Okay okay, so.

As I have mentioned in other threads, I originally hail from Argentina, where I lived until 2001. Fresh off watching Evangelion around 1999-2000, me and my friends, who were all evangelion and shoujo fans, found Utena. To this day, it's still our favourite anime, with good reason.

Now, the thing is, we didn't experience Utena in the original Japanese when we first obtained it. No, what we got our hands on were the tapes for the first 12 episodes, dubbed in Spain.

Now, a note on spanish-language dubs.

Spanish-language dubs are made for two markets, for the most part: Spain and Latin America. While Latin America has a very broad, diverse range of dialects and accents, most dubs are made in Mexico and then sold to the rest of the region. These dubs tend to minimize mexican phrasings, going for a more 'neutral', almost 'accentless' spanish. Occasionally, one character in the dub will have some mexican turns of phrase as a wink to the dub's origin (for example, in X-Men, Wolverine always had little mexican phrasings in the latin american dub).

Spanish dubs, I am not as able to judge, simply because my experience of Spain-Spanish is very different. I have seen Spanish dubs ranging from awesome to awful. The Evangelion dub was more or less average, but I have to say that one of the attractions of Utena was that, well, I found the Spain-Spanish dub utterly stunning. The voice actors/actresses use a very... kinda classy, pretentious tone in it, which really befits the atmosphere of Utena, where most characters are self-serving and pretentious. The Spain dub really helps this feeling that this is a school full of very entitled people.

Now, with the new uncoverings that have been posted on Empty Movement, I remembered that there was a Mexican dub of Utena, where our title character is called Ursula, and the show is entitled 'El Anillo Magico' (the magic ring)!. I have never seen this dub, but it looks terrifyingly bad. Now, I'm not going to link to them, but suffice to say you can find either dub on Youtube!

So yeah! This is all very interesting or something. I wonder if they ever dubbed past episode 12 in Spain? I'd have loved to see Akio's voice in that dub.

TL;DR Utena in spanish thread.