Moj Mali Poni: Prijateljstvo je čarobno (My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Croatian HRT dub)

Moj Mali Poni: Prijateljstvo je čarobno (eng. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magical) is the first Croatian dub of mh:besttvshows:My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It has aired on HRT 2 and includes the first two seasons so far. Each and every episode has been cut into two parts, essentially doubling the number of episodes.

This dub is notorious for being done by Novi Mediji, a dubbing studio whose work was shown to be of exceptionally bad quality due to voice acting, casting and even audio mixing being below the standard, putting it in close to the likes of other similarly cheap studios such as Agapio Racing Team. The series eventually received a re-dub on RTL Kockica which saw many improvements over the original Croatian dub.

Why This Dub Sucks

 * 1) Some characters have unfitting voices to them. For instance, Pinkie Pie's voice actor makes her sound scratchy and on the older side, in contrast to her bubbly personality.
 * 2) There are instances of characters blatantly sharing voice actors with each other, without much variety if any at all. This becomes a bit of a problem in "Dragon Quest" where Rarity, Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle all have identical voices and one of them tells the other two their dragon disguise will be blown if the dragons hear three different voices coming from it.
 * 3) The voice actors are inconsistent. Some characters, such as Scootaloo and Rarity, received more than one or even two different voice actors across the first 2 seasons, and some changed voice actors within the same season. In a few cases, a character gets more than one voice actor within a single episode.
 * 4) Most songs, save for a few, use exactly one female singer, regardless of who is singing or even how many characters are in a shot at a given time. It rears its head during "Art of the Dress" where all the main characters (sans Rarity) are singing in close proximity and at the same time but still have only one voice backing them, and in "The Perfect Stallion" where every line belongs to that one female singer - even that of BIG MAC, a stallion with a deep masculine voice.
 * 5) Some songs - and even a couple of episodes - shamelessly lift assets from the Serbian dubs of the show instead of trying to come up with original material (if it's not a direct translation). This often comes in form of lyrics that are almost exactly the same aside from some word spellings, but can sometimes involve audio itself as well. This has also led to the "Art of the Dress" song copying the Serbian Mini dub's character names (thus creating a naming inconsistency) and an error where Twilight Sparkle refers to the Canis Major as Ursa Minor despite the two constellations being nothing alike.
 * 6) A good deal of songs are poorly done and have flaws such as unpolished lyrics and singing (despite the singer being a professional). "This Day Aria" is by far the worst offender due to it being exceptionally off-key and off-beat, cramming too many words into one line, boasting several audio errors (Pinkie Pie shouting "Yay!" after the first line, a magical blast sound effect randomly playing in the middle of a verse, two unknown characters shouting when Princess Cadance takes flight, and the very last line playing way too late), and generally ripping off the Serbian Minimax dub of the song. Another big offender is "Love Is In Bloom", which not only likewise rips off the Serbian dubs and is off-beat but also has entirely different lyrics that have nothing to do with the theme it's supposed to follow (the marriage of Shining Armor and Cadance).
 * 7) For some reason, the dub contains loads of audio mixing errors, some of which are too explicit to be considered possible.
 * 8) * Some lines of dialogue are either too short, too long, or in the wrong place. Lines that are too short tend to be looped or filled in with something unrelated, while lines that are too long either are cut off, clip out of lip-syncing, audibly overlap with the next line or even replace it entirely. In more severe cases it leads to missing dialogue, whether it be in form of empty air or a completely different recording somehow replacing the intended one, such as "A Bird In The Hoof" suffering from Fluttershy's singing being replaced by spoken dialogue, "The Show Stoppers" having two instances of blatantly missing dialogue, Mulia Mild in "MMMystery On The Friendship Express" saying "But how?" in Gustave le Grand's voice twice instead of "Why are we all here again?" and the brown dragon in "Dragon Quest" saying "You sure your name is Spike and not Shrimp?" and "I think he's Crackle's cousin" in another dragon's voice instead of "You look more like peewee to me" and "You fly on your mommy's back during migration?", respectively.
 * 9) * Sound effects sometimes play randomly, even when they have no place at the timestamp they're playing on. One example is a magical blast sound effect playing out of nowhere while Mayor Mare is holding a speech.
 * 10) * The in-episode recap from "A Canterlot Wedding Part 2" consists of randomly arranged voice recordings instead of those that should be playing (said voice recordings aren't even supposed to be there because they came from different scenes), leading to dialogue that doesn't make sense.
 * 11) Some character names do not sound like they have had a lot of thought put into them. For instance, Pinkie Pie is simply called "Pink", Nightmare Moon is called "Black Princess", Big Mac is just referred to as "Big Brother" as if it were his actual name, Scootaloo's name is based on the English one but does not fit her ("Skakutalo", or Skippy/Hoppy as it would roughly translate back), and Queen Chrysalis' name somehow turned into "Crystalina" despite her having nothing to do with crystals. Cadance's Croatian name, Kadenca, while ultimately correct unfortunately creates a plot hole due to being pronounced exactly the same as "Cadenza" from her full name, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza; when she learns about the wedding, Twilight Sparkle does not recognize Cadance's full name but does recognize her shorter name, and Cadance's localized short name completely removes the distinction between her two names making it seem like Twilight should have been able to recognize the full name.
 * 12) In the first two episodes in the series, "Friendship is Magic" part 1 and part 2, there are many problems that showcase the dubbing studio's carelessness:
 * 13) * In the opening segment, the narrator does not speak her lines fast enough, causing the narration to go out of sync with the visuals - for instance, when the Elements of Harmony appear, the narrator speaks about Nightmare Moon's vow instead of name-dropping the Elements, only doing so at the end of the sequence where Celestia banishes Nightmare Moon. In addition, the narration also directly overlaps with Twilight speaking, and makes a claim that the remaining princess took responsibility for "both herself and the sun".
 * 14) * When Twilight meets Fluttershy, the latter audibly says her name instead of muffling it beyond recognition but Twilight's lines about not hearing her well are kept in.
 * 15) * There is a voice clip of Twilight making a nondescript "Euuugh" sound, and it plays in places where it doesn't make sense but doesn't play where it was likely intended (when Twilight spits out an apple).
 * 16) * The studio-made recaps are mixed up. The recap from second half of the first episode makes a claim that Twilight and her friends are "still searching for their princess" and that "Nightmare Moon set up a plethora of traps for them" even though Twilight hadn't met all of her soon-to-be friends yet, essentially spoiling the upcoming plot, while the recap from the first half of the second episode likewise claims that "preparations for the Summer Sun Celebration are still underway" despite the fact the celebration had just been held. Even worse, the second erroneous studio-made recap is quickly followed by the real recap, proving that the editors either did not care or were not paying attention.
 * 17) * In the second episode, not only are there lines that needlessly loop like in many other episodes, one of them loops uncleanly. When Applejack asks Twilight if the latter knows what's going on and her line loops due to being too short, there's a clear sign of trimming at the loop point.
 * 18) * When Pinkie Pie meets Twilight a second time and tells her story, her voice actor doesn't speak her lines at the needed speed, instead doing it at a slower rate like in the narration sequence. As a result, Pinkie's speech is too lengthy and clips way too far out of her lip-syncing, overlapping with Applejack's line and even ending long after she was supposed to stop talking.
 * 19) * The river serpent's voice actor gave the serpent a voice that has almost no inflection, and his crying is impossible to tell apart from his laughter.
 * 20) It had some moments of misnaming characters, particularly as a result of sloppily copying one of the two Serbian dubs in most songs and later episodes; for example, in the Croatian dub of Art of the Dress Applejack gets referred to as "Jabuklina" even though her name is "Ivka", Fluttershy as "Tihana" while it's actually "Plahuljica" etc.
 * 21) "May The Best Pet Win!" has two bad moments, both involving Tank. The first one is when Rainbow Dash initially meets Tank; she at first calls him a turtle (which is correct by the original script), but in her very next sentence she calls him a tortoise, to which Fluttershy remarks that he's a tortoise. The second one is his gender, wherein he's first referred to as a female and then as a male near the end of the episode.
 * 22) In the studio-made recap at the beginning of the second half of the episode "Return of Harmony Part 2", the narrator says that Applejack of all people found the Elements of Harmony and attempted to use them, even though Applejack is shown as corrupted and as secondary focus at best with the real finder Twilight Sparkle being prominent in every shot.
 * 23) There are a couple of instances where the dub slipped something semi-illegal and/or not very kid-friendly into the dialogue:
 * 24) * In "Applebuck Season", Applejack gets soda and pours it into the mix instead of baking soda as Pinkie Pie asks of her. The Croatian HRT dialogue translated the mention of soda to beer. Remember that this is a children's show and some of its foreign dubs such as Italian didn't allow the word "cider" in the show's episodes because it refers to an alcoholic beverage in Europe as opposed to the US where it's just a type of apple drink; here, they got away with straight up mentioning a drink that is regarded as alcohol just about everywhere including Croatia, despite the fact that it is against the law for persons under 18 to be served alcohol in the aforementioned country.
 * 25) * In "Hearts and Hooves Day", Big Mac's localized name ("Veliki Brat", or "Big Brother") creates a problem when he begins interacting with Cheerilee in a romantic way. Namely, when Cheerilee directly addresses Big Mac via his localized name, she sounds like she's calling him her brother and thus it creates an implication of incestual romance, even when it should be clear that Cheerilee and Big Mac are unrelated to one another and not brother and sister.
 * 26) The custom recaps at the beginning of each episode's second half were consistently made of clip montages and a narrator, until this format was randomly changed in the middle of the second season (beginning with "The Last Roundup"). The new recap format ditched the clip montages entirely and replaced them with the given episodes' prologues but left the narrator in, causing the new format to have a problem with the narration and regular character dialogue playing over each other.
 * 27) In "Bridle Gossip", Fluttershy is supposed to speak in a deep, masculine voice after being affected, but when she says "I don't know, seems awfully dangerous", she says it in her normal voice. And when she says "You made me sound ridiculous", not only does she not say it in a masculine voice, she says it in Pinkie Pie's voice.
 * 28) In "Mysterious Mare Do Well", when Rainbow Dash tells Scootaloo to wait up, she refers to her using second-person plural, which, in Croatia, is only used when formally addressing someone (like a boss or a teacher) and of course, if there are more than 1 people.
 * 29) The episode "Sonic Rainboom" has three errors:
 * 30) * The pony who says "I could watch you fly all day" is a female, but refers to herself as a male, since Croatian is a gender-specific language.
 * 31) * And before that, the pony who suggests Rarity enter the competition instead also says "I could watch you fly all day", also refering to herself as a male. Despite her line being different, Rarity still says "Maybe I should enter", which now doesn't make any sense since no one suggested the idea of her entering in the first place.
 * 32) * One scene has missing dialogue.
 * 33) There were a few name inconsistencies:
 * 34) * Despite Applejack's established name being "Ivka", she is referred to as "Jabučica" in some episodes.
 * 35) * Ponyville was translated as "Ponigrad", but changed to "Ponijevo" near the end of season 2.
 * 36) Finally to top it all off, the dub even had the nerve to end only on its second season, as none of the rest of the seasons, its human spinoff, and its movie were released in Croatian.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Not all songs are poorly made. "Find a Pet" and "B.B.B.F.F." are two examples that stand out as one of the best-performed songs in this dub.
 * 2) There is some good voice acting in spite of bad voice acting being present, thanks to the voice actors putting in some effort to properly convey their characters' tone and emotions. Likewise, some voice actors are quite fitting for the characters they voiced.
 * 3) Alongside bad character names, there are also good ones. For example, Apple Bloom gets an adorable name known as "Cvjetka" (a play on the word "flower"), Rarity was named after the violas flower to describe her beauty, and Discord's Croatian name ("Razdor", which is a direct translation) is very fitting and has a nice ring to it.
 * 4) The opening theme is decently done (excerpts from Serbian Mini notwithstanding), and the lyrics were even reused for the second, newer and much more polished dub done by an entirely different studio.
 * 5) At first Spike's VA was very terrible, having next to no inflection in his acting, before being exchanged for a different VA in the middle of the second season. The new VA rectified the inflection problem, finally granting Spike at least some reasonable emotion as a result.
 * 6) Katarina Perica Kirin and Andrea Baković, who voiced Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie respectively, are both professionals and have even reprised their roles in the movie, where they sound and emote much better than in the TV series. In addition, Andrea Baković's performance in the movie's songs is quite spot on, showing that she still has lots of potential despite not performing as well in the TV series' songs.
 * 7) Even through all the errors, they translate jokes and puns pretty well, like Spike's nicknames in "Bridle Gossip" and Pinkie Pie's combinations of cherries and chimichangas in "The Last Roundup".
 * 8) In Season 2, they copy Serbian dub much less compared to the first season.
 * 9) The RTL Kockica dub can be an improvement after it got cancelled.

Theme Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPCprnivT2Y&feature=emb_title

Compilation of the various aforementioned errors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=SfulPk6q7yM&feature=emb_title