

I don't quite understand it - the manga is popular, ongoing and their are
plenty of fans, and yet - from what I've researched - there was never a North
American licence and never an English dub.

Why was there never a Skip Beat dub?


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2014-08-16T03:03:55.550
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anime-production skip-beat
Why was there never a dub for Skip Beat?


The anime of Skip Beat was in 2008/09 , by Hal Film Maker. Shortly after the
anime, Hal Film Maker merged into the parent company TYO Animations. There may
have been some issues with licensing works from a company that didn't exist
anymore.

This was also around the time of legal online streaming's emergence - so
interested studios (possibly Funimation, who took on B Gata H Kei - Hal
Studio's next production) had a lot of business decisions and work at this
time.

Most dubbed anime go under a lot of cost analysis to see whether it is worth
it to produce. Usually shounen works are the easiest of works to pull a profit
on. Shoujo works are harder to sell, so perhaps it was decided by most
companies that it just wasn't worth it.

Any of these could be potential reasons and this probably isn't a very
satisfying answer, but unless there's an official announcement by a involved
company, we won't know due to company secrecies.

The longer it remains unlicensed however, the less likely it is to be picked
up as it slowly looses the target audience's interest.


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2015-05-30T08:25:34.780
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2015-06-05T05:24:16.490
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I began this as a comment on Toshinou Kyouko's answer, and it's sort of a
supplement to that answer.

US companies, in general, have become a lot more averse to producing dubs. In
the days of Geneon (2003-2007), almost everything that came out had a dub.
That is no longer the case; lots of shows come out with no dub, and it seems
that, as Toshinou-san mentioned, any show that isn't going to make the sales
doesn't get one. Shoujo anime typically doesn't sell that well in the US; only
a small fraction of all the shoujo produced even comes out here. (Shoujo manga
used to sell well, in the age of Geneon, which was also the age of Tokyopop.)

Why don't companies want to produce dubs? The economics of anime has changed
pretty drastically. In the Geneon days, you bought anime as a series of DVD
releases, usually six or seven of them, for about $30 each. That works out to
about $180 to own a complete series, but the companies also sold a lot of
individual copies of the first few discs. (If you think that's bad, the
original release of Eva was on 13 VHS tapes, each with two episodes, and you
had to pick whether to buy the dub tapes or the sub tapes.)

Legal streaming sites changed that. Whether you intend to buy the DVDs or not,
it makes sense to watch it for free online so you know you're getting a good
value. Everyone stopped paying $60 just to watch the first five or six
episodes of a series to find out if it was good or not. DVD releases now are
usually in box sets that contain 13 episodes. The US distributors have to
assume that everyone who buys the DVDs has already seen the series online,
which drastically limits the market for most shows. Also, US distributors
today have seen Geneon and ADV fold because they spent too much money on fancy
dub scripts and pop-up notes for shows that turned out to be unpopular. For
shows like, well, about 80% of what I watch, producing a dub is a losing
proposition.

I also believe dubs became less popular because the TV market for anime dried
up. In the mid-2000s, TV networks were hooking up left and right with anime
distributors. Cartoon Network was working with Viz and Funimation; Encore was
carrying titles for ADV and Media Blasters; Geneon worked with TechTV (later
G4) and even had a deal with MTV that resulted in a disastrous run of Heat Guy
J. As far as I can tell, no one except Cartoon Network is carrying anime
anymore, and they've scaled back quite a bit. The networks have also been hit
by the Internet, and they've figured out that they can produce their own
anime-like content, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, and have full control
over it, instead of having to work out some weird limited-term licensing deal
with a US distributor who already has a weird limited-term licensing deal with
a Japanese distributor.

Producing a dub is much more expensive than producing a subtitled translation;
that's why you see lots of fansubs, but very few fandubs. That's also why
streaming sites such as Crunchyroll don't produce their own dubs. And since
anime is still fairly low-profile in the US, for a lot of shows, it just
doesn't make sense to spend that money.


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2015-06-06T23:42:54.370
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One reason there was never a dub for Skip Beat is the industry at the time
truly believed only magical girl shoujo made money. Even now (2016) when some
companies are adding more shoujo titles to their catalogs, they are still more
hesitant to invest in shoujo at the same rate they invest in shounen, and the
titles to appeal to girls/women licensed lean towards reverse harem, its
cousin the newer bishounen subgenre, and yaoi.

Good news, though. More companies are crowdfunding left-behind licenses, and
Pied Piper, the company that rescued and released Time of Eve, is running a
Kickstarter for a North American release of Skip Beat. The disc will have the
original Japanese audio, with improved subtitles, and a new English dub. The
campaign ends April 16, 2016. <http://kck.st/1RooUS7>


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