Funimation | The Ocean Group | ADV Films | Sentai Filmworks
- Maybe it's just the fact that English speakers can actually hear the characters' accents in the English dub, but many find the Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi dub at least as enjoyable as the sub, if not more so. There are a few shaky moments, but every time Mune (special kudos to Kaytha Coker for speaking in three voices for the same person and making them all fantastic, which is not easy to do) switches from her manic sex fantasy persona to her normal voice it's a reminder of how great the dubbing is.
- Azumanga Daioh was one of those shows that fans of the time instantly declared to be "un-dubbable" due to its heavy use of puns and obtuse cultural references. ADV took that as a challenge and produced what is easily one of the best dubs of their intermediate period. How good? A number of Japanese otaku over on 2ch (a group not known for being outward-thinking, or amenable to things that aren't native) were impressed by it.
- The dub of Cromartie High School is one of the best that ADV ever did. It's very expressive and highlights the absurd hilarity well. The characters play off each other very well, too.
- Due to its nature as one of the purest examples of Gag Dub in existence, the inclusion of ADV Films's Ghost Stories on this list may ruffle some feathers. That doesn't change the fact that the casting—regardless of what the script does—is top-notch, and the main actors have phenomenal chemistry. Some of the jokes (mostly the political ones) became dated before the DVD's even hit the shelves, but there's still plenty of hilarity to be found.
- ADV came up with the brilliant idea to cast their not-an-actor art director as the lead in Golden Boy, supposedly because that's how he really is. The result is quite possibly the greatest piece of pork in dub history. ADV's usual stable of actors from their early period—including Spike Spencer (channelling Monty Python in his role as an old woman), Tiffany Grant, and Amanda Winn-Lee—are clearly having the time of their lives just trying to keep up with him.
- The English dub of Kanon is fantastic. Every last voice actor nails their characters and hits every emotional cue and nuance. This dub also happens to be the literal pinnacle of ADV's quality, since Kanon was one of the very last dubs ADV completed before their 2008 shutdown. One could make the argument that this dub surpasses the original Japanese, which has some top-notch seiyuu who can certainly act, but still feels rather generic due to many of the girls sounding too similar to each other and high-pitched (even for seiyuu) to the point that they don't even sound like teenagers. The dub cast, on the other hand, sound much more natural, varied, and age-appropriate—these characters are high school juniors and seniors; they're supposed to sound grown-up.
- Le Chevalier d'Eon, another late-era ADV dub, finally proved once and for all that director Stephen Foster was capable of making a dub that was both well-acted and faithful to the original. Despite the fact that the dub breaks standard convention for a show like this by flat-out refusing to use The Queen's Latin (or any accents at all for that matter), it's easily an improvement on the Japanese dub. Bonus points for averting Crossdressing Voices with Robin and casting an actual 15-year-old boy (the Japanese had a woman play the role).
- ADV's dub of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water also deserves mention here. Recorded at the now-long-gone Monster Island Studio in Austin, every part was brilliantly cast. The three children were played by actual children, and all of them could act well for the most part—the occasional missed line notwithstanding.note The kicker is that most of the voice actors in this dub didn't do much of any voice work before or since. The script adaptation is also really good; faithful to the original yet rewritten for natural flow purposes without changing anything about the story or the characters.
- The English dub of Petite Princess Yucie is very well-dubbed. Yucie actually sounds like your typical naive everygirl, Glenda sounds wonderfully bratty and arrogant, Cube sounds worrisome (as in personality, not in his dub performance, which is very good) and reasonable, just...everybody sounds great!
- Princess Nine has an excellent old-school ADV Films dub. All nine girls are expertly portrayed, especially Hilary Haag's Ryo, Monica Rial's Izumi (the way she acts Izumi's somehow inspiring "The Reason You Suck" Speech in episode 17 is stunning) and Cynthia Martinez's Hikaru. Vic Mignogna is utterly charming as Hiroki Takasugi, and Andy McAvin nearly runs away with the entire dub as Coach Kido.
- Nerima Daikon Brothers. Anime dubs are not known for often dubbing songs, and this one not only dubbed everything, but pulled it off surprisingly well. It helped that the three leads—Greg Ayres, Chris Patton, and Luci Christian—were seasoned veterans who had been working together for years and were already known to have great chemistry. It also helped that Nabeshin gave them a lot of leeway on adapting the songs to make them work in English (as Greg Ayres once said, when the ADR director - his older brother - came to a lyric that didn't translate, they called up Nabeshin and asked if they could put a sex joke in its place; apparently with Nabeshin it's always okay to put in a sex joke).
- Many fans think so highly of Appleseed Ex Machina's dub that they are willing to watch a movie they would otherwise dislike.
