[Vexx]

Actually... I've never seen a dub that came close to the original VA work, be it Japanese, German, Russian, French, Chinese.. whatever (live action or animated). It has more to do with cultural texture than skill --- though in the case of anime, the english dubs of japanese anime suffer from the problem that while the japanese industry carefully cultivates voices (hell, they even have colleges to churn out hopefuls), the american companies use a very small talent pool that basically consists of people they've worked with before who meet the comparatively meager budget restrictions. With the exception of a few productions, I find the dubs poorly cast and poorly acted... really badly acted in some cases.

On the other hand... its gotten better in the last year or two. I've actually complimented a few distributors of actually sounding like they took more than 30 minutes to cast the parts and those people actually sounded like they had studied the characters a bit. Disney has actually pushed the quality bar up because they've always been careful with their internationalization in the outbound direction and they've done much the same with their imports (like Totoro, etc).

Yeah, its a harsh assessment, but don't think because people are unsatisfied with the Haruhi dub that its somehow special or unique to that series.

As for the "viral market campaign" .. frankly I find it rather annoying and ... well, stupid. They're having to be so oblique with these "hints" that the dialog often sounds ... well... lame compared to the source material. Like a bunch of kids trying to sound cool and failing miserably.

(wow, I'm being curmudgeonly tonight...)