http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ5mQPVQmZ8
In general it’s fine, with the Giroro & Narrator voices very good. The script is OK too with only a couple of quibbles. Pwn? Really? And they got the cat’s gender wrong which would cause problems in later episodes.
However there is one glaringly obvious problem, and it’s one that highlights the weakness in a lot of anime comedy dubs – Keroro’s voice.
In the original version, Keroro is voiced by Kumiko Watanabe, who does a very comedic, “cartoony” voice. She has a huge range with just that one silly voice, with Keroro veering around a rollercoaster of emotion. It’s not surprising to learn she’s the Japanese voice of Woody Woodpecker. She can do voices that can only exist in cartoons. Which is what an alien frog should have.
In this test episode, Keroro is very flat, which just doesn’t do for a the character that demands a performance on the level of Tom Kenny’s on Spongebob. One advantage a lot of “proper” cartoon performances have – a lot are performed by people with professional comedy experience, often stand-up, impressionists or radio performers.
Can anyone name a regular US anime voice actor with that sort of experience?
The result is that even a comedy anime with a decent dub script like Shin-chan still feels flat compared to its US equivalents (except maybe any character voiced by Seth Mcfarlane).
Sgt. Frog is potentially licence to print money (OK maybe not right now, it would have been gold 2 years ago…), so Funimation really need to get that central voice right. Keroro needs to be the funny man to everyone else’s straight man role.