrassment, which would serve as a massive black eye to Funimation.

You can only imagine the excitement that hummed through the industry watchers, when Funimation announced that they’d not only continue their SimulDubbing efforts, but they’d be expanding the initiative sixfold, bringing their total offering for Winter 2018 to eleven shows… including heavy hitters like Tokyo Ghoul √A, Assassination Classroom, and Yurikuma Arashi.

More impressive, though, was that Funimation would launch an all-new program, called “Dubbletalk,” which was this big and splashy joint with ScrewAttack that aired weekly on Twitch.

This. Was. MASSIVE.

And, with that in mind, I set down to write the article. The piece was partly a news report, partly an editorial, and partly a business analysis which attempted to tie all of the news together, and cement just how great of a magnitude this news carried.

I dove into the logic of marketing via Dubbletalk, and the sheer volume of the announcements, attempting to really explain how Funimation planned to tell the world that they were on to something massive.

Revising the article, I have to admit that I probably failed to do so. My messaging was choppy, and my delivery was incredibly rushed. But, well… I was pretty excited at the time, and my eagerness got the better of me.

Nowadays, I’d probably consider doing a straight-up news report, while writing a side editorial that would run a few days later. It would allow for both sides to be happy, with a quick news report delivering the “in the moment” explanation, as the editorial serves a more measured and researched take on the same details.

Regardless, though, this was a big article for us (for obvious reasons), and it’s a super valuable part of the Herald’s history as a whole, as it signified the first rumbles of an evolution into our current format.