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Anime dubbing can be a hot topic among fans, but it shouldn’t be. The quality of the dubs we get today is staggering when compared to what we saw in the 90s. As someone who has been following anime for a very long time, I can remember watching some truly terrible dubs, both professional ones and fan-made. I can also remember the first time I noticed that a dub wasn’t just passable – it was good. Yu Yu Hakusho’s English dub was so good it became a turning point in the anime community and I didn’t realize it until years later.

That’s right; before it was a tragically rushed live-action Netflix series, Yu Yu Hakusho was a hit anime that radically changed my mind about English dubs. When it started airing on the Toonami block of Cartoon Network in 2003, I was immediately sucked into the story, but, more importantly, I was shocked at how good the voice acting was.

Like many anime at the time, Funimation was in charge of the distribution and dubbing of Yu Yu Hakusho in the US. The show presented a particular challenge to the studio; while Yusuke Urameshi is very much possessed by Main Character Energy, he shares almost equal screentime with three other male characters in Kuwabara, Hiei, and Kurama as well as a supporting cast that includes the most adorable and bubbly Grim Reaper, a geriatric mentor, and a bureaucratic baby. It is an eclectic cast, is what I'm trying to say.

See, back in the early 2000s, anime wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. While it had come a long time since the original dub of Sailor Moon changed character names and forced heterosexuality on an otherwise very LGBTQ+ friendly cast, it was still considered a fringe, niche industry in the US. Which meant that there wasn’t as much money to dub these shows for an American audience. The result is the uneven, sometimes comical English voices you might have come across. Studios would often hire one or two competent actors for the main cast and then drag some warm bodies off the streets to fill in the rest.

Related: How to watch Yu Yu Hakusho in order

That wasn’t the case with Yu Yu Hakusho. Every member of the core cast here is very good and has gone on to be mainstays in the anime community in the decades since. Justin Cook is brilliant as Yusuke, nailing the punk teenager with a heart-of-gold vibe from the original. Chuck Huber embodies everyone’s inner edge lord as Hiei. John Burgmeier is probably the weakest of the main cast in my opinion and he is still very good as Kurama. And that is before we touch on Christopher Sabat as Kuwabara, a role that I maintain is some of the best acting he has ever done, which is saying something.

Even the supporting cast was taken from established names in the anime dubbing industry. In fact, most of the cast had worked on other Funimation shows, particularly Dragon Ball Z. Linda Young had voiced Frieza and made every scene with Genkai feel memorable. Laura Bailey (long before her Critical Role and The Last of Us fame) was still a relative newcomer to voice acting when she was cast as Keiko. Botan, the aforementioned bubbly personification of death, only works because Cynthia Cranz balances the character’s bemusement at Yusuke’s antics with an underlying care and sternness.

It isn’t until you get to some one-off characters or throwaway villains that you start to get some uneven performances in Yu Yu Hakusho. There is a remarkable depth to the cast that audiences weren’t used to at the time. The English dub benefited from the success of Dragon Ball Z in establishing Funimation as a dubbing studio, giving them a roster of solid actors to tap for their projects.

I’m not a particular fan of a lot of Yu Yu Hakusho’s story; I think it suffers from the Dark Tournament being so good that it makes everything before and after feel lesser by comparison. However, it is one of the few anime from that period that I can go back and watch the English dub of and not feel compelled to switch to the original Japanese. It is a testament to the strength of the cast and the voice direction that they nailed these characters so completely. The English dub of Yu Yu Hakusho is a landmark moment in anime history that is worth celebrating more than twenty years later.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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