Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories (学校の怪談 Gakkō no Kaidan, lit. "School Ghost Stories") is a 20-episode anime series created in 2000 by animation studio Pierrot and Aniplex for Fuji Television, based on a book series by Tōru Tsunemitsu.

Dubbing History
When Ghost Stories failed to thrill audiences in Japan, the distributors were desperate to make up their losses through international sales. They struggled to find a company interested in dubbing the series until ADV Films agreed to license the series. According to voice actor Greg Ayres, they were told to "do whatever it took to sell the show." The only condition was that the basic story and names of major characters and ghosts had to remain intact, but everything else was fair game. To that end, director Steven Foster reworked the show into a pure Gag Dub by throwing out nearly all of the original script. When the voice actors were called in to record scenes, whoever got there first would set the tone and subject for the scene, which meant the other cast members had to follow in those footsteps. This unique approach produced a dub full of random characterization, fourth-wall-breaking jokes, political and cultural references.

When the dub was first released, it was decried by much of the anime fandom despite the poor reception of the original show. The dub of Ghost Stories was released during the peak of edited dubs, such as 4Kids Entertainment's dub of One Piece, and the backlash among the anime fandom that increasingly demanded zero alterations to a dub script during localization, regardless of the series' quality. The dub, however, has gone on to be seen generally postively by anime fans for its irreverent humor and excellent voice acting, with many considering the ADV dub to be the show's best feature.

An alternative dub would later be produced by the anime television network Animax, which stayed true to the original, retaining all of the original Japanese plot, character and dialog details, broadcasting the series uncensored and unedited within its respective networks across the world, including Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

Animax Dub

 * Andrea Kwan as Satsuki Miyanoshita / Datto / Datsueba
 * Claudia Thompson as Momoko Koigakubo / Mio Imai
 * Candice Moore as Hajime Aoyama
 * Sarah Hauser as Leo Kakinoki / Keiichirou Miyanoshita
 * Russell Wait as Amanojaku
 * Rik Thomas as Principal