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[Yoink]

The show I just started watching, whilst mostly not humorous (unless there's some weird French humour going on that goes totally over my head), caught me completely off-guard with the following exchange. I may have snorted with laughter, or perhaps softly guffawed.   

Old voodoo lady who pays her bills by performing healing magic and the occasional exorcism from her dingy, tenement apartment: "Did you cast a spell on this beanpole?! He has the mark on him!"   
Weird dude who just up-chucked all over himself and the voodoo lady's kindly granddaughter, ostensibly due to his medication: "...It's vomit."   

[Naturegirl1999]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’
Tide CEO states Soap Is Not Medicine (CollegeHumor Skit)

[Dunamisdeos]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’
Tide CEO states Soap Is Not Medicine (CollegeHumor Skit)

Dis was pretty great

[Yoink]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’

Oh yeah, it's called Mortel. At first glance it seems exceptionally lame, but I'm glad I gave it a shot for whatever reason. Of course, I'm only two or three episodes in so it remains to be seen if it will hold my interest, but it has already greatly exceeded my expectations.   

It's in French, though if memory serves it had dubs on by default. Anyone who decides to check it out, don't forget to turn those off - unless you have a legitimate reason to need dubs instead of subtitles, such as a vision impairment, dyslexia or a crippling phobia of the French language, in which case I suppose I can forgive you.    


So far it's had at least one other moment of subtle, possibly unintentional comedy amidst all the drama and supernatural themes.

[Naturegirl1999]

Why do most prefer s8bs over dubs?

[pisskop]

I find most english dubs to be awkward and poorly done, often.  The subs are more engaging anyway.

But these days I do most of my movies and podcasts and youtube videos as background noise, so it doesnt help.

[Reelya]

Part of that is that the original company spent a lot of money on the production, so they usually don't skimp on the voice acting / audio. If you're spending $350,000 on production per episode then you're not going to skimp on the audio by hiring the sound editors's niece as a voice actor and using a Casio keyboard for incidental music. You already spent so much money, so making it sound good is good business sense. Skimping on the audio for these guys would be like putting their expensive product in cheap shitty packaging.

Whereas you can contrast this with the economics for dubbing companies. (1) they get the show pretty cheap, since the export market is an afterthought for shows that did well in Japan, or a dumping ground for shows that did poorly. (2) imported shows only have a niche audience (3) half your niche audience only wants the subs and would buy them whether or not you dubbed them at all, and half the people who prefer dubs would go "fuck it" and watch it with subs anyway if there were no dubs if they really wanted to see it. Let's face it: the audience for a niche product of this kind who are also noobs who only want it dubbed is a very small slice of an already-small pie. People chasing up such a niche product are usually all-in in the first place. The economics of this mean that dubbing is an added expense on a cheap product with low profit margins that many people would still buy even if you never bothered to dub it at all. That means skimping on the audio is good business sense.

Yeah, so good economic reasons there why a very low amount of effort is spent on dubbing most series. If you watch subs, then the overall quality of the voice acting is a lot more consistent, since in Japan voice acting is a make-or-break career with a much larger talent pool. The American dubbing companies by comparison tend to have a small pool of voice actors specific to that company who are low-paid contract labor. And that's not getting into game dubbing. There was one small company that imported a game, and the lead programmer got his family members including his mother to be the voice actors. The result was an obvious shit-show that ruined the product complete.
EDIT for lulz
https://kotaku.com/not-so-good-voice-acting-explained-5014864?IR=T
Yeah, this is pretty bad but I've heard bits and pieces of anime dubbing that's almost this bad too, especially for lesser-known series.

[hector13]

I prefer subs because you get the performance that the creator wanted (or the best they thought they could get in the time they had) and the subs usually make more sense than the dubs because sometimes the amount of time someone says something in a foreign language isn’t analogous to a different language.

I recall watching Ninja Scroll in dubs every time I watched it, and one part never made sense to me until after watching it with subs. Basically the characters avoid an explosion by jumping over a cliff, and one character catches the other character before she falls to her death. In the dub he then says “how long have you and me been hanging around?” while the sub says something along the lines of “you can climb up anytime.”

[Reelya]

Then you get things people think are mistranslations but are actually direct translations, except the audience didn't get the reference. The "people die if you kill them" line is the most famous one. It's actually a play on a local idiom "he wouldn't die if you killed him" to indicate a tough-as-nails person. The line in the show is saying this idiom is false.

The situation is equivalent to this, say your show had the lines "too many cooks hasn't spoiled the broth" or "clearly a bird in the hand isn't worth the two in the bush", and that got translated and then angry people are watching the show going "birds?? bushes?? wtf is this shit? there are no birds or bushes! these translators fucking suck!"

[scriver]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’
Tide CEO states Soap Is Not Medicine (CollegeHumor Skit)

Dis was pretty great

But I thought CollgeHumor died?

[Naturegirl1999]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’
Tide CEO states Soap Is Not Medicine (CollegeHumor Skit)

Dis was pretty great

But I thought CollgeHumor died?

Apparently not

[MaxTheFox]

[Reelya]

Yoink, what show is that? It sounds interesting’’
Tide CEO states Soap Is Not Medicine (CollegeHumor Skit)

Dis was pretty great

But I thought CollgeHumor died?

Apparently not

Apparently yot

On January 8, 2020, it was announced that IAC was selling CollegeHumor to its Chief Creative Officer, Sam Reich, resulting in the job loss of nearly all employees and staff. However Sam Reich later clarified that the company would keep a skeleton crew of mostly technical staff in employment in order to continue releasing pre-recorded CollegeHumor content on its streaming platform Dropout for at least the next 6 months. The only creative left on the payroll was Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM of the Dimension 20 show.

Yeah, so the parent company said to the creative director "here have the thing, but sorry no more funding". So they're just putting out their backlog of material now. Sam Reich paid them some money for CH so it's possible he's going to reboot it after some time.

[Naturegirl1999]

Sounds like Gray Rectangle doesn’t know how explosions work

But I thought CollgeHumor died?

Apparently not

Apparently yot

On January 8, 2020, it was announced that IAC was selling CollegeHumor to its Chief Creative Officer, Sam Reich, resulting in the job loss of nearly all employees and staff. However Sam Reich later clarified that the company would keep a skeleton crew of mostly technical staff in employment in order to continue releasing pre-recorded CollegeHumor content on its streaming platform Dropout for at least the next 6 months. The only creative left on the payroll was Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM of the Dimension 20 show.

Yeah, so the parent company said to the creative director "here have the thing, but sorry no more funding". So they're just putting out their backlog of material now. Sam Reich paid them some money for CH so it's possible he's going to reboot it after some time.

I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.

[Reelya]

Oh btw that video is new, and according to what I quoted they should have only been putting out their backlog of material about now. However it looks like Sam Reich has other ideas. After all, if they thought CH was done for and were willing to sell it to him cheap he would have been a fool to say "oh BTW i have all these plans for new material" because then they'd have charged him more for buying it out from them. It's a general humor channel on Youtube with almost 14 million subscribers. It really doesn't matter what you put out on that channel, it's going to pull in revenue. There are very low overheads in just owning a Youtube channel.