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| Welcome to Dogasu's Backpack, a fansite for the Japanese franchise Pocket Monsters! For 24 years this website has been your guide for the Japanese version of Pokémon and contains content you can't find anywhere else. Stuff like detailed comparisons between the Japanese version and the English version of the animated series, interview translations, information on Japan-only manga, a lyrics database, a home video guide, and much more! So whether you're a seasoned veteran or a newbie just getting into Pocket Monsters this site has something for every fan to enjoy. | ||
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Episode Comparison: "The Pokémon Water War"
October 9th, 2024
Dogasu @ 08:48 JST -- Now that I've got last month's manga stuff out of the way it's time to go back to updating the Episode Comparisons section with the next Japanese to English comparison in line. This month I'll be taking a look at the premiere episode of 4Kids' third season of the show, "The Pokémon Water War!"
This episode has it all! Random dialogue rewrites, digital paint, cut footage, music edits...it's just one thing after the other with this one.
As always, let me know what you think via the links below!
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Manga Guide Update: Pokémon Fan Issue 90, Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters
October 4th, 2024
Dogasu @ 22:30 JST -- The latest issue of Pokémon Fan, the Pokémon magazine that gets released whenever the hell Shogakukan feels like it, came out on September 30th and so for today's update I'll be covering one of the three comics featured inside. That comic is Pokémon 4-Koma Dai Hyakka, and it's another four-panel comic strip series.
Pokémon 4-Koma Dai Hyakka is one of the classics -- it's been running in one form or another since 1997! -- so I'm happy to finally have a section for it up on the site. Like with Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, I'm offering brief summaries of each comic strip to help document what kind of gags are being featured this time around.
There were two other comic series in Pokémon Fan but I'm not going to bother covering them for the time being.
The first one is Pokémon Chou Dajare Club (ポケモン超だじゃれクラブ), or "The Pokémon Super Pun Club," by TAK.BR / Santa Harukaze (TAK.BR/春風邪三太). It's yet another four-panel comic strip series, only this time the punchlines it has are all based around untranslatable Japanese puns. Covering a series like that would take way, way more time and effort than I'm willing to put into something like this so I'm going to just skip it for the time being.
The other series is Pokémon Quiz Puzzle Land Pikachu no Takara Sagashi (ポケモンクイズパズルランド ピカチュウの宝さがし), or "Pokémon Quiz Puzzle Land: Pikachu's Treasure Hunt," with the comic portion being done by Kemon Kawamoto (河本けもん) and the puzzles by Hiroshi Takase (嵩瀬 ひろし). In the current iteration of this series, Pikachu and the Paldea starters help whatever Pokémon needs help that issue, with the twist being that every page has a quiz or puzzle that readers are invited to solve. So the comic will be something like "Let's try looking under this rock...oh look! A Pokémon themed word search!" And then half that page will taken up by a word search, or a maze, or a rebus, etc. And this repeats over and over for like nine pages. It's not really a series I could cover without also posting all the puzzles, and then translating them, and so I'm just not going to bother.
In non-Pokémon Fan news, I also added a bunch of summaries to Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga page! I actually added those about a week ago, I just never bothered to report about them here. The newest chapter was scheduled to come out September 29th (last Sunday) but the 29th came and went and...nothing happened. A few days later CoroCoro decided to revamp its entire website and in the process they removed all the comics I had just summarized. They also changed the release date of the next chapter from "September 29th" to "TBD," and Kousaku Anakubo's promotional X page hasn't posted in about two weeks so there's no telling what's going on.
Finally, because I know a lot of you are wondering, I am working on the next Episode Comparison and hope to have it up very soon.
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Manga Guide Update: CoroCoro Ichiban! November 2024 Issue
September 23rd, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:53 JST -- You may remember I did a complete overhaul of this site's Manga Guide earlier this month. Part of that was because the section was in real need of a dusting off, but another reason for doing all that work was to prepare for a return to doing monthly manga chapter summaries.
So for today's update, I've added summaries of all four of the series that ran in the issue of CoroCoro Ichiban! that came out this past Saturday.
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Pocket Monsters Special, aka "Pokémon Adventures" in the West. The first summary I'm doing for this arc is right in the middle of a Gym Battle, which I know isn't super ideal but at the same time I've gotta start somewhere!
Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~!, the "Pokémon tries its hand at a Yu-Gi-Oh! type manga" series that's been running for over ten years at this point. I've been wanting to cover this series for a while now as it's incredibly underrepresented among Pokémon fans but the fact I know next to nothing about the Pokémon Trading Card Game has been a really huge barrier. I'm be considered "fluent" in Japanese, by some measures, and yet whenever I try to sit down and read this manga I have no idea what anyone's doing at any given moment. The summary you see for this month's chapter is the result of hours of research and so I hope the end result is a summary that at least makes some sense.
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Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, one of the current series of Pokémon related comic strips. This particular iteration, which has the Pokémon characters all attending the same school, has been running since 2013. I struggled to find a way to summarize what is basically a series of newspaper comic strips but I think what I settled on makes the most sense.
Pokémon Frienda Oshiete! Friender-Man, the comic based on the current Pokémon arcade game Pokémon Frienda. This one is like Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~! in that it's pretty much just an advertisement for whatever went on sale that particular month but it's far, far less technical than the card game manga so it was a lot easier to summarize. It seems like the publishing schedule for this one's going to be pretty irregular so we'll have to see how many chapters of this end up coming out.
Since I didn't have pages for three of these four series I went ahead and whipped up some sections for each series as well.
Later this week the next chapter of Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters should be posted online, and then on Monday the 30th the next issue of Pokémon Fan will come out with its own series of 4-Koma comics, so there will be plenty of manga summaries to come!
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"Rica Matsumoto Essays: Laugh & Peace" Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
September 18th, 2024
Dogasu @ 19:51 JST -- Earlier this year singer / stage actor / voice actress Rica Matsumoto released a book called "Rica Matsumoto Essays: Laugh & Peace." This 288 page book is a collection of autobiographical stories, written by Ms. Matsumoto herself, about various things she's learned throughout her life. It's not specifically about the Pocket Monsters animated series, per se, but she does cover the series here and there.
So for today's update I'll be doing the same thing for this Rica Matsumoto essay book that I did for the book Pokémon Story earlier this year and provide a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the release. Each entry contains the essay titles, both in English and in its original Japanese, the page numbers you can find each essay on, and a brief two sentence summary of what they cover. The goal of the page is to document what this book actually is, especially since information about it online is basically non-existent.
I don't know if this book will ever get an official English translation, but even if it doesn't I think this page will do a pretty good job of letting everybody know what this book's all about.
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Rumor Guide: "Characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series"
September 5th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:55 JST -- It's been a while but it's time for the next entry to the Rumor Guide, "Do characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series?"
I take a look at three cases where it seems as though someone says something surprising in the Japanese version and then work to determine if those interpretations are in any way accurate. At the moment I only have three entries on this page but if you've come across any other examples of, say, a fansub that has Satoshi and his friends saying something a bit colorful then please let me know and I'll see about adding it to the list!
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Manga Guide Revamp
September 1st, 2024
Dogasu @ 18:26 JST -- This isn't going to be the most exciting update ever, but for the last few weeks I've been working on completely overhauling the Manga Guide here on Dogasu's Backpack. A lot of the changes are very behind-the-scenes and therefore won't be super apparent to you all, but it was still something that very much needed to be done. Here's a brief summary:
- The entire guide has been reorganized to place
different series in new categories. Unfortunately this means that every
page now has a completely different URL now so if you've ever been kind
enough to link to any of the pages in my Manga Guide I have to ask you
to please update them.
- The section on Pocket Monsters Special has
been completely revamped / reorganized, not unlike the way I revamped
the Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters
section earlier this year. The Pocket
Monsters Special section was kind of a mess before, with chapter
summaries from each arc being spread out across multiple pages, but
that should all be fixed now.
- Various name spellings throughout the section have been corrected to be consistent with the rest of the site.
- Every broken link in the section should hopefully be
fixed now.
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Episode Comparison: "Charizard Chills"
August 16th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:45 JST -- My journey through the Orange Islands episodes picks back up again this month with the last episode of the English dub's second season, "Charizard Chills."
There are quite a few script rewrites in this one I haven't seen reported on anywhere else so I'm sure you'll find out something you didn't know before.
As usual, let me know what you think via the links below!
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"Pocket Monsters Liko's and Roy's Adventure" Animated Series Original Soundtrack CD
August 9th, 2024
Dogasu @ 10:57 JST -- About a month and a half ago a CD featuring Conisch's background music from the Pocket Monsters (2023) TV series was released here in Japan. The CD also came with a booklet with a ton of information in it and so for today's update I've translated all that information and put it all up in the CD Guide.
Here's what's been added:
- The full track
listing's been updated with the composition and arrangement credits
for each song. The TLDR version of this is that Conisch basically did
everything for all the songs not based on music from the video games.
He also apparently wrote the lyrics to Hogator's song, for what that's
worth.
- Translations of the six pages of liner notes included in the CD booklet.
- Translation
of the staff credits at the end of the booklet. These include
credits for each and every musician whose performance you hear on the
soundtrack, information that isn't ever provided in the show itself.
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Episode Comparison: Pokémon The Movie "The Power of One"
July 15th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:44 JST -- Last month I go to the part of the Orange Islands arc where the second movie debuted in Japan and so I took a small break from doing regular episode comparisons to focus on the second movie. I started with a revamped comparison of "Pikachu's Rescue Adventure" and now I'm ready to tackle the main feature itself, Pokémon The Movie "The Power of One."
Something like 90% to 95% of the second movie's script got rewritten for the English dub and so I sat down and documented every one of those changes. When I copied and pasted the text of this comparison into a Word document it comes out to around 50 pages so, well, I hope you like to read! As you might be able to tell a lot of work went into this one.
Now that I've got the second movie out of the way I'm going to start work on the next episode in the Orange Islands, "Charizard Chills."
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Rumor Guide: "Mewtwo's blast kills Satoshi at the end of Movie 1"
July 12th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:50 JST -- Before I move on to the revamped "The Power of One" comparison (I'm like 80% done with it, by the way) I thought it'd be nice to take a quick break and update the Rumor Guide I started up last month. This time around I'm tackling a rumor regarding Movie 1; Does Mewtwo's blast kill Satoshi at the end of Mewtwo Strikes Back!?
I take a look at why people think he dies and then dive into various Japanese texts to figure out whether or not that interpretation's correct. The essay's not quite as long as the previous entry but they're not all going to be; sometimes a few quotes is all you need to prove a point!
I have my own list of rumors I plan to tackle in future updates but I'd also like to hear from you all. Are there any rumors related to the Pocket Monsters animated series or movies that you'd like to see featured on the site? If so, let me know through the usual channels below!
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Episode Comparison: "Pikachu's Rescue Adventure"
June 12th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:59 JST -- As you're all aware by now I've been making my way through the Orange Islands episodes these last few years, documenting the numerous changes between the Japanese version and the English version. I've now reached the point in the saga where the second Pocket Monsters movie comes out in Japan and so for this month's comparison I'm doing a revamp of my comparison for "Pikachu's Rescue Adventure."
I already did this comparison years ago but when I looked back over it I found it to be lacking in quite a few areas so I basically redid the comparison from the ground up. The second Pikachu film is unique in that 4Kids completely removed the narrator from the film, creating this weird pseudo dub where something like 95% of the film's dialogue gets removed for reasons we can only really guess at.
I'm also working on a revamp of my "The Power of One" comparison so look forward to that coming soon!
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"Pocket Monsters Liko's and Roy's Adventure" Animated Series Original Soundtrack CD comes out June 19th
June 11th, 2024
Dogasu @ 21:19 JST -- A few weeks ago listings for what seemed to be a CD soundtrack release of Conisch's background music from the Pocket Monsters (2023) TV series began to surface on online retailers. Details were pretty scarce at the time -- all we had were a title and a June 19th release date -- and so there wasn't much to report but now that we're getting closer to the release date we're starting to get a better picture of what this release will be!
The CD Guide has been updated with full details about the CD that include a full track listing, a look at the physical extras that'll come packed with early printings, and links to where you can purchase the CD for yourself.
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Rougela in Animation From Black to Purple
June 10th, 2024
Dogasu @ 23:27 JST -- You may remember I made a page a few years ago called "Rougela in Animation From Black to Purple" where I documented the episodes of Pocket Monsters that had been re-edited to turn Rougela from its original black to its updated purple design. As of 2017 the majority of Rougela's appearances had been updated but there were still about five episodes that still depicted her with her old design.
Well, earlier this week bluesun and Toa of Gallifrey alerted me to the fact that all those random stragglers -- the Hinamatsuri episode, the Orange Islands showboat episode, the final Orange Islands gym episode, that one Dr. Ookido's Pokémon Lecture segment, and the Pokémon magician episode -- had finally gotten their own purple edit. And so I went through the aforementioned Rougela page and updated both the sections on those episodes as well as the big list at the bottom of the page that lays out which streaming service is showing which version of each episode.
With this latest update, every single piece of animation that used to feature Rougela with its original black design has been updated so that she's now consistently purple across the entire series.
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Introducing the Rumor Guide
June 5th, 2024
Dogasu @ 21:12 JST -- For a long, long while now I've wanted to add a Rumor Guide on the site, a section where I take a look at the various rumors surrounding the animated series and work to figure out whether they're true or not. But, for one reason or another, I just never got around to sitting down and writing it. Well, today I'm finally ready to post my first entry to the newest section of the site: Does the Japanese version of the second Pokémon movie confirms Musashi and Kojirou are 25 years old?
Instead of giving a simple "yes" or "no" answer I try taking a look at the dialogue from every possible angle, as well as any other materials I could think of to refer to, before delivering what I believe to be a sensible verdict. Hopefully you'll agree!
I've got a lot of ideas for future installments to the Rumor Guide -- some as long as this one, some much, much shorter -- but if you happen to have any suggestions of long-standing rumors you'd like me to cover then please let me know!
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Episode Comparison: "Bound for Trouble"
May 6th, 2024
Dogasu @ 10:47 JST -- It's a new month so that means it's time for a new comparison! This time let's look at what all was changed between the Japanese and English versions of the Orange Islands episode "Bound for Trouble."
The episode has the usual script rewrites, of course, but this one sticks out because it also has a number of sound effect edits as well...? The write-up also takes a look at the brilliance of Masaaki Iwane's animation style, characters being mean to each other, Pikachu's gender, dub background music, and a whole lot more!
As usual, let me know what you think via the links below!
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