Speakonia Dubs

Speakonia dubs are videos created by the Speakonia Community where a piece of media (either a TV show or movie) is re-dubbed with Speakonia voices and given colorful commentary and Barney Bunch-esque humor. They are not as common as traditional Speakonia content, though, and are pretty much considered a lost art.

History

It is hard to determine when the first Speakonia dub was first made, but it's speculated that it may have began in late 2009. The most prolific dubs came from bigboyrats, a channel run by Zak Wolf and his brother Billdeco08. They would take episodes of Rugrats and re-dub them in Speakonia, adding additional jokes and references that would feel right at home within the community. They continued doing this until the channel was terminated in 2013. Another major dubber was HuckleberryHound69, who gave us a Speakonia dub of Disney's Robbin Hood. This dub would unexpectedly introduce Maid Marian into the community, which caused a lot of controversy. FireGoron was also a key player on the Speakonia dub scene, as he helped produce some of anime, notably DragonBall Z. Additional dubs that were made by the community included the 1990s Sonic the Hedgehog OVA and Disney's The Rescuers, but these have since become lost media.

Over the years, the dubs became less prevalent, even during the major revival eras. However, a video by Zak Wolf discussing the Rugrats reboot hinted that he might be doing potential Speakonia dubs of the new series and, in 2021, would make a dub of one of the episodes of the reboot. Bigboyrats would continue to create dubs for both the reboot and the original series, so time will tell if anyone else will hop on board to revitalize Speakonia dubs.

Why Are They Not As Common?

Despite their popularity early on among most members of the community, Speakonia dubs are rarely made. The biggest and most widely accepted reason is copyright. Despite falling under fair use, many of these dubs came out at the worst possible time, as YouTube was under the mists of many companies flagging or taking down videos containing copyrighted material. Viacom, the company that owns Nickelodeon (and to an extent Rugrats), was especially notorious for doing this and it was the proverbial nail in the coffin for the bigboyrats channel. Disney is also infamous for doing this as well. Bigboyrats, fortunately, has most of their videos readily available to watch or download on their Google Drive page, and Huck's Robin Hood dub was discovered on Dailymotion (albeit missing Parts 2 and 4), but the same cannot be said about the others, which appear to be lost for good following the termination of the channels they were on.