| Finally! Uncut "Yu-Gi-Oh!" DVD's! |
I never thought this day would come. I never dreamed that I would be holding in my hand an uncut, subtitled, duel language DVD of “Yu-Gi-Oh!” from 4Kids Entertainment. But here it is, sitting in my lap with me still awe struck (I wanted both DVD’s, but there was an economic reality I had to face). Not only that, but an uncut DVD of “Shaman King” also sits in my lab next to the “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD. This, above all else, proves that dreams really do come true. Despite running a website that was fighting for uncut “Yu-Gi-Oh!” to come to the states I never actually thought it would. After all, 4Kids Entertainment is definitely the worst “anime distributer” out there. 4Kids track record certainly hasn’t been shining, and along with the fact that 4Kids has never released ANY of their anime uncut, but they also seemed to be pretty much against anime all together! Al Kahn considers anime to be a “dirty word,” they brag about how they can make so many edits that kids don’t even know that these shows come from Japan, and their response to fans complaining about the treatment of anime has always been to give us the middle finger and then continue to ignore us. However it looks like in the end the voices of fans (and our threats that we would BUY uncut DVD’s) prevails, and so we now have uncut DVD’s of “Shaman King” and “Yu-Gi-Oh!” Since this is a “Yu-Gi-Oh!” website I’ll mainly be covering just the “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD, and I’ll let Lovely of “Shaman King Uncensored” tackle the “Shaman King” DVD. I guess I’ll start with the cover of the DVD, which definitely looks nice. The cover is very simple yet very nice to look at. It consists of Yugi smiling while in one of his dueling poses in the bottom right corner of the box, while Black Magician is in the upper left corner of the box. In the back is a red wall with a golden border surrounding the two characters, and the background is filled with Egyptian symbols galore. The logo is the typical “Shonen Jump’s Yu-Gi-Oh!” logo, however unlike the TV dub, THIS DVD definitely deserves to be associated with the “Shonen Jump” name! On the top of the box is the “Original Uncut Edition” banner while on the bottom is the banner for the title of this DVD, “The Shadow Games.” The back of the box has the uncut banner on the top, pictures of Exodia and Blue Eyes White Dragon, and on the bottom...well, well, well, what is this? A “TV-PG” rating on the back? That’s interesting, I thought 4Kids was originally going to put a “Suitable For Ages 13 & Up” on the back of the box. Maybe they changed their minds and went with a rating that was more recognizable to the general public. It should also be noted that the “Japanese Dialog with English Subtitles” and “English Dub” are labeled as “Bonus Features” on the back of the box. I guess we’re lucky that 4Kids is nice enough to give us some audio bonus features, otherwise I guess we’d have to watch the show as if it were a silent film. Inside the box is an ad for the other uncut “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD’s as well as the “Shaman King” DVD’s. Upon putting the DVD in the player you get the 4Kids Entertainment logo as well as three unskipable previews; one for “Shaman King” DVD’s, one for Fox Box, and one for WWF Wrestling toys (I’m not kidding). Likewise “Shaman King” has previews for “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD’s and Fox Box, but no WWF Wrestling toys. My question is why do the “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD’s have this toy commercial and the “Shaman King” DVD’s don’t? Is there some mad conspiracy behind the decision to do this? And why are these previews unskipable? By now EVERYONE must know how much people HATE unskipable previews! Why does FUNimation continue to do this with the DVD’s they distribute? The only good thing about these unskipable previews is that I know in advance that I have at least 5 minutes to prepare a Pepsi for myself before the DVD starts, otherwise though these previews seem absolutely useless. It should be noted however that if you have a DVD player with a "Title" button on your remote you may be able to bypass the previews. We then get to the menu of the DVD, which is pretty static and lifeless. Strangely enough, the menu for this DVD plays the dub music in the background instead of the Japanese music, which I find to be a little bit on the odd side since the dub music never actually shows up in the episodes for this DVD. The DVD has two options in the set up department: Language in English or Japanese, and subtitles or no subtitles. Immediately I put the Japanese language on with subtitles (much to my embarrassment when I found out that the Japanese language is the default language, and proving once and for all who these DVD’s are made for), and proceeded to watch the show. I sighed a sigh of relief: The translation was WONDERFUL!! It was so good to finally be able to watch a subtitled copy of “Yu-Gi-Oh!” with good subtitles and an accurate translation! I was in heaven...until I noticed a couple of lines that shouldn’t have been there...but we’ll get to that later. I then decided to sample the dub, to see if the dub was as improved as 4Kids had been promising it would. The dub is, to be blunt, a HUGE step in the right direction! No, the voices haven’t changed (much to my disappointment), but I can’t deny that the acting has gotten better. Yes, while the voices are still off in how they should sound, the acting has improved enough that voices aren’t as big of an issue as they were before. Not only that, but (unlike previous speculations) the original music and sound effects are included in the dub, so people who don’t like to watch anime subtitled (heaven forbid) can see what the big fuss is about. Another nice bonus is during the card battles 4Kids fixed it so that when Yugi changes into his alter ego, that Dark Yugi’s voice is now heard throughout the whole duel, even when he’s thinking to himself. For those five people reading this who don't know what I'm talking about, in the English dub when Yugi transformed into his alter ego his voice got deeper but his thinking voice was the same, which forced 4Kids to start screwing up scene’s and re-writing whole twists because this was the wrong way to dub Yugi. Now that 4Kids has fixed this mistake the translation and dialog can be more faithful and accurate in the way the character is portrayed. Dark Yugi may still have the worst voice in the show, but at least the acting has been corrected. Unfortunately one thing they did NOT do in the dub is dub the opening and closing songs, which I must admit to being slightly disappointed about this. I love the dubbed songs that FUNimation has provided with their dubs, and I was hoping they would provide dubbed versions of the songs here too. I guess someone decided that this was not needed for some reason and opted not to dub them. As for these episodes being uncut, they are uncut to a certain extent, but there are two omissions that some people may not be too fond of. The first omission is a minor one. In the Japanese broadcast of the show the eye catcher played twice, but on this DVD it only plays once. The second omission is that the previews for the next episode are missing, and there has been no reason as to why these previews were not included on the DVD’s. Neither of these omissions are too important in my eye’s (the only purpose previews have is to ruin the story for the next episode), but some people do care about these things, so it’s a shame they weren’t included. Now let’s talk about the subtitles for this DVD, which are guarantied to upset a lot of people. Right now there are some rumors spreading around the net as to whether or not these DVD’s have properly translated subtitles or dubtitles (which are subtitles for the dub of a show that are passed on as a literal translation). I wish I could give you a yes or no answer on whether or not these are dubtitles or not, but the situation is more complicated then that. If you were to look at the subtitles from a PURE technical view, then yes these would be dubtitles, but the truth of the matter is the subtitles provided are both dubtitles AND translated subtitles! You see, the translation for the dub is practically a word-for-word translation. If you were to compare the translation for the Japanese script to the new dub script, then you will find that there are almost no changes between the two. There are a few changes, but a good 98% of the dub script is a direct and faithful translation of the Japanese scripts. The controversy is that because the dub translation is so faithful to the Japanese script, someone decided to use the same subtitles for the dub as the subtitles for the Japanese version, with the only difference being the name changes. For the most part this isn’t a problem since, again, the new translation is pratically perfect, but there are a FEW lines of dialog that are different from the dub, and those lines do find their way in the Japanese subs! For example, in the English dub of episode 1 Pegasus goes “Hmmm” after hearing about Yugi’s victory with Kaiba. In the Japanese version Pegasus just smiled, yet “Hmmm” shows up in the subtitles anyway, which is sure to make a few people scratch their heads in confusion. Another line that showed up in the dub of episode 1 that didn’t show up in the Japanese version was Yugi saying “I’m going to attack.” This ad-lib is not as noticeable in the Japanese subs since the line appears while Yugi is still talking, but if you know some Japanese you can tell that the line was added. I’m actually rather surprised that these ad-libs made their way into the Japanese subs, but I’m guessing 4Kids wanted to spend as little money as possible on dealing with the subtitles, so using the dub subtitles with different names was probably the best solution they could think of since the dub translation was 98% accurate anyway, thinking that people wouldn’t notice. Trust me 4Kids, fans notice these things. It's actually worse on the "Shaman King" DVD's as the Japanese subtitled track also subtitles sound effects and noises, acting as both the Japanese subs and hearing impared subtitles. So what’s my take on this issue? Well this is certainly an issue that needs to be fixed, but this issue (contrary to what some people have predicted) is not fatal enough to ruin the enjoyment of the DVD. Yes there are a few ad-libs, and there’s a line or two that is not translated properly because of this, but (as stated above) these changes are few and far between, and otherwise the subtitles work just as well for the Japanese version as they do the English version. However despite this not being too big of an issue now, at the end of the this IS day an issue that needs to be dealt with, and I STRONGLY urge everyone reading this to let 4Kids and FUNimation know about the problem and request that they fix it! The best way to do this would be to mail your receipt to 4Kids with a POLITE letter saying that you are happy that uncut DVD’s of “Yu-Gi-Oh!” are coming out, but that future DVD’s of the series needs to have this problem fixed! PLEASE don’t boycott the DVD’s for because of this though! This WAS 4Kids first uncut DVD, and compared to FUNimations first “Dragon Ball Z” DVD’s (the “Ginyu Assault” DVD’s), these DVD’s are very well made, and comparing the two DVD’s will make you realize that the situation could have been MUCH worse! Right now the only thing that will convince 4Kids to make more of these DVD’s is to buy them. So buy them, send them the letter with the receipt, and hopefully the next DVD will contain PROPER subtitles for both versions! I say this because if these DVD’s fail 4Kids will NOT look think that the reason the DVD’s bombed were because they screwed something up, they will think that the reason the DVD’s bombed is because no one really wanted uncut “Yu-Gi-Oh!” DVD’s in the first place! The situation is annoying, but all things considered it’s NOT fatal, and I’m willing to let them off the hook this one time since this IS their first uncut DVD, and every anime company that has only had experience in edited dubs screws up the first DVD’s to some extent! Now why am I asking you guys to send in the receipts with the letters? Because by sending in the receipt's you are showing the company that you are a paying customer, that you bought their disks, but that you will reconsider buying future disks if this problem is not delt with. This tactic gives you the face of a "paying customer" instead of a random complainer. Ignoring the subtitle problem altogether the real treat with these DVD’s is finally being able to see uncut “Yu-Gi-Oh!” in the states. Listen to the music and pay attention to the dialog real close. Notice how much more mature the script is? Notice how much more effective the music is, and how the right type of music was picked for just the right scene’s. Pay particular attention to the scene with Yugi and his Grandpa 9 minutes and 30 seconds into the first episode and the summoning of Exodia. Aren’t these scene’s just beautiful? The music, the smooth animation, the dialog and the voices all come together to create truly moving scene’s. How can ANYONE watch the dub on TV after being exposed to this?! I don’t think anyone WILL be able to watch “Yu-Gi-Oh!” on TV after they get a taste of the show in its uncut glory! These DVD’s are a GIFT to “Yu-Gi-Oh!” fans, and I’m very glad that they came out! It’s disappointing that someone goofed with the subtitles, but that is a minor problem that will most likely be fixed in the future. Right now I recommend that everyone who is a fan of “Yu-Gi-Oh!” to go out and buy these DVD’s, whether you are a fan who’s just seen the show on TV or a hard-core who’s been waiting for an uncut version of this show to come out for years! Arigato 4Kids, for finally giving us the version of “Yu-Gi-Oh!” we’ve always wanted in the first place. NEXT TIME: Next time we'll be talking about the Iraq war as well as the presidential debates. ... Alright I'm just kidding, what I'm REALLY going to be talking about is a certainly change made by Viz regarding the "Yu-Gi-Oh!" manga in the "Shonen Jump" magazine! What's this change? Tune in next time to find out. |
| Past Editorials |
|