Anime dubs can be a tricky subject since some fans are reluctant to give them a chance, which is understandable with all the examples of how localization can go wrong. Still, English dubs have definitely come a long way from where they started, and there are many that come together quite well and deserve recognition.
However, for every dub that knocks it out of the park, there's at least one that, for one reason or another, just doesn't seem like it cares. While the quality of these dubs oftentimes is purely awful, some can be entertaining either because it's "so bad it's good" or because the studio decided to run wild with its adaptation.
10 Familiar of Zero's Lackluster Dub
Most of the time when a long-running anime gets dubbed, all or most of its seasons get dubbed too, this is not the case for The Familiar of Zero. While it has four seasons under its belt, only season one of this fantasy series was dubbed in English and it's not hard to see why.
Despite having some notable voice talent attached to it, like Cristina Vee, the bulk of the cast sounds pretty bored and unmotivated in almost every scene. The debatable nature of the anime's content didn't do it any favors either, not even the strongest magic could've saved this dub.
9 Garzey's Wing, a Bad Dub For a Bad OVA
Older anime dubs didn't have the love and care that most dubs do these days, Garzey's Wing is among those unfortunate dubs. Being infamous for being one of the worst OVAs in anime history, so it's no surprise that the quality of its English dub matches the rest of it.
When they don't sound bored, just about every character sounds as confused by the OVA's convoluted story as the audience is. It makes for a funny kind of hate-watch that can be riffed on with friends, but not really much else. This dub was basically dead on arrival.
8 The Baffling Choices of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX's Dub
When anime fans think of bad English localizations, 4Kids Entertainment often springs to mind. 4Kids made many weird choices when it came to the original Yu-Gi-Oh!, yet somehow they one-upped themselves when it came time to dub Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. It starts out pretty tame but goes further off the rails as it goes on.
The usual suspects in 4Kids "Americanizing" library are there, though cranked up to eleven in some aspects. On top of that, some characters are portrayed with bizarre impressions, one of the most notable being Crystal Beast Amber Mammoth's Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. On top of all that, they didn't even bother finishing it, tapping out before the fourth season.
7 Digimon's Many Bad Jokes
Humor can provide some much-needed levity to a story when used right, when used poorly it can be jarring and off-putting. While Digimon's English dub is memorable to many fans, the one aspect most agree with is the dislike for the overly abundant bad jokes throughout the early seasons.
Some of the dub's groan-worthy jokes and one-liners would come in at horrible times, sucking out all the tension in a scene (Apocalymon's "pizza crust" metaphor comes to mind). It pretty much persisted throughout the first two seasons, parts of the third season, and even the movie, but eventually phased out over time.
6 Duel Masters' Shattering of the 4th Wall
When Yu-Gi-Oh!'s popularity exploded, there were many imitators that wanted a piece of that pie. Sadly, Duel Masters didn't do a whole lot to differentiate itself from its competitors, so when it was time to dub its anime in English, the licensors decided to run wild with off-the-wall, fourth-wall-breaking humor that poked fun at the show, anime clichés, and pop culture.
While not all the jokes are winners, Duel Masters' English dub does end up taking a pretty stale by-the-books card game anime and ends up turning it into a fun parody of itself. It could've tried to play its story straight, but then it would've truly just been a Yu-Gi-Oh! clone.
5 The Hilariously Awful Guin Saga Dub
A story of swords, sorcery, and a hero with a leopard's head, Guin Saga seems like it would have all the makings for an anime classic worthy of a great English dub, sadly this was not the case. While this fantasy anime didn't do much to grab anyone's attention, what did was the laughably horrible English dub it ended up getting.
While it starts out fairly mediocre, Guin Saga's dub continuously declines in quality as it goes on. Every character line sounds as though it's the first and only take, lipsyncing is all sorts of off, and there's one strange scene where a character actually sings their inner monologue. It's as if the dub's director threw their hands up and said "I give up!"
4 Animax's Incredibly Lacking Fate/Stay Night Dub
The Studio Deen adaptation of Fate/Stay Night is notorious for a number of reasons, sadly its dubbing is among them. While Geneon and FUNimation had the rights for the North American English dub, Animax produced its own dub that aired in Southeast Asia and the results were really something else.
Animax's Fate/Stay Night dub is another case where every character sounds bored or just plain soulless, and the sound mixing is incredibly clunky too. While the North American dub isn't exactly all that great either, it's Mozart compared to how lacking the Animax dub is.
3 4Kids' Infamous One Piece Dub
From Pokémon's "jelly donuts" to Yu-Gi-Oh!'s "Shadow Realm," there are many examples of 4Kids' notorious changes to the anime when they were localized, but there might not be one more egregious as the one they gave to One Piece.
From the very start, trying to make this anime kid-friendly was a mistake and one that required plenty of noticeable edits and censoring to make happen. The voice acting was poor, entire characters and episodes were removed, and the less said about that horrible "Pirate Rap" opening, the better. This dub lives forever on in infamy.
2 Dragon Ball Z's "Big Green Dub"
By now, most Dragon Ball fans are familiar with FUNimation's English dub, but that's not the only time Goku and friends were localized for the English language. AB Groupe produced a dub for several Dragon Ball Z movies for the UK and Canada, but the end product was nothing less of head-scratching.
Nicknamed "The Big Green Dub," after it renamed Piccolo "Big Green," this adaptation changed character names, terms, and techniques like it was going out of style (for example, Super Saiyans were renamed "Super Warriors"). Not only was this dub's dialogue poorly performed by the voice actors, but also poorly translated too.
1 The Insanity of Ghost Stories' English Dub
Ghost Stories in its original form was a mostly toothless and tame horror anime that didn't do much to scare anyone. So when ADV got the rights to do its English dub, the crew was basically given free rein to do literally anything they wanted to sell it. The result was one of the most hilarious anime dubs ever recorded.
Reworked into a pure gag anime, Ghost Stories rewrote essentially all of its characters and story as it fired-off jokes about pop culture, politics, and even more offensive and risqué topics, all of which smashed the fourth wall to bits. There was literally nothing that was too "off the table" to be in the show. It was an insane English dub that doesn't take itself seriously at all.