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Answerman - Who Was Cloverway, And What Were They Doing With Anime?


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belvadeer





PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 12:38 pm Reply with quote
Huh, so that's what happened to them. I never really looked into it following the end of Sailor Moon SuperS, so I assumed they'd just given up on anime and moved on to something else.
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Silver Kirin



Joined: 09 Aug 2018
Posts: 1144
PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 1:20 pm Reply with quote
Being from Latin America I would like to add some information. The main problem that caused Cloverway to disappear, apart from digital piracy, was that Toei decided to distribute their series alone, prior to that Cloverway distributed series like Cardcaptor Sakura, Trigun and some tokusatsu series like Ultraman Tiga and Kamen Rider Kuuga. Sadly, this meant that some of the master copies of the non Toei shows are lost.
Also for some reason, the shows belonging to TMS were dubbed in Los Angeles instead of Mexico (tohugh a few shows like Marmalade Boy and Kinikkuman were dubbed in Chile) and all the characters had their names changed.
The way Toei handled things since 2004 has been rough, Dragon Ball Kai had a bad reception since they ordered to change most of the voices, but since Battle of the Gods onwards they managed to get the old voices back and DB Super is now being shown in Cartoon Network, Sailor Moon Crystal is now being broadcasted in Mexico with almost all the original voices, and One Piece is being re-recorded (the original dub was based on the 4Kids version), but sadly there are no news of Digimon Adventure Tri being released here, and for a non Toei show, Carcaptor Sakura Clear Card is also being dubbed into latin american spanish right now.
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Primus



Joined: 01 Mar 2006
Posts: 2780
Location: Toronto
PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 2:53 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Cloverway, Inc. was a distribution company based in Long Beach, California, that was owned by Toei Animation. [...] Toei Animation started managing their own properties from their own Los Angeles offices.


So Toei had an office in SoCal and decided to close it favour of opening another office in SoCal? Anime dazed
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Kicksville



Joined: 20 Nov 2010
Posts: 1212
PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:34 pm Reply with quote
Was it a happy accident that we ended up with articles on CloverWorks and Cloverway on the same day...?
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Sandstar



Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 196
PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:07 pm Reply with quote
Kicksville wrote:
Was it a happy accident that we ended up with articles on CloverWorks and Cloverway on the same day...?


It's the way Clover works.
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4973
PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 6:55 pm Reply with quote
I never looked into Cloverway and what else they did in spite of being a huge Sailor Moon fan so I find it all very interesting that they once had such a heavy presence in Latin America. I always assumed Cloverway mainly was in a distribution role with the original English dubs of Sailor Moon S and SuperS and Optimum did the majority of the dubbing work.

Quote:
The main problem that caused Cloverway to disappear, apart from digital piracy, was that Toei decided to distribute their series alone, prior to that Cloverway distributed series like Cardcaptor Sakura, Trigun and some tokusatsu series like Ultraman Tiga and Kamen Rider Kuuga. Sadly, this meant that some of the master copies of the non Toei shows are lost.
I recall Toei also briefly tried to release anime directly in the US in the early 2000s after Cloverway shut down in the US like with their short lived attempt at releasing Slam Dunk.
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FLCLGainax





PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 7:48 pm Reply with quote
I remember hearing they were responsible for the Latin American Spanish dub of Tenchi Universe that played on Univision around 2000. Think it was recorded in Chile.
Primus wrote:
So Toei had an office in SoCal and decided to close it favour of opening another office in SoCal? Anime dazed
I'd imagine having an office in Los Angeles would make more sense than Long Beach, because it's the center of the entertainment industry.
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Sailor Sedna





PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 9:12 pm Reply with quote
Cloverway definitely wasn't the best distributor, I mean, while they did license/dub part of one of the best examples of Japanese animation, they totally screwed up a ton of stuff and their dub, especially in season 3, was VERY inconsistent. Sailor Moon Uncensored (though I don't always agree with them) said it best: "The ENTIRE S season is COMPLETELY INCONSISTENT from one episode to the next. Attack names would CONSTANTLY change back and forth, along with transformation phrases. Throughout the entire S season, Sparkling Wide Pressure was usually called "Sparkling Wide Pressure", but there were occasions that it was called "Jupiter Thunder Power" and "Supreme Thunder Crash". Venus's "Love-Me Chain" also got many names, fluctuating from "Venus Love Chain Encircle", to "Venus Love Chain Whip", "Venus Love Chain Harness", and sometimes just "Venus Love Chain". Important terms in the series were commonly referred to as different things. In the beginning, the daimons were referred to as "Heart Snatchers", "Heart Thieves", "Daimons", and countless other things. Kaolinite was constantly being called "Kaori" and "Kaori Knight" which had to have confused some people (it sure as hell confused me). The Sacred Cup was called the "Purity Force" and then later the "Purity Chalice", and I don't even think that I can name all the things that they called the "Messiah" early in the season before they decided on the term "Sovereign" more than halfway through the season. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto's transformations constantly changed from "Star Power" to "Planet Power", and their attacks would sometimes have their planet name in front of it and sometimes not (I.E- Sometimes it would be "Uranus World Shaking" and sometimes just "World Shaking"), and let's not forget the infamous "Mini Prism Power". In the last few episodes, a "Transform" was added to Sailor Moon's transformation phrase for no apparent reason or explanation, and then suddenly removed in the last two episode, more than likely confusing fans. Look at the size of this list, and I'm not even getting into the inconsistencies WITHIN the actual dialogue!!" (only one who was consistently handled in S was Mercury, in fact.)

Cloverway also was really, really lazy when they edited the Crystal transformations, for the part when the Sailors were spinning until their clothes formed on their bodies, they just used an edited version of the Star Power sequence instead of properly editing the Crystal version (and another inconsistency, it's not "STAR POWER"!!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxqxS7FGjT0

Wasn't just that, DiC was guilty of doing something similar when they butchered R, and even Toei's guilty of that with season 2 of Crystal (only changing the pen/brooch)!! Evil or Very Mad

But I digress.
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 12:34 am Reply with quote
It's my understanding that most of the inconsistency issues with the S and SuperS English dub were due to the dubbing being extremely rushed and the voice actors were told they could do one take. I think the ADR director only spoke French which made things more difficult and I heard she was very difficult to work with.
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CR85747



Joined: 13 Oct 2014
Posts: 115
PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 1:14 am Reply with quote
Primus wrote:
Quote:
Cloverway, Inc. was a distribution company based in Long Beach, California, that was owned by Toei Animation. [...] Toei Animation started managing their own properties from their own Los Angeles offices.


So Toei had an office in SoCal and decided to close it favour of opening another office in SoCal? Anime dazed


From the article, it appears that Cloverway managed shows from other studios, while the sole work of Toei Animation's current LA office is managing the parent company's shows.
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GeorgeC



Joined: 22 Nov 2008
Posts: 795
PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 1:43 am Reply with quote
Sailor Sedna wrote:


Wasn't just that, DiC was guilty of doing something similar when they butchered R, and even Toei's guilty of that with season 2 of Crystal (only changing the pen/brooch)!! Evil or Very Mad

But I digress.


Let me stop you RIGHT there.

How old are you, and do you even know what TV standards were like in the 1990s and 2000s? It was much, much tighter regulated in content back then but arguably there was also a lot less CRAP being shown back then, too.

"butchered" is a very charged word and I think you have no idea what you're talking about here when it comes to showing something on mainline television and doing a release unedited on TV or showing on a premium pay channel.

Do you understand there is quite a bit of difference between the liftetime experiences of fans in their 20s and older, and kids that aren't even in their teens?!? Do you even have children and understand what it is like for adults with young children to navigate their children through a culture which has become has far less inhibited every day? There are many people who tend to let it hang out a LITTLE bit much and don't practice any kind of discretion around children.

There's also what's considered acceptable content before evening, and what's okay after 9PM. These are very, very different things. Maybe you're too used to 24/7 content and don't realize they used to restrict adult content to after 9PM.

And that's not even considering the HUGE gulfs that exist in cultural standards and what's acceptable between Japan and the West.
Of course, there were going to be changes IF they were going to show series on daytime TV. America is NOT Japan and there were going to be edits after what they saw was allowed on kids TV in Japan.

Trust me when I say this -- if DiC or Clover hadn't made the changes they did in Sailor Moon for the dub, that series would NEVER have aired on American in the 1990s. It simply would NOT have happened.
As it was, Sailor Moon was a ratings disaster in North America because it was shown in the morning before school in most places and the timing just wasn't right. A few years later, after it was rerun on Cartoon Network, it became a "thing" in the US but just after it peaked, it got taken off American TV by the Japanese rights holder. Just over ten years later, it's a different story but TV is NOT like it was prior to streaming services and widespread broadband services.
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belvadeer





PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:03 am Reply with quote
Out of all the name changes in the Cloverway dub, I had to say going from Witches 5 to The Bureau of Bad Behavior was my favorite. That name just rolls off the tongue and is so much fun to say. XD

Maybe the reason the attack shouts were inconsistent was because they wanted to imply (with different call phrases) the Sailor Guardians could do more than merely toss out their moves. For example, we all know Venus can whip enemies with her Love Me Chain, but she can also tie them up with it or she could latch onto something to avoid a fall, so that could possibly explain the Encircle and Harness shouts.
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Aphasial
Exempt from Grammar Rules


Joined: 08 Aug 2010
Posts: 122
Location: San Diego, CA
PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 am Reply with quote
I seem to recall that one aspect of the rush job was that there were basically two translation/director (or ADR?) teams going on. The wildly different episode quality was because, quite literally, every other episode was written by alternating teams, with two different ideas on how liberal/Americanized the translation and characterization were going to be.
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Mosaic



Joined: 26 Feb 2005
Posts: 75
PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:31 am Reply with quote
Cardcaptor Takato wrote:
It's my understanding that most of the inconsistency issues with the S and SuperS English dub were due to the dubbing being extremely rushed and the voice actors were told they could do one take. I think the ADR director only spoke French which made things more difficult and I heard she was very difficult to work with.


They were also most likely using Toei's official English translated scripts, which are terrible quality. Probably why we got names like "Byruit", "Kaorinite", "Remless", etc.

Also, to be far, by the time SuperS came around, the inconsistencies had settled down. Aside from an attack here or there, there weren't any major issues. Even the latter half of S wasn't too bad (once they settled on terms for the Talisman and Messiah). People also forgot the DIC dub was also wildly as inconsistent sometimes, especially in the Black Moon arc.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13584
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 9:53 am Reply with quote
Sandstar wrote:
Kicksville wrote:
Was it a happy accident that we ended up with articles on CloverWorks and Cloverway on the same day...?


It's the way Clover works.

Rimshot.
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