Best and Worst Pokemon Dub by 4Kids

[mogoldmember]

With 4Kids' control over the Pokemon Dub coming to an end, I thought I'd start this thread, since someone else thought of the exact same topic over at Bulbagarden. Anyway, I was wondering what people think is the best dubbed Pokemon episode by 4Kids in the past eight years, and what is their worst dubbed episode? Here are my thoughts.


Best Dubbed Episode: Pikachu's Goodbye

The Kanto season has some very good episodes and they are at the highest quality of the series as far as the Dub goes, but I think Pikachu's Goodbye is is singlehandedly the best episode of the entire series for many reason, as well as the best handled Dub. This episode is like no other, as it is true test of friendship for Ash and Pikachu. This is the only episode where Ash even considered letting Pikachu go to live with other Pikachu in the wild. At the end of the episode, the two heroes come to realize that they are inseparable in a plot and sequence of events that are very well thought out. This episode pretty much defines the bond between Ash and Pikachu throughout the rest of the entire series. In addition, this episode has an excellent compilation of background music, with a very strong insert song (Boku No Pikachu).

As far as the Dub goes, this episode pretty much leaves everything in it's place and fans in English speaking understand the bond between Ash and Pikachu in the same way that that those in Japan see it. Part of the feel good spirit of this episode comes from that fact that 4Kids left in just about every piece of original music and even had about twenty-five seconds of straight silence in one scene. Even their own insert song (The Time Has Come) was just as powerful as the original.


Now that the good part's over,

Worst Dubbed Episode: The Legend of Thunder

I think it's pretty obvious why I despise this episode, but I'll go ahead and explain any. For starters, they replace all the original music with an infinately inferior background score for the dub. This is my biggest pet peeve for the regular series, but at least they keep a few pieces of original music. Seriously though, the background music is the least of this special's problems. I think it's safe to say that we all know about the name changes of characters already established in previous episodes and the infamous gender change. But if that's not enough to make this episode the worst dub of the series, how about all the time cuts, unnecesary paint edits, and script changes. Many of the characters who were so thoroughly developed in the original were changed to reflect one-dimensional stereotypes (Marina, Atilla, and Eugene come to mind). So many dubbed lines were changed just so 4Kids could try their luck at humor, but those mistranslated lines just made me groan in disgust. This special was just painful for me to watch, even for a minute.

 

[Lil Brother]

Boku no Pikachu? I think you mean Oyasumi Boku no Pikachu/Goodnight, My Pikachu.

Best dub: The majority of the Pikachu/Pichu shorts. They did keep the music in the later ones after all...

Worst dub: Legend of Thunder and most of Chronicles.

But I'm going by how much was dubbed. LoT was better than a lot of other dubbed episodes when it comes to how enjoyable it is.

 

[Jesse GS the II]

Face it, everybody's gonna say "The Legend of Thunder" was the pits. I wholeheartedly agree, but I've got other beefs with them too. They rewrote the entire script to Myuutwo's Revenge, they threw out the entire backstory to The Water Capitol's Protector Gods, they ordered new scenes for Serebii's Encounter Through Time because they thought that Americans were too stupid to figure out the plot... And that's just the movies! They farmed out "Chronicles" to the team that works on "One Piece", resulting in about a million continuity errors; they released spoilers in the Season 8 opening sequence over a year before they should have been released; they deleted scores upon scores of Japanese music because they thought their own synthesizer crap sounded better; they hacked out ending credits sequences and replaced eyecatches with embarrassingly easy trivia questions that they still got wrong more than half the time; they changed characters' backstories and took an insulting amount of liberties with their overall characterizations; they made careless script mistake after careless script mistake on a seemingly weekly basis; they forbid the Japanese producers to include any Japanese text in the background paintings and forced them to replace it with a nonsensical alphabet of symbols and dots; they tried to hide every last aspect of foreign culture from their viewers; and to top it all off, their CEO insulted every child in America by making the unbelievably boneheaded accusation that kids don't read in a disgusting and repulsive attempt to justify all the lies his company has told its viewers over the last eight years through this pathetic shell of a translation.

I quote Joel Robinson, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo when I lament: "THEY JUST DIDN'T CARE!!!"

 

[Satoshi]

Best Dubbed Episode: "Pokemon! I Choose You" or "Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village"

Now, even the elitest of the elitists can admit that the dub was much better in the first handful of episodes. For the first episode, aside form the add-on electric puns from Prof. Oak and wierd paint aways from close range Japanese words (from what I remember, they left in the Japanese kana when the Pokeballs first appeared out of that machine thing in the lab, but then they were painted away when we get a closer look at them), and the cut of a scene of what was originally Kasumi slapping Satoshi, it was translated pretty faithfully. What I really find interesting is that in the original version, Shigeru told Satoshi to call him "Shigeru-kun" and in the dubbed version Gary told Ash to call him "Mr. Gary", that's the kind of Americanizing that I really want to see in the dub, changing something that simply can't be translated into English (like Japanese suffixes, example above) and leaving everything else as-is. Shame they don't do most of what they did in the first episode (at least they left a little Japanese kana, rather than erasing it entirely like they do in current dub episodes) and leave signs with Katakana/Hiragana/Kanji as they are or simply translate it (like they did with the Ganbare Satoshi, painting it over with English words "Go Ash Go!" (even though Ganbare Satoshi means "Satoshi Good-Luck", but it isn't that totally different) rather than erasing the thing and replacing it with pictures, or even erasing English words entirely). As for "Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden", it simply only had one paint edit and the whole thing was translated pretty well. Heh, and lets not forget that both titles are merely translated from the Japanese titles and are not full of puns.

Worst Dubbed Episode: "The Legend of Thunder" (or the rest of Pokemon Chronicles (aside from "Pikachu's Winter Vacation"))

"The Legend of Thunder" was just...plain sad. First off, what's with them changing almost all the characters' backgrounds and personality? Instead of Kenta talking about the pledge he made to his Pokemon about becoming the best team as they can to Marina, Jimmy talked about helping the "neiborhood kids", which was almost never emphasised throughout the whole damn special (at least in the original, Kenta showed that he cared for his Bakuphoon, which does emphasise his pledge a little as being a good team means you care for each other). Marina's personality and character was really cute in the original version, but in the dub her personality is chopped to bits. The dub makes it look like she wants to be a rock star or something, while in the original she only wants to be an Idol Trainer, which I pretty much saw in her battle versus..ugh, Jimmy. She said that the reason why her Jigglypuff can dodge his Beedrill's attacks is because they danced rehearsed for endless hours and that they could make a rap out of it...While in the original version, Marina said becoming an Idol Trainer isn't just singing and dancing, and that they have to have knowledge in battle. I mean, Marina can be silly sometimes but the dub made her out to be a complete idiot. I would mention how stupid it was that they changed Bashou's gender in the dub and how they make Buson out to be some sort of wrangler in the dub...but that would just lead into a big as hell rant.

The thing that did me in was when they cut out the entire ending. I personally thought Minaki saying that a star shines in all of them, Kudo saying he should be embarrased at that and Minako telling him to "Aw, cut it out you!" was much more funny than the sad attempt at comedy 4Kids played in this special. Them cutting out how Kenta, Marina, and Junichi splitting up reminded them of the first day they left in Wakaba Town proves that they care sh*ts about the characters' backgrounds (and cutting out the very end, the scene where pretty much screams that QuestShipping is not one-sided). Why 4Kids left Chronicles to their One Piece team, I will never know.

Well, aside from Chronicles and Pokemon The First Movie, the Pokemon dub is okay in most of the translation, only the pointless edits and cultural edits shoves it a step down in "good". I can say that I'm interested on how Pokemon USA will handle the episodes.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I would mention how stupid it was that they changed Buson gender in the dub and how they make Bashou out to be some sort of wrangler in the dub...but that would just lead into a big as hell rant.

Strike that, reverse it.

Buson would make one hell of a woman, though.

 

[Satoshi]

Strike that, reverse it.

Buson would make one hell of a woman, though.

Whoops, my bad. I originally intended to bring up how they shoved how "Buson was a wrangler" in our throats when he wasn't orignally and then mention how they changed Bashou's gender, but then I realized that changing Basou's gender was far worst (it was obvious as hell he was a man in the original), so I decided to mention it first, so I switched them but forgot to switch the names.

 

[Kabuto]

Worst Dubbed: As Said By Many Others legend of Thunder was the worst. Many terrible lines and the voices and characters were slaughtered in the dub. All the Chronicles have the Worst Dubbing but Legend of Thunder wins by a landslide.

Best Dubbed: Almost every kanto episode. They kept alot of the soundtrack and the lines and scenes were left alone for the most part.

 

[Pure]

I agree with Rancid Meat completely.

They started mangling the original too much around Johto. Legend of Thunder was so much better in Japanese, but I still accepted it because it had Alakazam in it.

 

[Medea]

Best Dub: Most and/or all episodes from Kanto.

Worst Dub:

A Fan With A Plan-IT'S NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE TRAINER CHOICE! There were also some crappy mistakes made as well (and very easy to pick out)

i.e. When May said that Skitty did well in the Fallarbor contest. And we know for a fact that Skitty was NOT in that contest, it was Beautifly. And seeing that it this episode aired at least 7 months after the Fallarbor (it wasn't a long time ago)

Legend of Thunder & most of the Chronicles: Yeah, I saw that piece of crap 3-parter (in English it's a piece of crap) and a good chunk of the other chronicle episodes and let's just say after the...

-name forgetting
-repeatedly cut scenes
-repeatedly using the line of "You rock and you rule" (I know it was just for that one special but it drove me nuts)

I've lost respect somewhere here.

 

[wobbanut]

I'm not sure about the best because I love the dub and have many episodes I've enjoyed. Probably the best ones are the ones that translate the action into such great humor, in the cases of very odd visual gags followed by humorous dub punch lines.

The worst dub, though, is no contest: Same Old Song and Dance. I will rarely say I'm embarrassed by Pokemon, but that was one episode I'm embarrassed to say I watch. The songs were so horrible, sounding like something for a preschool album. What's most disturbing is that it goes along with these shots of men in the audience, which comes across as just... wrong. The only thing I like about the episode is Team Rocket's song motto.

 

[◘Ins0mnIac◘]

Worst: Legend of Thunder *gasp*

Best: One that stands out to me is a filler but still, "The Bicker The Better" just because more emotion was needed in that episode due to excessive screaming as well as appology.

 

[intergalactic platypus]

The first few were the best because they were slavishly faithful to the original. The absolute worst was definitely LOT for many reasons (Particuarly turning Marina into the most unlikable character in Pokemon), but I must also agree that Same Old Song And Dance qualifies for its horrific songwriting (on stage in a puffy pink dress singing you gotta have friends :/)

 

[The Big Al]

At least the girl could sing. I'd rather have so-so lyrics sung by someone who can actually sing than brilliant lyrics sung by someone who's tone death.