Spacetoon and MBC3 are big in the Arab world, and their shows have a big influence on children, everybody has watched a cartoon from either of these two.And thanks to them that most people, including me, discovered Sonic. AoStH had the biggest impact in the middle east, but more modern shows like Sonic X and Sonic Boom were more popular here in Morocco, everybody I now first discovered Sonic with Sonic X, and learned about the character and his friends in Sonic Boom.
Adventures_of_Sonic_the_Hedgehog#Syndication I put this together very quickly last night, and then got bored shortly after starting - a list of TV channels (and dates) that these cartoons were broadcast on. I grabbed half the ones on Wikipedia as a starting point, but they're missing a lot of countries. It's true that I've seen the French version of cartoons (or, in fact, media in general) be used as a basis for translations elsewhere. If we can get dates, we should be able to work out which were the original translations and which came later. I expect Sonic X to be the most interesting in that regard, because 4Kids liked to localise and censor things, but shows like AoStH tend to have a broader appeal because slapstick humour is universal*. Truthfully this would be most interesting for shows like Dragon Ball Z, e.g. which countries went with "Mr. Satan" and which ones went with "Hercule", but there should be strange localisation changes for Sonic as well. *That's why you remember Tom and Jerry, and not Ruff and Reddy.
The only thing I remember from the French dub of Sonic X (beside the fact that we didn't had the endure the awful american opening) is that Big was renamed to "Blue". He's the only character to have his name changed like that.
But... Big's not blue. He's purple. Also, Big is big. He has possibly the most obvious name in the series next to Tails and Knuckles. Why would they change that?
Well, French kids might not all know what "big" means. But it's still a stupid decision, as was the decision to rename Knuckles as "Castagne" ("brawl") in Underground.
You're right, It seems Takana's name was changed to Edouard in the french version. I don't remember the human's cast names that much, so maybe they were some other names change.
Sure but isn't there a literal translation of the word "big" they could have used instead. Why Blue though? But as far as name changes to the human cast who cares, they're all throw away characters anyway.
I typed Sonic X Big in Google image to see if he was maybe blue in the show... Yeah, I'm never doing that again. Jesus fucking christ. I guess we'll never know why they did that, especially since he's called Big in the French translation of the games, and Sonic X came way after Adventure 1.
What's with some dubs' obsession with translating the names of Sonic characters (other than Sonic) anyway? They even rename them when the literal translation sounds too awkward, such as Robotnik -> Mostachón (nevermind that "Robotnik" isn't even a word, and the word "robot" is the same in spanish) or Dr. Eggman -> Dr. Huevo. Do they think that kids won't be able to comprehend the story if they don't know what the names mean? In fact, the characters have always gone by english names in Japan, making it clear that they weren't meant to be translated.
Re: those magazines. These Sonic holiday scenes seem to be cropped differently every place we find one. This version reveals that it was Cucky who dropped the basket, but cuts off more of the bear and the fishing dog. Here's the previously discovered version:
It's also looking likely that the intention was to layer Sonic on front of these scenes. Those scans come from opposite sides of the world and yet Sonic lines up perfectly - it's not an editorial thing.
Though there is at least one instance of the Sonic image being positioned differently: EDIT: The Lotte gum sticker version of the camping scene (bottom left) shows more sky/clouds/treetops that is cut off on the other versions.
If you look at the side of the boat, you can see the silhouette of Sonic's illustration, which has just been crudely trimmed.
Bringing this back to note - he did post it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRphv7x97uw Check it out at 0:10. Young Yuji Naka and an extremely early build of the collision detection in Sonic 1. Fun stuff. Make sure to thank Naka-san! EDIT: This ended up on the Sonic 1 Alpha thread. Didn't notice until just now, my apologies.
Maybe they got confused with Rouge ("rouge" means red in French) who isn't red, and they wanted "Rouge" and "Bleu" (red and blue) ? We'll never know, I guess.
Still better than "Scheggia" instead of Tails as we got in Italy (not in Sonic X, but in the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog). "Scheggia" literally means "splinter (of wood)", but it also has other meanings, such as "someone or something that moves really fast". The other characters weren't much luckier, either. Italian dubs, especially in that era, were ridiculous most of the times, and the fact that most dubs were shared between European countries (such as, indeed, France, Italy, and Spain) didn't help, don't even get me started because there are TONS of things to say and that would be way off-topic here. I'll just say Saint Seiya and Captain Tsubasa and quietly leave the topic.
I don't know about other countries but, in Spain, Saint Seiya was released with the Japanese names intact, except for the series' title... It's a rare case of an old dub that has aged well.
