Plot: Mai has lost her passion for dueling after losing to Jonouchi, so she concocts a plan to have Ryuzaki beat Jonouchi for her. The catch? Yugi isn’t allowed to give him any advice. Being entirely on his own in the tournament for the first time, can Jonouchi beat Ryuzaki or will his dinosaurs make him extinct? …..Dammit, 4Kids, stop infiltrating my mind!
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They edit out Anzu’s inner monologue in the dub, which makes it awkward when you suddenly see her before Mai introduces the condition of the duel.
The punch sound is edited out of the dub, and Tristan says he was shoved when it’s obvious he was punched in the face….Don’t worry. We’ll have even funnier punch/shove moments than this.
In the original, Mai tells Ryuzaki that he’ll get his reward after he wins. Jonouchi doesn’t know what she means by that, so he cheekily asks what the reward is, very subtly implying that he thinks it’s something romantic or naughty. In the dub, this is omitted, obviously. They also edit the part where Jonouchi implies he wouldn’t mind being Mai’s slave. Jonouchi’s kinda a perv….
One of the aspects of this season that bugged me was the status of the Flame Swordsman, which changes a couple of times over the course of the first season.
First off, Flame Swordsman is a fusion monster, not a regular monster. However, apparently a regular version of the card was made later on. Jonouchi flip flops back and forth between using a regular version and fusion version yet he regularly summons both instead of performing a fusion.
Secondly, it has no effect; it’s a plain monster, even in this version as shown by the color of the card.
Third, since when is fire strong against dinosaurs and why? Eventually, the card stays as a regular monster card, but, for this episode, 4Kids changes it to its purple fusion appearance when it’s regular yellow in the original. Since I believe the fusion version is the ‘right’ version, at least at this point in time, I’ll give 4Kids some props.
In the original, Jonouchi doesn’t announce that the card he’s placing in the trap field is a Time Wizard. Mai and Ryuzaki guess that it is, but what idiot would declare what FACE DOWN card he just played? Even if it can’t be sprung as a trap, that’s just stupid.
Overall, I liked this episode. It’s nice to see Jonouchi dueling on his own two feet, and Ryuzaki’s a pretty interesting opponent.
Next episode, Jonouchi’s duel with Ryuzaki concludes. Can he face down the fearsome Red-Eyes Black Dragon?
Plot: Yugi accepts Pegasus’ invitation to Duelist Kingdom in order to recover his grandfather’s soul. Yugi helps Jonouchi get aboard the ship heading for the tournament by giving him one of his star chips, while Anzu and Honda sneak onboard.
While aboard, they meet some of their future opponents; Insect Haga, Dinosaur Ryuzaki and Mai Kujaku. Haga gets his hands on the Exodia cards and throws them overboard to ensure that they can never be used against him. Jonouchi jumps into the waters below to recover the cards but can only retrieve two before needing rescue. After being rescued by Anzu, Honda and Yugi, Jonouchi tells them of his sister’s medical troubles, which is why he desperately needs the prize money from the tournament.
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In the original, as Yugi’s on the school roof, he sees Pegasus’s face overlaid on the sunset as he thinks about his Millennium Eye and how he could see his cards. In the dub, Pegasus has been replaced by Yugi’s grandpa and he’s worrying about his grandpa instead.
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Dubbed:
Entire Show Edit: All flashbacks now have fuzzy white borders, common of all 4Kids productions.
A running ‘proverb’ so to speak throughout the show is ‘that which can be seen, yet not seen,’ the true shape of the Millennium Puzzle before finishing it, friendship etc. The dub completely omits this.
In the original, a bigger bully named Ushio sorta hired himself as Yugi’s bodyguard to take care of Jonouchi and Honda for him, since they were bullying him, for a lump sum. In the dub version, he’s unnamed, and Ushio makes no mention of any bodyguard deal. Also they add that they got Ushio expelled.
Mai in the original version basically ignores Jonouchi entirely upon their first meeting. In the dub she’s very mean to him for no reason. I guess this is to prod the JoeyxMai relationship in a weird way?
Directly after that scene, Anzu is upset that Yugi and Jonouchi are lusting after Mai and calls them perverts. In the dub, T’ea is upset because Mai’s so arrogant and keeps babbling that Yugi’s the best duelist. I guess this is to prod YugixT’ea?
Name Change: Mai Kujaku is changed to Mai Valentine.
Am I the only one who finds it incredibly arrogant that Joey/Jonouchi barely makes it onto to boat only through Yugi’s kindness and he has the nerve to bitch that he doesn’t get a private room? He does this in both versions, by the way.
When Anzu gets up, she’s looking for a toilet and Honda tells her to go pee off the side of the ship. This was probably seen as crass humor by 4Kids, so they changed it to T’ea being cold (so warm yourself up by getting closer to the freezing cold ocean in the freezing cold open air.) and then Tristan tells her the sun will rise in another few hours and she gets pissed. (I know it’s stupid, but he probably meant the sunlight will warm her up in a few hours.) Afterward, before the transition, Anzu actually says she’s cold and shivers, but 4Kids cut this….WHY? That scene actually lends credence to your edit, you morons!
Mai in the original version says she’ll do anything (wink wink) if Ryuzaki wins. 4Kids has their head in the gutter, so they changed it to simply a kiss.
I don’t entirely understand Mai’s perfume trick. First of all, Rex/Ryuzaki can’t smell that her cards are drenched in perfume? He’s almost as close to them as she is. Second, all of those smells would meld together when on top of each other in a deck. How could she tell them apart enough to know which is where?
Obviously the card “Cyber Bondage” with the giant needle nipples needed to be censored to ‘Cyber Shield’ and the needle nipples went poof. See your doctor if the same happens to you.
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Dubbed:
It’s pointless, really, but at the end of the Japanese version, before the preview, they overlay a rather intimidating picture of Yami for some reason. In the dub, his face has been removed and the shot only focuses on the sun rising.
This episode was decent, but nothing really happened outside of Yugi losing Exodia. Not like it matters that much, I doubt it’d be allowed in the tournament since its use is banned most everywhere, but he did need to lose it technically to avoid getting more instant wins. Other than that, it was a neat little intro to a few of the tournament competitors and not much else.
Next episode, Yugi challenges Insect Haga to a duel as revenge for Exodia. Can he beat the master of insects?
Plot: Jonouchi is training with Grandpa to be in an upcoming tournament. He comes in eighth, but still has a lot to learn. After watching the finals of the tournament on TV, Yugi gets a mysterious package containing a glove, some stars and a videotape. As he pops the video in, he sees the creator of Duel Monsters, Pegasus Crawford, on the screen proposing a duel to Yugi.
He drags Yugi into a strange shadow world to play a Yami no Game, a game played with real monsters and real consequences. Whoever is ahead within fifteen minutes wins. If Yugi wins, he’s left alone. If he loses, he has to go to Duelist Kingdom for a tournament being held by Pegasus. Will Yugi win or will he lose something precious to him?
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Weevil and Rex have much better voices in the Japanese version. Rex’s voice in the dub is insanely nasally and it sounds like he has a throat infection. Weevil’s voice is horrid in the dub. He sounds like a cartoon weasel. Rex’s voice in the Japanese version is very plain, but much less grating than the dub. Weevil’s voice is incredibly fitting in the original. It’s a very soft and methodical voice that leads you to believe he’s hiding something. Weevil’s not a kind-hearted person, and you can tell he’s not trustworthy just by his eyes, but his voice adds some degree of mystery about his true intentions.
Name Changes: Dinosaur Ryuzaki is changed to Rex Raptor, and Insect Haga is changed to Weevil Underwood. I find no reason to prod 4Kids about this since they were just taking Japanese lame pun names and changing them into English lame pun names.
The poster for the upcoming Duel Monsters tournament is completely redone for the dub. However, the Japanese poster was incredibly lame IMO and the dub one is far superior. Congrats 4Kids. I complimented you.
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Dubbed:
….HOWEVER, as you can see, there’s no text on the dubbed poster, so there’s no real reason why he’d be so entranced by it. It’s also an awful advertisement for the tournament. There’s no information written on it at all, so it doesn’t even really count as an advertisement for the tournament. Since 4Kids is so paint-edit hungry, you’ll eventually see that practically every sign and advertisement in their shows is useless.
There’s no real reason given in the dub as to why Joey wants to join that tournament. In the original version, it’s heavily hinted that it’s because there’s a three million (?) dollar reward. Grandpa says he wants to cleanse Joey of his impure intention of simply getting money from dueling by teaching him the heart of the cards. Then Joey screams as they fade out. In the dub, Grandpa basically starts grilling him about all sorts of Duel Monsters questions.
In the original version, Jonouchi makes it to the final eight in the aforementioned tournament and most of their conversion on the couch includes mentions of it. In the dub, they act as if he never even competed. I do have to say, it’s incredibly impressive that Jonouchi made it that far just by a few weeks of training. He really sucked at the game before. As for why this is changed from eighth place to never competing in the tournament at all, well, I really believe they wanted Joey to be almost a complete rookie out of the gate so they removed this small plot point.
Pegasus in the original is very entertaining to listen to. He constantly switches back and forth between English and Japanese. I don’t mind Pegasus’s dubbed voice at all. In fact, it’s pretty fitting, but he does sound immensely creepy sometimes.
I understand Pegasus’s power to see other people’s cards and read their strategies, but he can’t always have the right card in his hand to counter whatever the other player is planning.
The duel between Pegasus and Yugi is heavily changed, at least dialogue wise. In the dub, Pegasus takes this opportunity to tell Yugi all about the story of Duel Monsters. He explains that they’re in a Shadow Game in the Shadow Realm and how the game was made using real monsters in ancient Egypt blah blah blah. They even put the final winning attack in the Pegasus vs. Yugi battle in there for no good reason besides it’s the one in the first season that looked the most Egyptian-y.
In the original, they only talk about Pegasus’s upcoming tournament and how he’s using his Millennium Eye to win.
In the original, Yugi seems very honorable in that he wants to destroy his controlled Devil Dragon instead of the Piper, which has lower attack points, thus would suffer the most damage. He wants to destroy the dragon first because he has a duty to his cards to not allow them to be under the control of a malicious being. In the dub, Yugi just gloats and mentions nothing about duty. He just attacks the Koumori Dragon and moves on.
Yugi mentions that he could win if he stalls until the time runs out when he’s ahead in life points. However, he doesn’t want to because that wouldn’t be a legit win to him. Dub!Yugi makes no mention of this ‘loophole’.
Permanent marker smiley faces create a bond that not even the forces of darkness can break!…..Literally..But that’s later.
Plot: Yugi and his friends love playing the card game Duel Monsters, but when the world champ, Seto Kaiba, overhears that Yugi’s grandpa has a super rare card at his game shop, he believes it to be the card he’s been searching for for ages. When he arrives, lo and behold, it’s the Blue Eyes White Dragon he’s been looking for. However, Yugi’s grandpa, Solomon, won’t sell it or trade for it because it’s so precious to him.
Kaiba later kidnaps Yugi’s grandpa (because logical reactions) and duels him for the card. Solomon falls ill after losing to Kaiba, and Yugi goes to save him. Kaiba rips up the Blue-Eyes to prevent it from ever being used against him since Kaiba already has three Blue Eyes, and Duel Monsters’ decks can only have three copies of one card in a deck. He challenges Yugi to a duel as his grandpa goes to the hospital. Yugi struggles with Kaiba for a long time, believing he’ll lose. Will one card be the difference between triumph and defeat?
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I don’t completely understand Kaiba’s reasoning for kidnapping Yugi’s grandpa. I know he wanted the Blue Eyes, but why did he want it so badly?
1) It’s pretty clear his Grandpa was never going to sell it to anyone or trade it.
2) He also didn’t show a desire to use it in a duel.
3) Even if it was ever used against him, he has three Blue-Eyes – he has a huge advantage. In addition, tearing up a card doesn’t mean it can’t be used in anymore duels. I mean, maybe in duels using the holograms (because the system probably couldn’t ‘read’ the card that way) but it’s still usable. If you wanted it gone so badly, you should’ve burned it.
4) Why destroy it anyway? Free backup Blue-Eyes in case anything happens to the three he has.
Why does Joey mention that Yugi has the Millennium Puzzle when he’s listing off reasons as to why he can win? He doesn’t know at this point that that thing has magical powers to help him win duels, so basically he’s saying “Hey Yugi, you can win this card game because you have a giant necklace!” In the original version he just talks about how Yugi helped change him from a fight-loving thug.
In order to make it a surprise that Kaiba has the other three Blue-Eyes, they omit the part of Kaiba’s speech before the duel where he mentions that a deck can only have three copies of the same card, and he destroyed the fourth because he couldn’t use it and didn’t want it used against him.
This season is well-known for the utmost disregard of the rules of the game. In the Yu-Gi-Oh game, each player starts out with 8000 life points. What you can summon depends on how many stars the monster has. If a monster has four stars or below, it can instantly be summoned. If it has five to six stars, it requires one monster to be sacrificed from the field. If a monster has seven or more stars, it requires two sacrifices. In this season, incredibly powerful monsters can be summoned from the start and each duel requires only 2000 life points on each player. You’d think this would make duels go faster…..Silly you! :3
To be honest, though, I like this season. Sure the rules are used as toilet paper and a lot of the moves make no sense, but that makes duels kinda exciting and more fun.
You also hardly ever see direct attacks in this season. In the game, if you have no monsters on the field but your opponent does, they can attack your life points directly causing damage equal to the number of attack points a monster has.
Take the duel in this episode for example. Surely Kaiba has other monsters that he can summon from his hand when Saggi is on the field. If he did, Yugi’s one monster per turn defense would fail, and he’d win in a matter of a couple of turns, yet he doesn’t. In addition, it doesn’t seem to matter if you have more than one monster out. If your opponent has one defense monster, I guess you’re barred from using the other monster to attack.
Kaiba states that the Swords of Revealing Light card only affects monsters that are currently on the field during activation. A new monster won’t be under the same spell. This is entirely wrong – new monsters are just as affected by Swords as the others.
Subbed, dubbed, that friendship marker smiley face thing is still insanely cheesy.
Exodia comes out of a pentagram in the original. They added more lines in the dubbed version to avoid controversy, though it makes more sense to use the regular star design since it has five points and Exodia uses five cards/parts….Also, technically, that’s far from a Satanic pentagram, but whatever.
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Name Changes: I honestly don’t understand why they chose to change only some of their names. 4Kids changes names a lot in order to Americanize their shows, but only a handful are changed in Yu-Gi-Oh.
Katsuya Jonouchi is changed to Joey Wheeler, Hiroto Honda is Tristan Taylor and Anzu Mazaki is Te’a Gardner. Yugi’s last name is altered in a weird way. His last name is Muto, but it’s ‘changed’ to Moto for the dub, for some reason.
Pegasus also had a slight name change. In the original, he’s Pegasus J. Crawford. In the dub he’s Maximillion Pegasus. This is yet another name change I just don’t get. Why change it so that his first name is his last name? Either way, both the original and dub characters call him Pegasus. Though, I do have to say, at least the dub makes Pegasus’s parents look better. Max is a fairly normal first name and you can’t do much about your surname. His Mom and Dad must’ve hated his guts to name him Pegasus….
Entire Show Edit: The dubbed version never shows the title cards.
Entire Show Edit: The opening and ending themes have been replaced for the entire run and the next episode previews have been removed……Though, to be completely honest, I prefer the dub version’s better, at least for this season. Later seasons get better themes.
Entire Show Edit: All of the cards had to be edited for the American release to not look like the TCG cards (Trying to avoid product placement in kid’s shows and whatnot, though I could never make heads or tails of the actual rules involved with that.) Instead of showing them as they look as the real-life TCG cards, they only show the picture, color, attack and defense points. This causes a lot of confusion during the series as the characters seem to read cards several times, but there’s no text to read. It also makes you wonder how anyone knows what these cards do.
Entire Show Edit: Though Kaiba is still an asshole in the series, he’s is much more respectful in the original version. Dub!Kaiba slings insults and treats people like crap while original!Kaiba is more subtly condescending and uses honorifics.
Entire Show Edit: As typical 4Kids fashion, a lot of the music is replaced and there is hardly ever any silence.
I’ve brought this up before and I might as well do it again, dubbed Yugi never sat well with me. I can partly understand if his friends don’t realize his eyes, demeanor and height change when he duels, kinda….But Yami’s voice is so deep compared to Yugi’s in the dub that it’s completely unbelievable that they wouldn’t notice that.
In the Japanese version, Yami sounds just like Yugi only using a deeper, smoother voice. It’s a very subtle change.
Don’t get me wrong, Dan Green does an incredible job as Yami, and I commend him in his range because he does not sound like Yugi at all, but the change is too drastic for me …Also, why is it they all seem to notice when Yugi gets encompassed by light but no one bothers building on that?
Next episode, Pegasus and Yami have a showdown through a video tape. Will the tracking need to be adjusted during the duel!? Tune in and find out!
The Anime Madhouse 