Los Simpson (Latin American Spanish)

The series debuted on Canal 5 in Mexico on Christmas Day of 1990, and has since been broadcasted on several channels throughout Latin America, most notably Fox.

Dubbing History
As mentioned previously, the first time the series was broadcast in Latin America fully dubbed, was on December 25, 1990 on Canal 5 in Mexico. It was Televisa themself who produced and bought the dubbing rights to the series in 1990, despite its rival television station TV Azteca acquiring the rights to broadcast the series.

Auditions for the roles of the characters were extensive, overseen by both Televisa and Fox representatives in Mexico. For the main character, Homer Simpson, several actors were tested, but Humberto Vélez was later picked, and would soon be known as the voice actor for Homer Simpson in Latin America. Despite the promotion, many people had low expectations of the series and thought it would preform poorly, including Humberto Vélez and Nancy MacKenzie, who even thought at first to reject voicing Homer and Marge Simpson.

The series was first dubbed by Audiomaster 3000, with a characteristically Mexican adaptation, including idioms and several references to Mexican culture, while also trying to include a few words from other Latin American countries. In addition, voice effects were frequently added to the characters, whereas the English version didn't add include any. Other contributions of Mexican dubbing include the accents of origin inserted in various characters, as well as imitations of other Spanish-speaking accents (such as the inclusion of Spanish accents in the episode "Day of the Jackanapes" from season 12). After the change of voices and direction of the series, the Mexican and Latin American idioms were entirely scrapped from future scripts, becoming more neutral and attached to the original English scripts. As Marina Huerta said in an interview, it was the decision of the New Art studio to stop using idioms in the series. Despite this, some characters retained their accents originating in Mexico, which were inserted from the beginning of the series, an example are the cases of Otto and Lou, who speak with a marked Mexican suburban accent, although their dialogues themselves lack idioms.

Since the beginning of the series, the dub has tried to censor a few aspects, mainly sexual or religious references, making it more suitable for all audiences, although in more recent seasons these censorships have practically disappeared since the series has become much more open to those issues than it was in its beginnings, so censoring it would be practically impossible.

Controversy
In late 2004, a conflict occurred between Futura Doblaje y Regrabaciones and most of their actors, who belonged to the National Actors Association. This was due to how the dubbing actors wanted the studio not to withdraw a clause from the contract that indicated that only actors belonging to the National Actors Association could work in the studio; however, the studio wanted to change that clause in order to allow independent actors to work in the studio. The company intended to hire 75% of ANDA actors and 25% of independent voice actors, but the actors who until then had done the dubbing considered that this meant losing part of their benefits, and that was why they did not agree and eventually the conflict led to the actors carrying out a strike against the studio that began in January 2005. The conflict was not resolved in time for the dubbing of season 16, so Fox had ordered that it would be dubbed by other actors, technically firing most of the original voice actors.

This also affected other Fox series that were dubbed in the same studio, such as Futurama, Malcolm in the Middle, King of the Hill and Family Guy.

Majority of the staff being axed
When the cast change occurred at the beginning of season 16, one of the most noticeable differences was the drastic cutback in the series' cast. During the first fifteen seasons the series had a large cast of actors to dub many of them, including the six who voiced the main characters and many of those who voiced the supporting characters dubbing only one character, at most two and occasionally doing episodic characters, even after the closure of Audiomaster 3000. But at the beginning of season 16 and with the cast change, the number of actors reduced to half, with one actor giving voice to four major characters at a time. Even the actors who voice the main characters had to dub other secondary characters. Ever since Nicolás Frías took over the direction of the series, this cutback has been less noticeable.

Cast

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