Sorry, I don’t really know how to phrase my question. For example, we know that over here in the USA, a box set of dragon ball z contains the English dub and the original Japanese track. If someone from somewhere else wanted to watch, let’s say SpongeBob on DVD, could they expect the original English track or was it commonplace to only have the local dub? ETA: Of course I’m referring to the time period before streaming, and I mean any type of popular cartoon.
In alot of the developed countries you’d get the local dub if available as well as the english track. The most common case would be to have the local language subtitles along with the english track. It mostly depends on an IP being picked up for localization by a local publishing studio and passing the censor board of the respective country.
In alot of developing countries you’d not get anything other than the english track so no subtitles at all. However it’s actually not so definitive because if you went to a store to buy say “SpongeBob anthology DVD collection” you’d most likely end up with a bootleg set which is just pirated off the web and burned onto a couple of DVDs with a generic SpongBob Logo sticker(Literally) on the DVDs. So basically random, it could have subtitles burned onto the video in arabic for all you know.