INTERNATIONAL MY LITTLE PONY DUBS: a deep(ish) dive

Hey! I'm an admin of the Dubbing Database and a huge MLP dub researcher, so much that practically all the MLP: FIM pages on the wiki were supervised and heavily expanded by me. I appreciate so much that you used the wiki as a source! Especially because I'm huge Shunks fan, so wasn't expecting this video, truly. I have toooo much dub knowledge when it comes to ponies, but if you wanted to know anything about what you left out or didn't elaborate on, I have you covered: - As with many TV shows, there are of course 'unauthorized dubs' - essentially, the dubs that Hasbro gave no permission to exist but they do, sometimes because of how loose the copyright system in the country can be. Of the MLP dubs that fall into this category, two big ones are Albanian (the first dub by "Jess"), and the 3 Persian dubs that exist (yes, it is common for one piece of media to receive multiple dubs in Iran specifically). The Albanian dub is infamous for constantly changing characters' names and using unofficial M&E grabbed from random sources, since obviously they can't receive that from Hasbro - the latter is also common within the Persian dubs but especially Persian Toon, who decided it was an amazing idea to use Ren and Stimpy background music during some scenes. - Sometimes related to censorship, some dubs would outright skip episodes or outright seasons of the show. Some even dubbed the show at a random point, like Macedonia and Bosnia randomly jumping to season 3 (which as you can imagine, does tend to cause continuity errors that these dubs do not care about). In the Hebrew dub, the network that originally broadcasted the show (Hop!) was very bad with this, skipping season 3 of the show entirely and heading right into season 4 with no explanation as to how Twilight got wings, and they've skipped so many episodes sporadically. - When it comes to the genders of the ponies, as you've said, some dubs have changed some relatively minor characters' genders, and a few even retracted their decisions when the gender of any specific character became more clear to the voice directors. However, it's so important to note the big one: Rainbow Dash and Applejack are *canonically* males in the Macedonian dub. They are referred to with he/him pronouns and both are voiced by male VAs. The reason for this is unknown, but we support trans gay ponies here - Pony dubs are truly a pain when it comes to voice consistency, oh boy. One character can have about 7 voice actors for so many reasons, including discrepancies in voice direction, it's especially bad in the Albanian dub. Though of course these dubs are particularly awful when it comes to the songs. Especially Hungarian, which was notable for being a sloppy dub in its first few seasons, and by the end started hiring random male singers to sing the parts of female characters. Not to say he didn't slay the part There are also some truly weird situations that I can think of, like the Indonesian dub hiring Malaysian singers in the first season to perform all the songs (though they wouldn't change the opening theme itself until seasons later), or the Japanese dub switching over to using South Korean voice talents beginning season 5, which was met with mixed feelings but it ultimately got the job done. - Speaking of Hungarian, Minimax in all of Central and Eastern Europe opted out of airing season 9 of the show, taking the Czech, Romanian, Serbian, and Slovene dubs down with it, as well. Czechia in particular has aired the show on many channels outside of Minimax, but they were just never allowed to air season 9 due to this rule. Despite this, the Czech dub still did dub the season, it's just being gatekept by Hasbro and may possibly not see release until the near future. As well, the TV specials and Pony Life were still allowed to air on the network and be dubbed in these languages just fine. Just S9 was affected. Weird, I know. - A BIG ONE you missed out on explaining are the demo DVDs! In some places of Europe, before the show was being rolled out on TV in many countries, they were selling DVDs of the third episode "The Ticket Master" being dubbed in several languages, as a demo test. They were sold in August 2011, and some dubs ended up took interesting approaches in the finalized version when it came to adapting the show. The voice casts in these demo dubs were different depending on the dub, some voice switches here and there happened, and in a few of them the finalized version is completely different, such as Romanian being dubbed in Bucharest in the demo, while being recorded in Oradea in the finalized version. There were Bulgarian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian dubs of these demos too, which did not happen with their finalized versions as they produced voice-overs for these languages instead (a brief run down on what that is: imagine the original version but now some monotone man or lady is reading the script in a different language over the footage. Bam, that's a voice-over). - There's a lot of lost media when it comes to MLP dubs too, of course. Like that mysterious Khmer dub where only a low quality recorded clip and some of the first episode ever surfaced online, and the title of the show reads "Ponies Are About Love". Or the Amharic dub... Or the hotly debated Albanian and Macedonian dubs that only tackled season 4 and aired for only merely a month on the kids channel Pikaboo, before being taken off air, while nobody in the community had reported on this, or was even aware of this until it was far too late. - I should also mention that there are a lot of multi-dub situations with MLP, two particularly odd ones: There are two Dutch dubs, the second of which was produced in 2016 and aired for a brief while on JimJam and nowhere else, with the only major difference being that it was produced solely in Netherlands, while the first and main dub was a co-prod between the Netherlands and Belgium. And there are also two Czech dubs, the second is technically a partial redub of sorts that aired in 2016, they only dubbed season 6. It was made because at the time Hasbro sent out 3 episodes of season six to various European distributors, and so the main Czech dub only did those 3 episodes and none other in the season, leaving another studio to redub those eps and finish the job for them. Okay, sooo that was a lot to take in, I know, and that's not even talking about G5. I like being a nerd. Hope you or anyone else interested in MLP dubs liked reading up on this! And I enjoyed the video lots! ❤❤

As a native german speaker, the little pony straight up cussing had me rolling on the floor

I like how they barely animated Twilight for the Little Pony TV segments, they just used some stock art and had only her mouth move

Fun fact about the Brazilian Portuguese dub: Rainbow Dash frequently refers to other female characters by calling them "babe". It's to the point where in It's Not The Mane Thing About You (S07E19), when Rarity gets a punk rock new look, Rainbow reacts saying "What a babe!" instead of just saying "Awesome!" like in the original audio. Which is kinda funny to me idk why. Also she wasn't changed to a guy around here, her actress just played her with a somewhat boyish voice. Spitfire was voiced by a man in her first appearance though, but they fixed that later.

How G4 was handled in Japan in general is incredibly interesting imo. They were still actively running official social media accounts for MLP G4 as late as last year in 2022 lol.

I love how many countries censored or forbid the cider episode while in the Czech dub they literally translate it as apple wine and have no problem with it.

I'm Polish. After the scene where Twilight turns into an alicorn the first thing Rarity said was like "You're an alicorn? I didn't know they existed" Even as a kid I was like wtf Rarity. Years later I learnd that it was a translation mistake.

As a Hungarian child who never knew what Babs Seed's gender was, it was such a shock when I later found out she was a girl!! That was basically a universal experience in Hungary for kids who watched the show, most of us assumed she was a boy for various reasons (for example, throughout my childhood, I assumed she was a boy because of how she was introduced as a bully and I associated that with boys)

As a Polish person, I love Polish dubbing of MLP:FIM and so far I've seen a lot of polish bronies loved it too. There's youtube channel called "Widzę głosy" in which famous Polish voice actors talk about their roles and there's a few about MLP! I especially love the Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash episodes cause Pinkie's va you can see that she really loves voicing Pinkie and RD va talked about how she once got invited to a small brony convention and one of the fans noticed that in some episode she might have catch a cold cause her voice sounded kinda different. I think it's really cute

The Italian version of the 80s MLP doesn't shy away of being this hard.

The design for Tang Bao (I definitely spelled that wrong) in the Chinese MLP show is really really good. Genuinely looks like a chracter who would be in the show.

Also in the Croatian dub they named Rainbow Dash Duga Jurić. Which would be fine, bc it can translate to fast rainbow, but Jurić is also the name they gave Lightning Mcqueen over here, which kinda makes it funny.

Dubbing Database admin here! Thanks for featuring our Wiki ❤ Don't have much to add to the video, it's pretty well made. I'd mention how some dubs have some crazy lore, like the Japanese dub resuming after years of not airing any episodes... completely changing the cast because it is now recorded in South Korea for no apparent reason, or the Bosnian dub that has such a vague translation for the theme song that it seems like Twilight is singing in first person about loving her hypothetical boyfriend. Cheers!

My favorite part about the Japanese dub is that Takehito Koyasu voices prince blueblood Aka Dio’s Voice actor

The name "Princess universe" goes hard

Russian dub was probably the most controversial, from really weird word choices via literal translations or some lines literally left untranslated to the characters' names being butchered and translated literally too (Nightmare Moon's name was literally said twice in that scene where Twilight calls her out as the Mare on the Moon, that was just glorious). It was so bad that one of the voice actresses actually agreed to re-record her lines for the first several episodes, but the studio declined this version and it's only available online. If I remember correctly fans even faked (?) a TV channel hijack with a parody dub over a very gruesome and infamous scene of a man hanging himself, alongside another one with a creepy Pinkie doll. So yeah, people were pretty unhappy...

I'm from Brazil and our dub is really amazing and well-done, unfortunately they changed the VAs on some EG shorts tho, and on the new Pony Life show. It really isn't the same thing Also the woman who voices Twilight here (Bianca Alencar) also voices Mabel from Gravity Falls

Damn I was unaware of the German version actually containing vulgar words, I should really rewatch it in German it's gonna be hilarious

As someone from Mexico (where Latin-American dubbing was done and consumed) I can add a few things. 3:02 In my country dubbing is usually kind of a serious matter (even the fans sometimes take it way more seriously than they should), but in general, my country puts a lot of effort in the dubbing, for what I have observed, the acting is rarely bad and if a dubbing is bad it's usually because of the translation, so having big names in it makes sense, and I'm thankful for it, because I love this dubbing, from MLP and in general. 3:07 Interestinglly, the voice she originally had in the dubbing pilot was from the VA Elsa Covián who in the final product voices Rarity, this was for having continuty from the G3.5 and also the reason why in said pilot Rainbow Dash has the voice of Fluttershy from Maggie Vera, who aslo directs the dubbing of the series itself. 3:11 I don't think there were a better voice actress in this whole country that fit the character better than Meli G, so changing the voices from the pilot was definitively the best idea. 3:51 I can gurantee you that in real life Melissa, at one point in her life, sang "Dale, dale, dale" even before G3 came out, it's THE song that sort of HAVE TO be sang when hitting a pinata in a party. 7:30 Well yeah, basically tonto = fool, "estupido" (the corresct translation) sound too harsh here. Other curious stuff I can add: - The voice of the parents of Twilight are from the real life parents of her actrees, Carla Castañeda. - In epidodes from 14 to 21 Twilight changes voice, and is never changed again, nor the episodes were re-dubbed. - All of the Mane 6 keep their respective voice actress when they sing. - Every EG short since "I'm on a Yatch" was never dubbed in latin-american spanish, I read once that it's told that they were in fact dubbed, but never released. - Altought I'm not the intented audience (at this point, it shouldn't something new to me), I really liked the European Spanish dubbing, and it's sadly is incomplete, the season 7 and 9 are simply not dubbed, and apparently the European Portuguese also lacks season 8 and 9 apparently (I thought it was also 7, check the response of this comment)

One of my favorite facts about the french dub is that " Changeling " was appropriately translated as " Changelins " for the entirety of the series....Except in season 6 for some reason, where they decided to call them.....Impostors...... Also, remember that part from the episode " Flutter Brutter " where Fluttershy says she's peeved and everypony around her is in shock? Well in the french dub, she says " J'ai les boules ", a slang expression that has a similar meaning to being peeved, but literally translates to " having the balls ". Yes, THOSE balls. The french dub of My Little Pony aknowledges the existance of testicles and the fact the mention comes from Fluttershy out of all characters makes the scene even funnier than the original dub in my opinion. Wonder how they got away with that.