I’ve been having some very rock bottom energy days since it’s been relentlessly hot and also smokey. I can’t even get my brain to focus reliably on reading which is usually as easy as breathing for me.
But I was stuck at work, tired, and too brain fog to read my book and that’s when I decided. I was gonna rewatch Digimon.
I liked it just fine when I was younger but also knew that dubs were inferior since my older sister was a total anime nerd. To that end I tried looking for the subbed version. Couldn’t find it. The internet told me it only existed on Crunchyroll Europe.
I settled. How bad could the dub be? I made it about four episodes but I started going crazy. Characters would say something but then facial reactions would be on a totally different wavelength. Clearly shit was going on that was not being translated.
I gritted my teeth and started hunting. First I secured a Crunchyroll login from a friend. I set my VPN to Germany. This immediately caused a problem because Crunchyroll thought that was suspicious. My friend got me past the security and teased it probably would have been fine if I weren’t currently in Berlin.
Finally, I thought. I clicked the episode I was on.
The subtitles were in German. I clicked on them to switch it to English- impossible. Only German.
I looked up this phenomena and apparently there’s a whole thing where if Germany had rights to a German translation they only have German available.
The subtitles were in French. Only French.
I fumed at the impossibility of my quest and tried to think of a European country that probably wouldn’t have had its own discrete subtitle produced and finally I moved to Greece.
Success! The subtitles were finally in English! I resumed playing where I was and quickly realized I had to start from the beginning of the episode. There was a whole sub plot of Sora thinking her Digimon was childish and clingy that had been cut!
A whole sequence of sensible communication was cut in favor of a montage of jokes for some reason.
I went back and rewatched them all in Japanese, eager for the real story. There was so much cut!
My favorite discrepancies were definitely the names. Some in the English dub were shortened forms of their Japanese names. Taichi- Tai. Yamato- Matt. (I think we can all agree that was a stretch). Kushiro became Izzy which seemed to be a play on his last name Izumi. Takeru became TK which was just fully fucking made up.
Some characters got to keep their names, like Sora and Mimi.
But I was really excited to find out the last kids name because I’d completely forgotten it from my childhood watch and when they introduced “Joe” in the dub I lost it. That was the stupidest name to me. They couldn’t pick better?
I was waiting with bated breath as his introduction title card came up. Then I lost my absolute shit because his name really was Joe the whole time. No change.
Overall though a lot got cut! The kids are quite practical; Joe specifically gives good advice that when disaster strikes you should stay put to make it easier for rescuers to find you and that was pulled! Why? Did they think American children would be scared by thinking of themselves in that situation? It made no sense.
I was eager to get to one particular scene from the third episode. Taichi and Yamato are talking about something heavy and abruptly Yamato turns and runs away into the night to play harmonica. In the English dub Tai says, “He’s a weird dude.”
There must be more to this scene, I thought.
When it came up in Japanese the conversation was surprisingly similar. Yamato tells Taichi how his little brother lives apart from him now that their parents are divorced.
Then he turns and runs away into the night, just as abruptly.
The only difference was that Taichi said nothing and in that once instance I do think the English dub was cooking just a little. Cause that was a fucking weird thing to do.
