Needless to say, if I would have been able to tailor my own words, "Gorilla man good" would not have been my choice of phrases to pacify Todd about knocking over his hummingbird feeder in a drunken stupor the other night, but it should be noted that the subtitles more or less matched my end of the dialogue, proving that subtitles are a viable (if misleading) form of communication.

However, with Todd's anger at the brink of explosion, I had to come up with something quick, so like many voice actors, I departed from the script and improvised, "Dude, it wasn't me. Owen ran into it with his car," at which time a surprised Owen escaped out the front door followed by an irate, gullible Todd.

Soon after Owen returned, having apparently convinced Todd that the hummingbirds must have broken their own feeder in protest of the high fat diet Todd was feeding them, we quickly ditched the script, loaded up on Jack and Coke and spent the rest of the evening back with our old stand-bys, wise-ass creative translations into English of English phrases. It seemed the easiest and least dangerous, considering the circumstances.

Now, we're a tad embarrassed about the way we conducted this experiment. Ostensibly we started this experiment to provide to the anime community hard scientific data on the effect of subtitles on the human brain. In actuality it was just an excuse to spend two weeks in the bar on the clock. We realize that our efforts were half-ass attempts to look busy and at the end of every evening, the pad of paper went down while the old debate concerning who is the hottest female anime cop resumed.

As an act of humility and for the benefit of the anime community at large, I have conducted this experiment in a controlled environment. My conclusion is that dubs are easier to process than subtitles. Subtitles are useful to those people in our society who: a) are speakers of a language other than English, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Bachi or Love; b) embrace the beauty of the written word over the aural disaster that is the human voice; c) are deaf; or d) need to fill the void in their lives by launching into diatribes about the purity of the Japanese anime art form infected by the low grade dubbing that makes up for a majority of the work released by American anime voice-over producers.

Well, there ya go, The Scientific Method at its grandest. Just remember kids, subbed or dubbed - it's still better than watching yet another "Quantum Leap" marathon on the Sci Fi channel.