Resurfaced Video Shows Former Funimation Scriptwriter Jamie Marchi Proudly Touting Wild Changes Made To ‘Panty & Stocking’ English Dub: “You Want It To Be Different And Original”
Hot off the heels of her infamous dub of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid becoming the focus of yet another round of localization discourse, a video has resurfaced showing Funimation scriptwriter Jamie Marchi proudly boasting about the massive changes she made to the English script of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt.
Produced by studio Trigger predecessor Gainax, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is a 2010 action-packed comedy anime that revolves around the misadventures of the titular anarchy sisters Panty and Stocking, a pair of angels whose constant bad behavior eventually gets them booted out of Heaven and banished to the ghost-plagued Daten City.
Once there, the two are tasked with using their magical, transforming lingerie weapons to defeat a number of Daten City’s evil spirits, as doing so will earn them the special ‘Heaven Coin’ currency they need to buy their way back home.
The topic of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt‘s English dub was first raised in regards to the latest localization discourse courtesy of its lead English dub script writer and Panty voice actor herself, Marchi.
On January 8th, offering her own take on the discourse, Lupin III: Prison of the Past Video Technician Kaylyn Saucedo dismissively asserted that fans unhappy with the English localization industry’s constant butchering of Japanese works and declare were acting as if “writing a word you didn’t like was akin to war crimes.”
In turn, Marchi taunted, “If they’re really so upset about ‘literal translations’, can you imagine how much they’d freak out if they’d ever watched Panty and Stocking?“
From there, Marchi was met by a comment from Twitter user @Lupinfan83 wherein they mocked, “All these trolls over one sentence [referring to her ‘patriarchy’ edit of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid]! They’d lose their minds if they watched Ghost Stories!”
For context, when given the Western rights to produce an English dub for Studio Pierrot’s 2001 anime adaptation of Tōru Tsunemitsu’s children’s series Ghost Stories, localization studio ADV Films was given nearly free reign to do as they pleased with the script by network owner Fuji TV.
Their only rules, as recalled by voice actor Greg Ayres, who himself provided the dub performance for the series’ Leo Kakinoki, the ADV Films crew, were that “We couldn’t change the names of any of the characters […] We could not change how that ghost was killed, […] and we couldn’t change the meaning of that episode.”
As such, the ADV Films recording sessions went absolutely off the rails, resulting in one of the most fever-dreamish and nonsensical dubs of all time (and a subsequent existence as a cult classic).
“Ghost Stories, [Crayon] Shin Chan, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt!” further declared Marchi before passive-aggressively opining that “probably only the last one [would make them angry] since that’s the only one I worked on.”
The Dragon Ball Super voice actor further inflamed tensions during a subsequent exchange with another fan, itself beginning when she opined of her critics, “I enjoy how they always pluralize ‘these’ lines when they can only come up with one example.”
Replying to Marchi, @moodslayer95 then asserted, “You’d think with the amount of spit and vinegar they’re spewing they would have chosen a line said by Tohru or Kobayashi during pivotal plot moments or something.”
At that point choosing to add more fuel to the fire, Marchi then mocked, “Well, they haven’t watched [Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid], so they only know what they’ve been directed to be angry about. If they really want to be mad, they should watch Panty and Stocking!“
Unwilling to let this baseless antagonization stands, fans went digging through archives of various materials, from tweets, to interviews, to panel appearances, in search of any information regarding her approach to Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt‘s dub.
Soon thereafter, a video was uncovered revealing that Marchi had not just explicitly spoken to the topic of the series’ English dub during its 2012 Anime Expo panel, but outright boasted about how much she changed.
As seen in the video, during the Q&A portion of the panel, Marchi is asked for insight into her decision to overload Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt‘s English script with curse words, to which she explains, “The reason a lot of those words are in there is because you want it to be different and original.”
“When there’s a lot of swearing, you tend to get desensitized to it and especially as a culture we are much more desensitized to f-bombs,” she told the crowd. “So mixing it up a little bit made it more interesting and you never knew what people were gonna to say we tried to keep that spirit of offensiveness and cleverness, which is what makes it so charming.”
[Time Stamp: 18:00]
In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that later on in the panel, Marchi claimed that she chose this approach to the series’ dub script because she had allegedly “received an e-mail from [Panty & Stocking] original creators to make [the script] as offensive and filthy as possible within the realms of United States law and to put as much Western terminology and slang as possible and then later teach it.”
However, to this same end it should also be noted that, as of writing, Marchi’s claim exists as the only public mention of this supposed request.
NEXT: Opinion: Western Localizers Have Deluded Themselves Into Believing They’re Actual Creators
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