This Week in Anime

The release of new dubs and adaptations has breathed new life into old classics like Digimon. Join Chris and Nick this week as they explore these classics and their recent makeover.

These series are streaming on Hulu and Netflix.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Discotek releasing the Digimon movies in both their uncut and American-edited dubbed forms wouldn’t technically be that surprising. The fan-favorite publisher has already put out the Digimon Adventure TV series in its linguistic iterations on spiffy Blu-rays, the same as they have for several other anime. But the way they’re going about this is what’s so monumental. Just peep that trailer; that’s “Butter-Fly,” the original Japanese OP for Digimon Adventure, playing over new English narration from the unmistakable Joshua Seth as Tai!

It was an announcement that took everyone at least a bit by surprise, especially that they’d be dubbing the uncut, original version of those films. For the past 20-odd years, the only version with English voices was the Robotech‘d Frankenstein, which changed all the music. Getting not just a new, more faithful localization but one that brings back as much of the original cast as possible is a big power move.

It’s an occurrence that says something not just about Digimon, but about that old dub specifically. The series is an escapee from the time when anime was just another cartoon on Saturday morning, and rice balls were jelly-filled donuts would be an almost quaint memory if that weren’t the sort of thing that the vehemently anti-dub crowd didn’t still bring up to this day.

It’s a bit of a curiosity. It’s still a product of a time when adaptive scripts played fast and loose and would add in gags wherever they could, but it’s still demonstrably more faithful than the treatment many other shows got back in the day. I remember when all you had to do to make a One Piece fan’s blood boil was quote the 4Kids opening rap.

The Digimon dub maintained its Japanese elements rather than papered over them. This helped endear the gateway series that got many millennials into anime. Even the requisite renames were here presented as “nicknames” for the characters’ Japanese monikers.

By comparison, that 4Kids version of One Piece wound up disowned, decommissioned, and replaced by a more faithful re-recorded dub from Funimation. This does happen elsewhere, but less often than you might think.

Yeah, most re-dubs I can think of are a) for shows that weren’t aimed primarily and elementary schoolers and b) usually done out of necessity rather than trying to Memory Hole an entire localization effort. When Funimation re-dubbed Escaflowne, it was to include a full release of the director’s cut, for instance.

Honestly, such is the fate for many localized anime they shoved onto TV at the turn of the century. It was the wild west, where broadcasters were grabbing whatever they thought they could make toys out of, and if it required them to turn all the ramen into spaghetti, then so be it.

Even in that edited form, these anime still work out as kids’ shows. And every anime is someone’s first, meaning that for all the misgivings people may have about stuff like 4Kids One Piece, there are plenty who hold nostalgia for its ilk, to the point that Discotek has carved out a nice corner of their catalog releasing adapted versions of series. Usually before their uncut Japanese versions!

The inclusion of those uncut Japanese language releases is what makes it work for me. Much as I have nostalgia for those old dubs and find a lot of charm in revisiting them, I’m delighted that they’re not the only option anymore.

These series get lucky, but availability across formats and platforms can be pretty hit-or-miss for anime in this category. At that time, inexpensive access to uncut Japanese versions of Cardcaptor Sakura would have been a pipe dream to franchise fans. But now you can stream the whole thing on Crunchyroll. The trick here is that the dub that’s also available, while technically faithful, is a relatively rough Southeast Asian recording by Animax. The old “Cardcaptors” adaptation by Nelvana? That’s been excised.

Kind of a pity, personally, given that it spawned one of my all-time favorite pieces of anime tie-in media.

It seems that even when acting as an introduction that you can still fondly remember, changing the original series too much is what dooms a re-versioned dub to history rather than an active part of a series legacy. Digimon still edited things a lot, but the end product still felt like its base series, compared to the hacked-up versions of Cardcaptors and Sailor Moon.

Granted, there were still some fumbles. The old script writers could not resist inserting a pun or a stupid gag when the opportunity presented itself, and while that usually worked out, there were some glaring moments where it didn’t. I still remember groaning at this line.

I worry that I’ve Angela Anaconda’d myself into liking that bit, but there’s no denying the dub still retains many quirks of its era. On the other hand, I’d argue the tone still mostly aligns. One thing I distinctly remember being struck by when I watched the Japanese version of Our War Game (which constitutes the second third of Digimon: The Movie) was the sheer number of jokes present in that original version!

That generally broad quality may be why Digimon has been able to carry the style and (most of) its English dub cast forward into new productions like the tri films and Last Evolution Kizuna, even before this new movie announcement. That’s a luxury afforded only to a few other legacy series like Dragon Ball or Digimon‘s erstwhile counterpart, Pokémon.

Pokémon is a weird one because it’s the only property from that era that has stayed the same for decades. Outside of the cast change when The Pokémon Company took control, the voices have been largely the same. The release strategy has stayed the same – dub only, with all the names localized. Much to the consternation of adult fans who would probably sell their firstborn to get a subtitled/simulcast release instead of waiting months to watch the dub on Netflix.

I’d like to know if Nintendo and TPCI’s franchise control causes that. It means we have to hear about developments in the Pokémon anime like reading the sports pages from different countries the next day. Though they do seem to put in a surprising amount of effort to synergize the regional versions of the anime when it does arrive here.




Changing the music in an anime dub when it originally aired? Sacrilege. Changing the music to call back to the original English theme song over two decades later? HYPE!

There’s a 7-year-old inside the recesses of my mind going absolutely bananas over that. But I do find the insistence on only releasing it this way silly. Some kids watch subtitled anime these days, so it’s not like releasing the JP-language version would ruin brand continuity, and lord knows TPCI can afford it. Sticking to a business model from the last century seems so outdated. Thank god no other company has tried that with a beloved and long-running property!

Oh yeah, this is the big plot twist: For as much as Digimon‘s legacy is a reminder of yesteryear’s adaptational style, it never really went away. Hell, it’s even some of the same people from back then behind the Glitter-fiction of our beloved Pretty Cure, if you’ll notice that Saban pustule sticking out of the title card. And it is like they never left, down to swapping out the names for characters, concepts, and even okonomiyaki.

It’s like loading up YouTube and finding a new video from some terrible “comedy” channel you followed back in middle school. To most anime fans, adaptation style had long been regulated to Power Rangers. Yet, in 2015, they were out here giving all the characters white girl names.

Sure, I can laugh at the sadly buried 2009 Canadian dub of Futari wa Pretty Cure blessing its main characters with the incredible names of “Natalie Blackstone” and “Hannah Whitehouse” (Yes, really). But there’s something only a little galling about a 2017 dub of Doki Doki! Precure opting to give a character named “Alice” a different Western name. While brazenly keeping Japanese onomatopoeia in its title.

Regina, at least, got to keep her name. As well as her Best Friend-ship with Mana, er, Maya.

And, like, I get it. This aimed to sell to the actual kids rather than the weirdo adults who have been following the franchise through fansubs for years. But every decision for these two seasons seemed stuck in an era where American audiences were assumed to be uncultured idiots who would set fire to their television if there was a foreign word on primetime.

That’s exactly the case. I’d already watched and enjoyed all of Doki Doki! Precure when it first aired, so I wasn’t going to have any reason to give Doki Doki Glitterature Club here a look (until five years later when we came upon the subject of this column). But the times, unlike Saban, have changed. Small wonder Glitter Force dried up after two seasons (though they’re still available on Netflix, avoiding the fate of so many others we’ve mentioned…for now), and we get the real Pretty Cure in simulcast form nowadays.

But then that arguably swings into the opposite issue, in that a sub-only Japanese release on Crunchyroll means the series is almost solely in the viewing wheelhouse of, as you pointed out, the weirdo adults who follow the franchise.

It suggests that Toei has mostly given up on trying to recreate the franchise’s success over here and is mostly banking on the hardcore niche of adult fans. Though on the topic of not underestimating children, I know at least a few parents who have gotten their children into watching subtitled anime. So, it’s not impossible for some curious kids could stumble upon the adventures of Sarah Winger and Michelle Crystals.

There’s hope in how kids and their taste for entertainment have evolved. And I’m not going to pretend that much of it isn’t simply that I really, really like Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure and think it would be neat to see it catch on with its target audience here. It got people talking back when it premiered, meaning Toei and Crunchyroll could have had a real hit on their hands. And the sort of thing is 200% doable, as evidenced by Tsubaraya opting to eat Toei‘s superhero lunch with a near-simultaneous YouTube release of an English-dubbed version of the new Ultraman Blazar.




That’s notably far from the first Ultraman dub, by the way. As another example of the same characters coming back in this story, you are not going to believe who was responsible for the old English dub of Ultraman Tiga.

That’s cool. It suggests that some people are paying enough attention to adapt to new methods of localization and release.

Pretty Cure is already one thing, but if you know me, you know I’m hoping for Toei to take a look at this and consider giving Kamen Rider or Super Sentai this sort of treatment. Whether that ever happens in the face of Power Rangers still existing is the bigger question, though notably, even that franchise appears to finally be stepping away from the adaptational sensibilities that carried it for nearly thirty years.

It may be a bold new era. Sure, you can still watch the old 4Kids version of Yu-Gi-Oh! on Netflix, but you can also flip over to Crunchyroll and watch the uncut Japanese version, as well as subtitled versions of all its sequel series. The Digimon franchise saw its last few entries get the subtitled simulcast treatment. It says something about how we’ve moved on that a new dub of Digimon Adventure material with the old cast and style is being produced, not for today’s impressionable youth but for nostalgic adults.

If nothing else, I’m just glad things have shifted as much as they have. For whatever issues the modern anime dubbing landscape has, it’s at least a positive change that something like Ghost Stories couldn’t happen again.

If nothing else, stuff like that puts Digimon in a much more respectable light. Some added puns and punchlines have certainly aged better than…whatever the hell that is.

I can see why they added a “Prodigious!” here and there into Digimon. And as we discussed, it helps that all versions of the show are available now. One reason stuff like 4Kids One Piece stung at the time was because that was the only official way to see a translated version of the series. It’s why even if the dub itself is mostly harmless, I’m still annoyed at Glitter Force for potentially keeping a subbed version of Doki Doki! Precure off of streaming. That dubbed version of Ghost Stories has subsumed the series, so you can’t even watch it in Japanese on Crunchyroll!

One can only imagine how a Macross fan like yourself felt about this sort of thing for the longest time.

I cannot comment further in that regard without turning this column into an actionable threat, so I’ll say that it galls me whenever social media gets in a tizzy over some minor meme reference in a new dub when for years, Steven Foster‘s proto-Abridged series was treated like anything besides a total piss-take on its source material. I understand why they didn’t, but honestly, a redub of that from Discotek would’ve been nice.

The company’s recent dips into dubbing with Sound Cadence Studios have turned out well, but there’s still only so much they can do. And it is nice to see them expanding their ability on something with positive energy, like these new Digimon dubs. Was it a double standard the way anime fans celebrated this happening when there’s been so much vitriol towards dubs generally otherwise? Sure, but it was still pretty fun to see that celebration.

Oh, for sure. It was positively electric to see that announcement break across the internet. I’m glad the movies are getting this new treatment alongside a comprehensive release. It’s the kind of treatment I’d like to see older titles get.

Depending on how successful this release ends up (and it will almost definitely be successful), it’s an approach we might see more of. I don’t know if Discotek could manage to go back and dub, say, the entire second series of Medabots, but then I never dreamed of getting an uncut Our War Game or the full version of Hurricane Touchdown either.

Or, who knows, maybe it’ll even inspire other companies bigger and more powerful than Discotek to try something like this.

It’s a wild new frontier, and anything is possible! Except for an uncut release of SDF Macross, lol.

Damn, who knows how different the landscape would be today if Saban and 4Kids had also gotten into real estate.