While the first thing anime fans tend to notice about the medium is the unique animation style, an aspect that has become increasingly important is the soundtrack that accompanies the visuals. Anime fans have their favorite theme songs and ending themes they love to sing along with at anime conventions, and composers like Yoko Kanno and Joe Hisaishi have become as well-known to the world as John Williams and Hans Zimmer.
While the unique music of anime can be heard on virtually every show that appears on Netflix and Crunchyroll, before streaming services came along if an anime wanted mainstream attention it would have to be on TV. If this happened though there was a good chance that the music would be replaced, and the reasons were wide and varied as to why this was done. From royalty issues to needing music to match up with editing, this practice resulted in Americanized anime soundtracks that all have strange and fascinating stories behind them.
Why Was Music Americanized?
Although there are various reasons why music is changed, the biggest one ultimately came down to money. When former CEO Gen Fukunaga was asked by Steve Harmon in 1999 why Shunsuke Kikuchi’s iconic score for Dragon Ball Z was replaced by music with Bruce Falconer in the Toonami dub of the series, he had this to say:
The replacing of the music, was a FUNimation desicsion. With our own soundtrack, we could charge royalties for every second it's heard.
In this case Funimation res-cored the anime so that they could charge royalties for the music. This may also explain why the dub of the time insisted on filling every second of the show with music as well (even when the scene called for silence). Most American companies likely decided it was more profitable for them to create their own soundtrack so they could charge royalties for the music themselves. What’s more, when releasing CDs the music would be theirs, and so they could sell their own music to American audiences.
Other reasons scores were replaced was because American producers felt that kids would be bored with the music that were made for the shows, and most wanted to ‘pump up’ the music to get kids more excited. What’s more, Japanese intros were almost two minutes long, and this would result in fewer ads being aired during the program, so thirty-second theme songs were composed for many of these dubs to accommodate more commercials.
What Were Some of the Worst/Most Unique Offenders?
The aforementioned Dragon Ball Z was notable for its score change, with fans of the Japanese version despising the Falconer score while fans who grew up with the English dub not enjoying the original Kikuchi score nearly as much. The two scores result in two different shows. Sailor Moon was another notable example, as that series borrowed melodies from the Japanese score to help compose the American tunes. What’s more, many of the English songs have become iconic in their own right, and even Japanese fans hard a hard time arguing with the quality of Carry On and My Only Love. So catchy were these songs that the out-of-print CDs are highly coveted collector's items.
Pokemon was a unique case because 4Kids Entertainment largely left the Japanese score intact. They wrote their own songs for the American audience, but the score itself was largely untouched early on. Famously this came to an end with the release of Pokemon: The First Movie, where the producers decided to not only produce their own score but to fill the American soundtrack with pop acts such as M2M, Britney Spears, Bewitched, and N’SYNC. This move was largely scorned by fans of the original movie, yet the high sales encouraged 4Kids to replace the scores for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sonic X, and One Piece (which did NOT end well)!
One of the more unique score replacements happened with Castle in the Sky. Disney wanted to prepare the movie for a theatrical release but felt the score sounded outdated with the synthetic score. They invested in original composer Joe Hisaishi returning to rescore the music with an orchestra and write twenty minutes of new music for the American audience. Despite the quality of the score itself, Miyazaki made it clear he preferred the original music, and thus rescored versions of the film are rare these days.
Does this Practice Still Happen?
For the most part the practice of replacing Japanese scores no longer occurs. In fact, anime has become so mainstream in America that many producers will produce two soundtracks for the movie: one with Japanese songs and the other with English songs. The songs are the same just in different languages. Before this happened Funimation experimented with dubbing Japanese songs themselves, but largely discontinued the process after a few years.
These days the music for anime largely remains unchanged unless there is a unique legal problem or the Japanese producers want a different sound for the American release. This second situation is rare though, so for the most part the idea of Americanizing the music for anime dubs is a long and forgotten one. Still, CDs of these old Americanized soundtracks can be found on eBay and in used music stores, and if you find them pick them up and give them a listen: they are certainly unique in their own way!
Source: DBZOA | Features - 30-Something Questions with Gen Fukunaga (archive.org)