How ironic since I Choose You was the other way round.
I admit, empathising with Ryu's argument, I would have gladly switched the two movies' stance, since I Choose You was based on nostalgic interest (and a lot of the Japanese themes were ones the original 4Kids dub actually used so that element translated even outside the games), while Power of Us seems to be largely a more original character focused story.
The problem with that reasoning is that it implies that you would need a specific reason to
not change something. I mean, yeah, I said that I would accept them changing the ED song, and there was an actual legit case to be made for putting in the English Lugia theme in order to appeal to the nostalgia of international fans, much like how changing the opening theme in I Choose You was the one and only music change in that movie that I could agree with, but... basically those are changes that I'd consider justifiable purely because of music changes done previously that have become iconic. I don't think 4Kids was technically in the right to change the theme song or rescore the entirety of M2 in the first place, but since we live in a world where that happened and the music they made has become as iconic and beloved as it has... Yeah using those tracks in place of the Japanese pieces they originally replaced makes sense. But outside of cases like those, or situations where the original music is just flat-out not
available, the dub should keep the original score because
it is not the dubbers' job to try and "fix" the movie. Of course I also don't think Pokémon's music ever
needed fixing as Miyazaki's score to me is adequate with occasional moments of greatness, but this point still applies even for stuff where I do think the original music was awful. Like, as an example, the third Japanese Digimon movie might just have the most boring, unfitting score I've ever heard for
anything, (imagine an hour straight of droning elevator music. In an action movie. It's basically that) and for all the other nonsense Saban did with that dub, their music quite plainly backed up the visuals better... well aside from that part where they played "Hey Digimon" but their soundtrack was still a net improvement... But even so, that
was them overstepping their boundaries. Just because that movie was a total trainwreck that had good animation but literally nothing else going for it, that still didn't give them the right to scrap half the movie, recut it into a goofy self-parody and throw in a whole bunch of contemporary American pop music. Or for a Pokémon related example, Yumemiru Lovely Boy from the Deoxys movie makes my ears bleed and 4Kids's "This Side of Paradise" is an infinite improvement by virtue of actually being listenable... But the proper way to handle that ending would still have been for them to make an English cover of the song that I hated.
...But at the end of the day, even though them keeping the original music here is kind of one movie late as for the last one there was literally
all the reason in the world to do so and I think there are plenty of arguments against it that don't even get
into my rant about how dubs shouldn't change stuff that doesn't need changing... I'll still take this as a clear step in the right direction. It doesn't make me any less annoyed at how the last movie was handled, but I am very happy that they did
this one right.
