I’m not sure if this is the subreddit to post on but you can be the judge. Anyway, I notice there were 4 dubs for the 1986 Tom Cruise film, Top Gun. Three of them were from TV Channels (TV Tokyo, Fuji TV, and NTV) and one was for home video. In fact, two of those dubs appeared on the Blu-Ray, the stereo TV Tokyo one and the mono Fuji TV one. I’m just wondering why there were so many dubs and why they ultimately decided to have the TV Tokyo cast reprise their roles for the sequel. Is it considered the best one out of all 4?
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/uxto9q/4_japanese_dubs_for_top_gun/
3 comments
This is pretty common for that era of blockbusters – because of licensing terms, each station would do its own dub, or sometimes develop their own new dubs, the studio would keep coming up with new dubs for new physical media formats, and it all snowballs.
Alien, for example, has [seven Japanese dubs](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A8%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3_(%E6%98%A0%E7%94%BB)#%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E5%90%B9%E6%9B%BF). 20th Century Fox did an [entire BluRay series](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%90%B9%E6%9B%BF%E3%81%AE%E5%B8%9D%E7%8E%8B) focusing on famous dubs of its blockbusters, and all the major studios have done similar releases.
There were many dubs for Die Hard but the Nozawa Nachi dub is the best.
>Is it considered the best one out of all 4?
I remember reading on one of the bulletin boards dedicated to the Top Gun dubs that this dub was certainly considered highly among the 4. I am not aware of any consensus view, or even any testing as to popularity. But fans really did enjoy that cast of voiceover actors, and its not at all surprising that they were recast for the re-boot/sequel. I just wonder if there will be any similar scandals in the recording booth this go around.