The Old School Otaku Lounge

I noticed when watching the ADV-subbed 1997 OVA Sakura Taisen that the OP and ED were subtitled in both English and Japanese but alternatively: One episode they are subtitled in English, the next in Japanese Romanji, and so on.

The same thing happen with City Hunter, of which version I watched belonged to the ADV Fansubs label. So I wish to ask if this is a common occurance back in the day, or only ADV did it? And did they do that because they wanted people to sing along?

The third strange thing: While both of these show are subbed, they actually have white text credit imposed on the OP and ED showing names of the dubbing actors. Can anyone explain to me this confusion?

I feel like its an ADV thing, which is still done today thanks to anything you buy from Maiden Japan/Sentai. My Dunbine copy did that where one OP/ED was English and the other was Romanji. That kinda kept me up with what episode I was on since the odd number ones were ENG subs and the even number were JP.

I want to say that AnimEigo and Pioneer also did this (I am thinking of their respective You're Under Arrest and Fushigi Yuugi releases). Occasionally, fansubbers would do this, too (I think my CTennosaur B'tX tape does this, too).

I think often times, it might have depended title to title rather than publisher to publisher. I think that a sing-a-long or karaoke effect was always the intended effect. A lot of TV anime in Japan would have the lyrics to the theme songs, at least for the opening, probably for much the same reason.

As far as the graphics with the dub actors on the tape, I am willing to bet that it was a shortcut for production but there's some speculation if that's actually a shortcut or not.

I'd like to say I think Funimation does this too, but I'm not sure. That said, alternating phonetic and translated subtitles was definitely a regular thing with ADV back in the day

As for the superimposed hard credits, Funimation DEFINITELY does this all the time now, where they re-edit the opening and closing credits sequences to be in hard english. I think Sentai/Maiden Japan leaves the credits in the original kanji now.

This was actually something that started with the VHS fansub days. Fansubbers would alternate the lyrics of the opening and endings from a straight English translation to the Romanji. This was so folks could learn to sing along to their favorite openings, which helped at cons when there were things like singalongs and karaoke rooms.

Once anime started getting picked up officially, most of them carried over this tradition. I'm honestly surprised that the tradition is still going, I guess it's one of those things that just.....now that most companies have done it for so long, they just do it because that's how it's always been?

As for the hard subs for dub actors, I'm not sure. Maybe it's to detour from people ripping and uploading it, or reverse importing?