Gag Dub

""Hmm? Oh! Oh yeah, I almost forgot! The cartoonist never gave me a nose!""

- Meowth, Pokémon (English dub)

A controversial but occasionally workable practice, where a movie or television show is subjected to Redubbing with rewritten or ad-libbed dialogue, usually for comedic purposes.

There are a few reasons to do this. If a company technically owns the property of a show that isn't seen as viable, such as the jokes being too culturally specific, they can make something creative with it. In more pandering fashion, producers are cashing in on a fad by buying an older show and retooling it. In rare cases, sometimes you just never get a hold of decent original scripts.

Compare Animutation, Redubbing, Gag Sub, Hong Kong Dub, Remix Comic, YouTube Poop.

A popular Sub-Trope is The Abridged Series. For a related video game phenomenon see Let's Play.

Anime and Manga
"Officer: The fish! SHOOT THE FISH!"
 * Samurai Pizza Cats is probably the best-known example of a gag dub, and one necessitated by one big reason: The dubbers were not given the scripts or the original audio. Supposedly, the show's creators saw the English dub and enjoyed it more than the original. The show was considered average and forgettable in Japan, but the dub is well loved to the point where the Japanese owners are surprised at how popular it is.
 * Similarly, when it was dubbed for Latin-America the LA dubbers did something similar by replacing the jokes that weren't likely to be understood by Latin viewers and using local pop culture, without derailing the dub too much from its "source". It worked like a charm.
 * The BBC got hold of the first couple of episodes of Urusei Yatsura, got an all-star cast to re-dub them into English in an extremely tongue-in-cheek manner, and released them as Lum the Invader Girl. It seemed like the BBC tried their hand at abridging. Ataru became "The oversexed son of the local chiropodist". (It's on Youtube but don't tell anybody!)
 * Cherry apparently had an explicit dream about Ataru, "involving a powerful discharge".
 * "LONG LIVE REGULAR SEX!"
 * "Peachy Bleachy" is one fan's version of what might have happened if 4Kids had produced a bowdlerized dub of Bleach. It's almost believable until the characters start making references to Yaoi.
 * See also: Casey & Friends, a popular re-imagining of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni as it would probably turn out if 4Kids ever got their hands on the series and tried to squeeze all the happy-go-lucky bloodshed and Mind Rape into the Animation Age Ghetto.
 * The first two seasons of Digimon could be considered partial gag dubs. The kids were cracking jokes about siblings, pets, and parents that they didn't even have. Most notable were the constant wisecracks by offscreen characters, even when nobody was talking. However, once each season got to it's more serious points most of this stopped, and as a whole, it was far more faithfully adapted than Dragonball Z or Yu-Gi-Oh! Surprisingly, the dub usually didn't censor death. This was dubbed by the same company that dubbed Samurai Pizza Cats, so this isn't too surprising.
 * Duel Masters, even going as far as to edit in new (and often bizarre) scenes, although the series did follow the original plot fairly faithfully.
 * The French dub of Fist of the North Star was Bowdlerised into a Gag Dub by the voice actors in an attempt to stop its broadcast because they objected to violence and Nazi imagery of the antagonists that the executives hadn't anticipated would be in a kids' show. Ken le Survivant ended up cancelled and a cult classic.
 * It was a writing error in the channel viewing lists. They put Fist up with Sailor Moon, thinking it was a harmless kids show. When they found out their screw-up, they decided to fix it by screwing around.
 * Also, there was no actual Nazi imagery, only un-nazi swastikas.
 * "Hokuto de cuisine" and "nanto de vison" remain some of the best puns ever.
 * Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter visited Bang Zoom! Entertainment's dubbing studio for a bit on their tragically short-lived version of The Tonight Show and did some gag dubbing (with a few doses of improvisation thrown in) for Ghost in the Shell, including a scene they just watched entirely out of context and without audio but "got the gist of it" making the scene about a man being arrested for not feeding his fish before being attacked by a naked cyborg woman:

""Shirotabi, please forgive me for bringing you back to life! I know now that it could never work between us. As much as we want it to, it could never be! Not because you're a rabbit, but because you're BLACK!""
 * Ghost Stories got a whole new script, and became a completely comedic series by taking Refuge in Audacity to whole new extremes. According to voice actor Chris Patton, this was done at the request of the Japanese, and the voice actors weren't given scripts, just general storylines and instructions as to content like 'your character comes in and says something belittling to the cop'. It's pretty well agreed that there's no way a played-straight middling-quality Cliché Storm of a horror series would have sparked the same interest.
 * According to Greg Ayres, they were told they had to keep the general storyline elements and major character names in the story, but everything else was fair game for the actors, including the way in which they explain those story elements. Greg only wished that the infamous "Mel Gibson Jew Hating" event had taken place just a month earlier so they could have put that into the dub.

"Narrator: Planet Earth, 200... uh, 9."
 * A number of Mon-oriented shows, including Mon Colle Knights, were acquired to cash in on the Pokémon and Digimon craze of the late 90s. None of them had the sheer financial presence of either of them though, and more than a few were adapted into outright spoofs of the genre. The more recent Duel Masters did much the same thing with Yu-Gi-Oh!.
 * Pokémon itself was almost a Gag Dub in the Diamond and Pearl saga with Team Rocket lampshading everything. However in the most recent seasons, it's reverted to a more or less straight dub.
 * Taken up to eleven with Team Rocket in the Mexican dub, especially with James.
 * The Portuguese dub of Dragonball Z. Although it retained the original story and episode count, they added in tons of jokes filled with Breaking the Fourth Wall and Lampshade Hanging.
 * It was probably helped by the fact that the dub director and voice actor, António Semedo, was a comedian, which resulted in lots of ad-libbing. He would go on to direct the dubs of Saint Seiya and Sailor Moon, which were somewhat more serious. The latter had the benefit of being translated directly from the Japanese version (DBZ and SS were translated from the French versions).
 * Dattebayo Fansubs did a fandub of one of the worst Naruto filler episodes. Naruto was played by someone who sounded like Steve Urkel.
 * Penguin Musume Heart pulls a gag dub on itself. The official site updated itself one week with a video consisting of brief sketches using footage from the first 11 episodes and the actual voice cast to create something sort of new. Such as little sister Kaede and Battle Butler Sebastian swapping voices for a few clips.
 * In a Brazilian example, Ribbon No Kishi was dubbed out of cloth, since they didn't have Japanese translators at the time (they made sure to never dub directly from Japanese anymore, for the anime fans' sadness, as there are many competent Japanese translators nowadays). That version was nicely received, as it was slightly faithful to the original (since there weren't many implied elements, like anime nowadays).
 * The fan dubbing group "Seishun Shiteimasu" specialized in this, producing parodies like Ranma 1/3, Voltron: Hell-Bent For Leather, and Robotech 3: Not Necessarily the Sentinels (actually a redub of Gunbuster, but that's the joke).
 * The DVD's of the anime Samurai Gun include scenes spoof-dubbed by the voice actors.
 * Crayon Shin-chan was gag-dubbed for Adult Swim by several former writers from Williams Street. It was largely adult-oriented as the content and dialogue had large amounts of profanity and much of it was self-parodying.
 * Although most people deny it, Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs is a Bowdlerised Gag Dub. The original Space Musketeer Bismarck was actually set in our solar system rather than a galaxy far far away (If you've seen the national flags on the heroes' helmets and uniforms, you'd know).
 * When Super Milk-chan was licensed, the dubbing company actually prepared two separate dubs - one "straight" dub, and one Gag Dub that skewed far more (im)mature. Both are available on the DVD; Cartoon Network, for reasons of not setting off Media Watchdogs, chose to air the "straight" dub.
 * Tokyo Mew Mew in a Nutshell, which uses Character Exaggeration and just plain out-of-characterness to great effect, lampooning the fans that honestly write the characters this way. For example, a Die for Our Ship victim that's constantly portrayed in Fanfic as an idiot becomes Too Dumb to Live, and the producer's self-admitted favourite character, who is ignored by much of the fandom, is reduced to insane ramblings about his hairstyle.
 * MTV's animation variety show Cartoon Sushi featured Ultra City 6060, a series of Gag Dub shorts that featured animation primarily from Genocyber and Iria: Zeiram the Animation.
 * "The Abridged Series" of popular anime, the original being LittleKuriboh's Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series. Not only is each episode abridged to around half (or less) of its total running time, LittleKuriboh voices all of the dozen-or-more characters himself, creating a wonderfully hilarious mockery of Yu-Gi-Oh, 4Kids, and sometimes, even of itself.
 * Several episodes of the 4Kids' dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX tread into this territory, with dialogue not unlike that of the abridged series.
 * Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has an odd example of this in the second series (Zoku): a gag dub done by the original voice actors, which consisted of gibberish. It also comes with a gag sub, done by same, concerning Goku trying to find the ◯◯◯◯◯◯balls. Apparently the only way a.f.k. found the actual plot was using manga scans. Said plot concerns Commodore Perry coming to open everything. Yes, it gets as dirty as it sounds.
 * When ADV Films dubbed live-action movies, they would often include some bits of gag dubbing as DVD extras. The most popular of these was "Lake Texarkana Gamera", a full-length redneck dub of Gamera 2.
 * It was 2000 and Studio Sukodei had completed Evangelion: ReDeath. Experience the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion with Pimp Gendo, Uncle Kaji, and Valley Girl Rei! Most of the jokes are about sex, so it's not that different from the original anime.
 * Also, Shinji thinks they must have run out of ink.
 * The new FUNimation-produced dub of Keroro Gunsou, a.k.a. Sgt. Frog, is a straight-up gagdub a la Crayon Shin-chan. It keeps all the plot points of the original episodes, but throws in plenty of additional jokes, including numerous pop-culture references and sci-fi humor. On top of that, Keroro's obsession with mecha anime hits an extreme that was never present in the original show (he likes Robotech and Exo Squad now). For added fun, we not only have a sarcastic narrator, but sarcastic subtitles as well.

""We crossed the border with no problem, didn't vee, Herr Schtick? I'm so sorry I didn't share any of my liver vusrt with you. The invasion vent so vell, I forgot about feeding mein Schticky friend.""
 * Most of this was probably inevitable. The original Keroro cut, too, was replete with pop-culture references, but it would have suffered from its instances being references to Japanese cultural icons. Many of these were already dated by the standards of modern Japanese viewers, so it is probably no surprise that the dub would need to fill it in with new references or risk not working at all in translation.
 * The first few episodes of the original Saiyuki anime series, dubbed by ADV Films, were chalk full of profanity and script rewrites in the English version, including a rewritten personality for one particular character. These differences were gradually toned down over the course of the series; the second half of the series and the Requiem film are much more in-line with the Japanese version. Compare the character of Hakkai between the first few episodes and the film.
 * The Funimation dub of Axis Powers Hetalia is effectively this, Flanderizing some of the countries' character traits and turning the Refuge in Audacity that was already in the Japanese version Up to Eleven. Half the fandom thinks it's hilarious, the other half hates it and thinks some of the newly added jokes are very offensive.
 * There are plenty of things to both love and/or hate, but one thing that caught on to the Fandom's popular imagination:

"Prime Minister: Harlock, how did you get here? Harlock: I jumped! BOO! Tadashi: It wasn't a person, dad; I think it's a woman! Harlock: That's the only Zeton dwarf nebula in the dense-space galaxy! Ship's robot: Greetings. I am Fambot 3. I am beautiful. I love you. Narrator: Illegal aliens from an underdeveloped galaxy decided to blackball the planet Earth."
 * Either Dangaioh has the worst straight-up dub ever, or one of the most absurdly funny Gag Dubs ever. You be the judge!
 * Lupin III has been dubbed by several different companies over the years, most of whom have done fairly straight translations of the original stories. However, the Pioneer/Geneon dub, which is likely the best known, added a great number of jokes and pop cultural references that are humorously out of place (e.g., "I bet he could bench press Shaq", when the story clearly takes place in the late 70's). This caused a bit of a Broken Base, as many loved these jokes, while others, especially long-time fans, hated them.
 * Funimation strikes yet again with their Oh! Edo Rocket dub. It takes the goofiness Up to Eleven. Well, that, and it has LOTS of swearing.
 * While Yu Yu Hakusho was one of Funimation's first anime dubs to not extensively change the original dialogue (like in Dragonball Z) and keep the heart of the original, some of the blander dialogue was replaced with witty and hilarious one liners especially for Yusuke and Hiei e.g. when Yusuke beats up Ichigaki the line "and this (punch) is for me!" was replaced with "and this is for pissing me off!", and a typical scene where Koenma complains about Jorge's stupidity was replaced with "and my father says a lobotomy would be too harsh..." This is one of the main reason several fans prefer the English dub.
 * The Latin-American dub of Dotto! Koni-chan replaces lots of the hard-to-translate or too risky jokes into Mexican slang and allusions to Latinamerican pop culture. Mix it with an extremely enthusiastic cast who is clearly Chewing the Scenery with all kinds of relish, and it's hilarious.
 * Sentai Filmworks dub for Guin Saga at first took it self seriously but by the second half of the series they suddenly decided to go a a different route.
 * Fast Food Freedom Fighters is an extremely funny fan dub of the first Project A-Ko movie. It was done sometime in the early 1990s, and may even be the first fan made gag dub for an anime.
 * The Tokko Complete Series DVD box set has short gag dub clips as easter eggs (clicking on the Tokko symbol on the extras screen) on all 3 DVDs, each one has some scenes from the episodes on that DVD with the original lines replaced with gag lines such as "Are you going to come quietly or are you a screamer?" and "Kureha, do you have to flash your tits at everyone?"
 * The 1980 Ziv Internatial English dub of a handful of the 1978 Captain Harlock series episodes appears to suffer from this for no visibly apparent reason. Two of the episodes are given a serious dub treatment. But two others change the young protagonist Tommy Hairball (Tadashi Daiba) to Tommy Hairball. His father becomes Professer Hairball. Also, the voices are completely different (as in more cartoony in comparison to the appropriately restrained acting in the other two episodes) and was given more farcial, nonsensical dialogue that was more improvisation than translation from the original Japanese version. According to cornponeflicks.com, these are some examples:


 * Excel Saga goes and gives us a Canon Gag Dub in the form of The Beautiful Theater: The English Version where in the Blind Idiot Translation even manages to fly into Gratuitous Spanish at one point.
 * B-Daman is a standard Merchandise-Driven anime about kids who settle conflicts with toy robots that shoot marbles. However, the people who did its dub were involved with the dub of Digimon, so they essentially took the ridiculousness of the concept and ran with it. It makes an otherwise unremarkable show like this rather amusing to watch. This is most evident in the framing segments with a blue cat and her children.
 * While Ultimate Teacher's US dub stuck very close to the Japanese dialog, the UK dub added tons of jokes and sarcastic dialog to the dub (along with some minor story/character personality changes), which does fit the movie's screwball comedy quite well.
 * The raison d'etre of Seishun Shitemasu, which was an early Nineties fandubbing project of Peter Payne, now the owner of J List. Ranma 1/3: Notes from the Closet and Voltron: Hell Bent for Metal being classic examples.

Comic Books

 * Forum RPG.net tries to do this with every Jack Chick comic track on its infamous Open Tangency forum. One of the grander examples includes redubbing the entire "Boo!" tract (about the Satanic origins of Halloween) to be about a girl converting her friend from Vampire: The Requiem to Dungeons & Dragons.

Eastern Animation

 * Three shorts from the Hungarian animated series Magyar Nepmesek got hilarious parody dubs - also in Hungarian - by YouTube user Dandozolika.

Film
""I got better" villager: "She turned my lout into a bong !" Sir Bedevere: "Can I take a closer look?" "I got better" villager: "...no need, it's OK.""
 * Possibly the first major example was Woody Allen's 1966 film debut, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which took a 1965 Japanese-made James Bond knockoff called Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (International Secret Police: Key of Keys) and turned it into farcical search for a secret egg salad recipe. The trope was so unknown at the time that Woody Allen and a straight man appear at the beginning to humorously explain the concept.
 * An obscure example is Can Dialectics Break Bricks, an old kung-fu movie redubbed by a group of French, um, Separatists Situationists into a narrative about the hypocrisy of the bourgeois communists. Complete with ridiculous fight scenes. And lots of misused swears (the French group inexplicably used English for their redub). Oh, and a running joke about the hero being a pedophile. Just watch it.
 * This was the whole premise of the comedy Director's Commentary by Rob Brydon.
 * Dmitry Puchkov, also known as "Goblin", is a Russian film translator who is perhaps more famous for his hilarious, Russian pop culture-filled parody dubs (well, voice-overs in this case) of famous English-language movies rather than for his more serious translations. Namely:
 * LotR: The Gang and the Ring
 * LotR: The Two Blown Away Towers (literally, but a translation would be something like "The Two Loose Cannons")
 * LotR: The Return of the Hobo
 * The Shmatrix (The Matrix meets Shtirlitz)
 * Antibumer (a gag dub of a Russian movie, actually)
 * Star Wars: Storm in the Glass (Phantom Menace meets a spoof of the Soviet spy and cop movie genres, amongst other things)
 * Remember the hilariously bad translation of Star Wars Episode III? Someone dubbed the whole movie using the translated dialogue, the first part can be seen here.
 * Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do this in a scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind while sitting in a car near a drive-in theatre.
 * The DVD of Galaxy Quest provides the option of watching the entire movie dubbed in the alien language of Thermian.
 * The Tri-Star version of Godzilla 2000, in addition to receiving a beefed-up sound track and a tightened pace, was given a jovial, tongue-in-cheek dub in homage to the old Godzilla films from the 60s and 70s. Added to the film were deliberately campy lines such as "these missiles will go through Godzilla like CRAP through a goose!" In the eyes of many fans (including the director and producers at Toho, who approved all the changes made to the film in advance and particularly liked the addition of more Ifukube music), this helped to spice up what was otherwise a blandly typical Godzilla movie, though the more serious fans still prefer the original Japanese version.
 * Australian comedy Hercules Returns has a storyline that's just an excuse for the main characters to take an Italian sword and sandal movie from the 1960s and give it the most ridiculous dub imaginable. Two Words: Ambiguously Gay.
 * Brazilian MTV comedy group, Hermes e Renato, did two seasons of comedy dubs with B movies, called Tela Class. Quite funny, as they turned movies such as Hammer horror movie, "The Mummy's Shroud" into a movie about a corrupt construction owner; or Talons of the Eagle (a standard action / fight B movie) into a romance between two men. It Makes Sense in Context.
 * Similarly, the more recent Kung Pow: Enter The Fist! took footage from a 1970s-vintage Hong Kong Wuxia film, digitally inserted director/writer Steve Oedekerk into the action, and Oedekerk dubbed a new story in... about.
 * La classe américaine : le Grand Détournement is perhaps one of the most accomplished example of this trope, as the gag dub was the whole point rather than an incidental occurrence. French TV channel Canal + acquired rights from Warner Bros to use several clips from a bunch of old american movies, including All the Presidents Men, Bullitt, Rio Bravo... They took out the audio and built a whole new story out of these different movies, with original dialogues recorded by the "official" french voices for main actors John Wayne, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman. And it was hilarious. Completely hilarious. Did we mention it was hilarious?
 * A scene in La Cité de la Peur, also by Les Nuls, has a gag dub in the film itself ("For budgeting reasons"), complete with sound effects, scary music, and the dubbers arguing among themselves.
 * The Lord of the Rings (Pán prstenů in Czech): The Fellowship of the Ring was transformed by a group of Czech high-school students into A Couple of Stoners (Pár pařmenů): The Fellowship of the Yellow Thingamajig with a Nice Ditty Inside, a tale of one habbit's attempt to gather nine people for the wildest party in all of Mildew-Earth, for which he just happens to inherit a free ticket.
 * Interestingly, the exact same thing has also been done by a german group, resulting in "The Lord of the Weed". It was done by the same crew that did "Sinnlos im Weltraum", a parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation (see below).
 * The mid-80s series Mad Movies With The LA Connection was based on gag dubs of public domain B movies.
 * Many of the people who like nanars (translation: "films that are So Bad It's Good") hold dubbing as a very important part of their subculture. In fact, they tend to think that a nanar should never be watched in its original dub, since foreign ones accentuate the ridicule, artificiality and low-quality aspect of this type of movies. This is particularly true since many Z-quality movies are dubbed without any translation of the original script ; many dubbers therefore feel free to add the most ridiculous dialogues just for laughs.
 * Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D is a gag dub of Night of the Living Dead.
 * Anti-marijuana movie Reefer Madness was transformed into Reefie's Madhouse thanks to G4 and their 2008 celebration of Four Twenty. By some miracle, the G4-made gag dub somehow made the movie more ridiculous than the original.
 * YouTube has several Return of the Jedi dubs about Luke learning Leia is his sister.
 * Brad Neely's Wizard People, Dear Reader, a parody dub of the first Harry Potter movie.
 * The Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies has in their official German versions, often adding completely new dialogue (for instance, when the speakers mouth isn't on screen) for the sheer comedic value. Even some of the more serious films have gotten this treatment, when they were re-released.
 * In the remake of The Italian Job, one character does this while watching another Casanova character chat up a female cable company installer with the intention of getting his hands on her equipment (for the full quote, see Instant Seduction).
 * In the Latin-American dub of Shrek (and its sequels), Donkey was voiced by Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez. Since he is so well known in the region, they had him introduce his own brand of humor into much of the dialogue, including the addition of quite a few local pop-culture references.
 * The Japanese version of "Christina" staring writer/B-movie actress Jewel Shepard was reedited and dubbed with a completely different story than the English/Spanish original.A Japanese speaking (U.S. born)friend states that the re dub is a better and funnier film.
 * In Brazil during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, a blogger took clips of Falling Down and redubbed as if Michael Douglas was Dunga, the Brazilian football team coach. First, D-Fens at the restaurant became Dunga vs. the press. Then, videos regarding each Brazil's following games appeared: D-Fens and a road repair crew became Dunga vs. a Portuguese, D-Fens and a Latino gang became Dunga vs. Chileans....
 * Farce of the Penguins was originally planned to be a Gag Dub of the documentary March of the Penguins, but they couldn't get the rights to use footage from that film.
 * A popular one in Britain is to incorporate stereotypical regional accents into scenes from films, like Scouse Harry Potter
 * Probably no one would say that Monty Python and the Holy Grail was lacking gags, but the official(!) German dubbers apparently thought so and inserted some of their own. The Unexplained Recovery "I got better" scene became this, for example:


 * Dracula (The Dirty Old Man): the original cut's sound was unusable, so the producers made a Gag Dub to salvage their property.
 * The first Marx Brothers films where translated into Spanish by humorist Miguel Mihura... who didn't actually speak any English, so he simply made it all up. Groucho Marx is said to have remarked that Mihura's dialogues were often better than the original ones.
 * The English version of the German film Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence.
 * A few scenes from Attack of the Clones got this treatment for a Hungarian fan meeting. The redubs feature Anakin and Padmé discussing the state of the music industry, a drunken Anakin gambling away all their money, and Padmé leaving the oven on on Naboo, causing a fire that destroys Anakin's toy car collection. The best thing? It's all done by their real VAs from the actual movie.

Live Action TV
"(singing) "Born From An Egg On A Mountain Top... (stops singing) Oh this one's in English, I'll just skip it...""
 * The cast and crew of Scrubs did a dub of A Charlie Brown Christmas in-character. This leads to Charlie Brown becoming JD, Linus becoming Dr. Cox, Lucy becoming Carla, etc.
 * There is also A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa.
 * Scrubs also has an in-universe example. At one point, JD tries to break the ice with a child by performing improv over the image of the child's parents and Dr. Cox arguing soundlessly through a window, however all the dialogue JD comes up with is pie related, and the child is unimpressed. JD resolves to change to an improv class the doesn't meet upstairs from a pie shop.
 * The Australian sketch series D-Generation and The Late Show (produced by the same people) frequently featured old ABC programmes redubbed for comic effect. Two DVD compilations were made containing their gag subs, which are more widely known than the original material. Take a look.
 * Three DVDs actually, there is the compilation of their early stuff 'The Best of the D-Generation' (which included the Gag Dub of the TV Cop show Homicide), the Best Bits of the Late Show: Champagne Edition DVD (which was combining all 3 of their Best Bits VHS tapes, which included some segments of their Gag Dubs, but not many), as well as the full run of both Bargearse and The Olden Days (Gag Dubs of Bluey and Rush respectively) on one DVD.
 * The Daily Show sometimes uses this in clips of people speaking in a foreign language (signaled with the caption "Voice of Translator"). When they want to use the actual message of the clip, they use subtitles instead.
 * Eddie Izzard's gag... narration of footage about San Francisco in his "Dress to kill" performance.
 * The Irish TV show Soupy Norman takes a Polish soap opera First Love and dubs over it hilariously.
 * The Firesign Theatre's most successful video, J-Men Forever!, took several '30s serials about catching spies and criminals and turned them into the adventures of a Federal agency fighting for our God-given right to smoke dope.
 * An already parodic 70's live-action Japanese version of Journey to the West got a gag dub to become simply known as Monkey. Its annoyingly catchy theme song, contrary to what one may have thought, was part of the original Japanese broadcast.

"Spike as Rachel: How can I thank you, you mysterious black-clad hunk of a night thing? Spike as Angel: No need, little lady, your tears of gratitude are enough for me. You see, I was once a badass vampire, but love and a pesky curse defanged me. Now I'm just a big, fluffy puppy with bad teeth. (Rachel tries to hug Angel, but he backs away) Spike as Angel: No, don't touch the hair! Never the hair! Spike as Rachel: But there must be some way I can show my appreciation? Spike as Angel: No, helping those in need is my job, and working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent poof is truly thanks enough. Spike as Rachel: I understand. I have a nephew who is gay, so... Spike as Angel: Say no more. Evil is still afoot. And I'm almost out of that nancy-boy hair-gel I like so much. Quickly, to the Angel-mobile, away!"
 * The entire series Kung Faux was old kung-fu action films with various hip-hop people doing voiceovers. Most of the voices weren't too high profile (Queen Latifah was a character in an episode) but even to the rap-challenged it sounds like some hilariously bad blacksploitation film. Throw in an avalanche of visual effects, a bunch of on-screen commentary, Unsound Effects like KRAK and SCHOOLED and the occasional Saying A Sound Effect Out Loud for additional comedy. Possibly the funniest example was Ill Masta.
 * When The Magic Roundabout was translated into English by Eric Thompson, rather than voice act the characters, he chose to narrate the whole thing himself. He paid absolutely no attention to the original scripts and dubbed it based purely on the animation, including many gags that appealed to parents (Parental Bonus). Many viewers of the French show who were unaware of the redub couldn't understand why the show was so popular in England.
 * The Dutch Master Movies funny-men regularly dub live-action fragments of well-known movies to make the characters say ridiculous things. Mostly notable for the quality of the dubbing, which exceeds many (if not all) professional productions, which makes the immature gags funnier than they should be.
 * The German dub of the series The Persuaders which in the English original had quite political and serious dialogues, received completely new dialogues, with more humour, sarcasm and satire - on request of the channel who bought the broadcasting rights, as the old ones were considered too political. At times it was also self referential. Due to this, the show was very popular in German, so much that the French version based its dialogues on the German scripts. In the US the show was a failure.
 * This arguably goes the other way with certain series of Power Rangers. Gekisou Sentai Carranger, for instance, was a humorous Sentai, but it became a (somewhat) serious series as Power Rangers Turbo. Same goes for the comical Engine Sentai Go-onger, adapted into the gritty Power Rangers RPM.
 * Carranger was an all-out parody of Super Sentai (despite being a Super Sentai series itself) which Turbo tried to turn into a serious show. RPM was more successful in its efforts.
 * It did go the opposite way with Power Rangers Ninja Storm though, although technically it was more of a Gag Adaptation (and Ninpuu Sentai Hurricanger wasn't that serious to begin with, it just had more Cerebus moments).
 * For a more straight example, there's the Power Rangers Dino Thunder episode where the heroes watch an episode of Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger (dubbed over with lines in English). However, while still silly, the original episode was even sillier.
 * Speaking of Power Rangers and Super Sentai, there's also the Kagaku Sentai Dynaman episodes dubbed by the Night Flight crew.
 * When the cast of one of PR's "sister" series, VR Troopers, got word of cancellation, they apparently got hammered, and went into the ADR booth to redub certain scenes in a more "humorous" slant (proof)
 * The Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle was dubbed into Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (later shortened to just MXC) for American audiences. It was still called Takeshi's Castle in the UK, but had an all-new commentary by Craig Charles of Red Dwarf and Robot Wars fame. In Australia it's been re-dubbed and re-edited in about 3 more ways in addition to showing both of the American and UK versions. In Spain it was gag dubbed as "Humor Amarillo" (Yellow Humour), and was quite popular in the early 90s. It was briefly revived in 2006-2007 and reruns are still broadcast to this day.
 * The Mexican comedy artist Trino has redubbed an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. You can watch these videos (dialogue is in Mexican Spanish) here and here.
 * Imaginasian's show Uncle Morty's Dub Shack gives Asian movie clips gag dubs as well.
 * One of the games on Whose Line Is It Anyway? was all about gag dubbing.
 * Dragnuts as a parody of Dragnet.
 * The Day Job Orchestra takes clips from Star Trek and dubs them with nonsensical dialogue that nearly matches the lip movements. Plots have included Khan's sexual exploits, Data wanting a threesome in a turbolift, Worf and Troi ordering food, the crew of the Enterprise-D discussing what to do while high on LSD, Sisko talking like Mr. T, and Scotty being fat in the future. And an odd fixation with apple juice...
 * In the Dark: The third episode of Angel opens with Spike standing on a rooftop watching Angel rescue a damsel in distress and supplying his own dialogue.


 * In an episode of New Tricks, two of the un-retired detectives watch the actual perp being confronted by the others and perfectly dub the entire conversation from a distance - the implication is that they have seen it all in their time.
 * In the pilot episode of Friends, the characters briefly do this while watching a Spanish Soap Opera.
 * Two Brazilian friends did an obscene dubbing in Portuguese of the 1960s Batman series - where among other things, The Joker gets an invitation to "fuck Batman's aunt".
 * Lorelai and Rory make their own Gag Dub while watching The Donna Reed Show on Gilmore Girls.
 * This also applies to some official German dubs of English TV shows written by Rainer Brandt, most notably The Persuaders, but also M*A*S*H and Hogan's Heroes, as well as many Bud Spencer/Terence Hill flicks and the first Aces Go Places movies. The secret of his success is that he first watches the original with sound and once more without sound, and then he thinks up entirely new dialogs which match the situation.

Music

 * There's a whole series of Gag Dubs out there on YouTube of concert videos, started by Santeri "StSanders" Ojala and continued by others. For perhaps the ultimate example so far, check out this one of Kiss, in which not only the instrumentation but even the lyrics are redubbed, with lip sync entirely intact.
 * And StSanders went Up to Eleven and made one that's even funnier, this time of "Bohemian Rhapsody".
 * In the same vein as StSanders, Bad Lip Reading (channel link) redubs bad pop music videos-- turning Rebecca Black's "Friday" into a song about gang fights with chicken, and The Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" into a song about poop.
 * Literal Music Videos rewrite a song's lyrics to fit the music video imagery.
 * Kind of an example... "Born to Be Alive" sung by Adolf Hitler.

Professional Wrestling

 * In the early noughties, this was done with Kaientai's promos. Taka Michinoku would launch into a tirade about how evil they were (sometimes while not even holding the mic) and Funaki would simply say "Indeed!"

Video Games

 * The Japanese versions of the original four .hack games (IMOQ) had gag dubs with the original voice actors, unlocked after beating the final boss. They were left out of the English versions, which instead replaced the second Japanese voice track with the original, making the games dual audio but both serious.
 * In the same vein, bundled with the release of .hack//GU TRILOGY is the Parody Mode.
 * Yahtzee, pressed to fill the extra time on his first-impressions review of The Witcher, tacked on a surprisingly clever gag dub of the intro from Painkiller at the end, recasting the game's protagonist as a receptionist at the Pie Eater Corporation's lobby and his tormentor as an arrogant systems analyst position seeker with a decidedly short temper and a first-place trophy from the all-county cocksucking championship.
 * Then there's the gag dub on the end of the Guitar Hero World Tour video, which invents lyrics for the Deus Ex theme tune. Put on a trenchcoat, and fight some conspiracies...
 * IGN has done two gag dubs parodying scenes from Final Fantasy XIII. The first involves making Snow out to be a foulmouthed, idiotic, stoned man-whore (what a stretch!). The second video makes Sazh a failed player and Lightning a prostitute. Language is NSFW.
 * The Ignition Factor for SNES is a straightforward firefighting sim with a reasonably serious tone. However, it's clear that the American version was released before the translation was finished. In addition to the Blind Idiot Translations that this sometimes resulted in, there are several in-jokes that slipped through, such as "I can't believe I'm saying this. Is this really in the script?", and "I think I'd have written something better than that, Joe!", even though they were grossly inappropriate for the context.
 * Final Fantasy V's translation for the Game Boy Advance version reworks a great deal of the dialog for added humor and meme references (Knights do it two handed) while playing up the Large Ham stats of at least 2 major characters. As Final Fantasy V never took itself seriously in the first place, and the previous English version was horrible, few, if any, take issue with it.
 * Every item in the game has a brief description of what it does. For the weapon "whip," the description is for when a problem comes along.
 * GSC game world is responsible for pirate Russian translations of Duke Nukem 3D and Blood where monsters, aliens and zombies talk in obscenities, with Caleb from Blood playing role of Ukrainian nationalist. There are other russian bootleg translations filled with random gags by various authors.
 * Fargus multimedia released gag dub of Dark Colony, named Pionerskaya Zor'ka where soviet boyscouts fight imperialist aliens.

Web Comics

 * The "Five Minute Terinu" summaries of each issue of Terinu take a very... liberal interpetation of the action and dialog, and the characters talking back to their creator about the plot points.

Web Original

 * Redubs are a fad in Germany (where they are called "fandubs") Notable examples include:
 * Sinnlos I'm Weltraum (Pointless In Space), a German redub of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, turns Captain Picard into a short-tempered amateur-alcoholic. It was probably the series that started the German redub fad, having been produced between 1994-1997 and initially hand-distributed on VHS(!)
 * Much more popular (thanks to originating on the Internet) are Lord of the Weed, a redub of guess what, and
 * Coldmirror's Harry Potter und ein Stein (Harry Potter and a Stone), Harry Potter und der geheime Pornokeller (Harry Potter and the Secret Chamber of Porn) and later Harry Potter und der Plastikpokal (Harry Potter and the Plastic Goblet), of Harry Potter films 1, 2 and 4, respectively. These made her one of the top 10 most subscribed YouTube channels and the ensuing popularity earned her short radio and TV shows on public broadcasters.

Western Animation
"Changed Daily didn't even bother to learn Martian, and as a result he just decides to speak gibberish."
 * The Chipmunks Parody Show takes a show that's already about talking anthro chipmunks and makes it... Stranger.
 * Count Duckula is already a very funny series, but it also received an impossibly funny Mexican Gag Dub with brilliant cultural, political, and commercial injokes.
 * The G.I. Joe PSAs redubbed by Eric Fensler mangles the moralistic tags of G.I. Joe cartoons into something completely absurd and quite funny. Despite threats of legal action from the series' original creators, they can be found on various places on the Internet, and were recently reposted on the official Fensler Film website.
 * Daniel Geduld has redubbed several poorly made cartoons in this manner, creating something rather more entertaining than the originals. The most prolific of these is "The Skeletor Show", which introduces elements such as insanity salesmen, German transvestites and beams to make one question one's fashion choices to a normally staid cartoon. The clips can be found on YouTube.
 * There are a a whole bunch of Hey Arnold! gag dubs that turn the family-friendly show into something more like South Park... and that's putting it lightly. (Obviously, so Not Safe for Work.)
 * The premise of all the parodies done by the parody troupe My Way Entertainment, famous for The Juggernaut Bitch!!, as well as parodies of Power Rangers, Bleach, and Ghostbusters, among others.
 * The Juggernaut line became an Ascended Meme in the third X-Men film.
 * The 1952 Warner Bros short Orange Blossoms for Violet, compiled and written by Looney Tunes directors Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, uses '20s live-action footage of animals dubbed with vocals by Mel Blanc and narration by Robert C. Bruce to tell the story of a monkey wedding.
 * The Secret Show has one entire official episode based around the characters trying to overdub a previous episode in Martian. Halfway through, they just decide to screw it all and watch it.


 * Space Ghost Coast to Coast is also built upon this, with little to no concern about continuity of the frames used from one cut to the next, resulting in at at times four different colors of Zorak (Vests, gloves and body) in the space of one 12-minute show.
 * Warner Bros' Saturday Morning Forever Web site has clips of The Herculoids redubbed by the above-mentioned Daniel Geduld in its rotation.
 * The original late-'80s/early-'90s Mexican dub of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was riotously hilarious, inserting context-appropriate gags and ad-libs, and became such a cult classic many young adults quote it constantly.
 * For a Web Original version - in English, no less! - go check out this channel's unique interpretation.
 * The Japanese version of the Transformers Beast Wars cartoon was rather less serious than the original, Breaking the Fourth Wall on a regular basis and inserting as much over-the-top humour as possible.
 * Transformers Cybertron, on the other hand, eventually went this route whenever the anime threw in Stock Footage. "Why do we always go this way?"
 * The french dub of Superfriends is really close to this trope, and it's getting worse through the series, besides some ridiculous dialogs, some characters speak with a foreign accent and Batman sounds like a snob.
 * It was a common practice in the French kids shows from the 90's to the mid-noughties to hire the voice actors of an animated series for reading new lines as their characters so that they'd be the anchormen. By using footages of the episodes, they'd eventually create tongue-in-cheek segments between the real cartoons, some of them being quite amusing. They did so with the Looney Tunes shorts, Taz-Mania, Batman: The Animated Series, or X-Men: Evolution, in particular. Highlights include :
 * Daffy Duck bashing every single person who collaborated to the show during the credits
 * Bruce Wayne spouting the corkiest pick-up lines you can imagine for seducing Talia Al Ghul (and succeeding !)
 * Professor Xavier getting brainwashed so that he'd act like an obnoxious pre-teen every time a certain code word would be used
 * Jean Grey starting (and failing at) a stand-up career.
 * Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings animated film has an irregularly good (sometimes brilliant, sometimes... not so brilliant) fan dub made by Lord Phillock 8. You can watch it in here
 * Sienna D'Enema's Jiz series, a redub of Jem.
 * Sealab 2021 started out with actual episodes of Sealab 2020 with rewritten dialog.
 * In Hungary, three of the Pixie and Dixie shorts from The Huckleberry Hound Show got memetic parody dubs as Narancs, Tetves és Dugó.
 * The official Hungarian dubs of many Hanna-Barbera shows (most famously The Flintstones) can also be considered this, as the translator rewrote the entire dialogue in rhyming prose and added a lot of new gags.
 * The Lebrons, an Internet-only animated series, has one done by the Fox Sports web series, "Cubed", when the first two episodes premiered on YouTube. It's called "Cubed: The Lebron's Spoof".
 * Most Offensive Video has made a whole plethora of Gag Dubs centered around classic Peanuts holiday specials. A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa and Jackie Robinson Was The First Black Baseball Player, Charlie Brown both bookend the series. Definitely Not Safe for Work (or, for that matter, around the racially sensitive, the politically correct, or anyone else lacking a rather resilient sense of humor).
 * Behold: Spongebob, Patrick, Squidward and Sandy redub scenes from Casablanca, Singin in The Rain and The Godfather.
 * Disney XD's Marvel Mash Up series of intersitials gives this treatment to clips from Marvel Comics cartoons produced during the 1970s and '80s, such as The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and an Animated Adaptation of Incredible Hulk. The results feel like an Abridged Series in all but name.