duuuude finding a fellow conan dub appreciator in the year 2022 🙏 the english dub is criminally underrated imo-- it was clearly localized with love and the VAs gave a lot of unique personality to their roles. (Viktorin + Jewell do a killer job as Conan and the use of the Shinichi voice for the internal monologues is so. good.) (also I finally have the info I need to determine if my SAVE copies are bootlegs like i've always suspected so thanks!)
I've found that there are actually quite a few FUNimation dub appreciators still around!
But yes!!! Totally agree. FuNi's English dub is genuinely my favorite way to watch DetCo, and it's so nice to see it get recognition for what it did well. I mean no disrespect to the new Bang Zoom! dub; my most popular post on this site is celebrating a Bang Zoom! dub, after all (unfortunately not captioned, though I did put together a sub/dub breakdown here). It's exciting that Conan is getting official English-dubbed releases after years of nothing, and there are some real skilled, experienced folks in the cast and staff.
And admittedly, I've only seen Bang Zoom!'s rendition of Episode One: The Great Detective Turned Small despite having every DetCo Blu-ray that Discotek's released sitting on the shelf in front of me right now, but I can't help but feel that in trying to correct the inaccuracies of the FuNi dub, they've lost a lot of the charm. Conan thinking in Shinichi's voice isn't faithful to the original Japanese performances, true, but it's a perfectly fair way of adapting the manga and a choice that resonates so much more with me. Why would you think in a voice that you don't consider your own? Conan thinking in Conan's voice strikes me as contradictory to the character, in all honesty. It was such a disappointment to me that the Bang Zoom! dub didn't continue this practice.
The Bang Zoom! script itself often comes off to me as stilted, too; one of the biggest strengths of FUNimation's dub, in my opinion, is how natural it could sound. But part of that is due to the loosey-goosiness of its translation. It takes a lot of creative liberties—definitely too many at times!—but for the most part, I think it's absolutely excellent at making the dialogue really work in English. The Bang Zoom! production sells itself as a more accurate Detective Conan, and I sincerely do respect that, and I love that it uses the original names, but I also feel that in striving so much for accuracy, it loses the naturalness that FuNi's dub absolutely shone in.
Of course, a quick glance tells me that other Bang Zoom! Conan projects have different ADR directors and script writers, so maybe the films still wrapped in plastic on my shelf have a different feel to them than Episode One. But gosh, while I initially watched Detective Conan in Japanese with subtitles because I was turned off by the name changes of the FuNi dub, actually experiencing it all these years later told me that you can still have a fantastic dub, even if it's not 100% faithful.
Sorry to ramble! I'm super passionate about dubs and subtitles and that sort of thing. Happy that my S.A.V.E. bootleg post was helpful! Still can't believe that Case Closed of all things got so bootlegged, though I must say: for anyone interested in collecting the old FuNi dub on disc, I can't recommend the original art box releases enough. Sure, they're not as nice and compact as the seasonal sets, but you get more extras (dub bloopers!) and the occasional English dub subtitles and video options. I really regret not getting them initially!
