|
Japanese Episode 092 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Main Old Updates Archive Links
List of Pokémon
Episode
Comparisons
Humor Pokémon Bashing Features Rants
|
Dogasu's
Backpack
| Episode Comparisons | Orange Islands
Episode Stats: Japanese Episode 092: "The Sailing Joy! Go Through the Violent Storm!" American Episode 237: "The Joy of Pokémon" Pokémon Dare Da? Lucky (Japanese), Geodude (English) Dr Ookido's Pokémon Course: Ghos Japanese Air Date: April 15th, 1999 American Air Date: March 4th, 2000 Important Places: Navel Island (Navel Island) Satoshi and
his friends are riding along on Laplace one day when a small boat
speeding by catches their attention. Curious to see what's going on,
the trio follows it to a small island where they meet a giant Koiking
being taken
care of by a surprisingly tough looking Joy...? The Pokémon
nurse explains that her job is to go from island to
island and take care of the Pokémon in the area who wouldn't
normally have access
to a Pokémon Center. The children find this fascinating and so
they spend some time shadowing her, doing their best to keep up with
her as she
zips around from island to island. Later that day, Joy heads out toward
a small island to give medicine to a baby Pawou while Satoshi and the
others tag along. The four of them get caught up in a violent storm but
are luckily able to make it to a nearby island safe and sound.
Suddenly, the Rocket trio launches a surprise assault! Joy's Koiking
swims onto the scene and, after a bit of a struggle, evolves into
Gyarados and sends the trio and their submarine blasting off. Our
heroes resume their journey to the island where the baby Pawao is and
successfully deliver the medicine. Later, Joy tells Satoshi that
there's a Gym Leader on nearby Navel Island who he could challenge for
the Shiranami Badge and so Satoshi, eager to get his second Orange
League Gym Badge, sets off for his next challenge. Thoughts But then what does pop into my head when I think
about this episode? Not much, if I'm being honest. I think most fans
are generally aware of the existence of "that one Orange Islands
episode with a tanned Nurse Joy" but beyond that there's not much else.
So my mind wanders to some of the more absurd parts of the episode in
order to keep itself entertained. Why doesn't Joy use a motorboat instead of a
paddle boat? Why is no one freaked out by the fact that her sentient
egg monster can swim? Why is her Koiking so
huge, and why does it evolve into a regular sized Gyarados instead of a
giant one? Why is this Joy the one stuck taking care
of these small, rural islands? Is she so bad at her job that the other
Joy have essentially ostracized her, forcing her to do the grueling
physical labor usually reserved for new recruits while they sit back
enjoy cushy jobs in Pokémon Centers? Did she mess up and is now
being punished? Am I so bored with this episode that I'm having to come
up with new headcanons to keep myself interested? The English dub of this episode has a ton of rewrites (most of what Nurse Joy says in this episode is not a faithful translation, for example) and more music replacements than we've been getting lately. But the thing that sticks out to me about this episode is realizing just how much I personally just don't like the way Nurse Joy sounds in the English version. Like 95% of the 4Kids voice actors, the problem I have with the performance is how one note the whole experience is. Ayako Shiraishi gives you peaks and valleys throughout this episode -- she's cheerful one moment, strong and assertive the next, soothing and calming after that, sad and remorseful later on, etc. -- while with Megan Hollingshead I feel like she's always at a 10, shouting everything at the top of her lungs whether the situation calls for it or not. I don't want to be too unfair to Mrs. Hollingshead -- she was probably just following the directions of whoever was directing her that day -- but when Nurse Joy sounds off in an episode all about Nurse Joy then it stands out. Joy's Gyarados keeps its Japanese voice...kind of. It keeps its voice whenever it's in battle and being all ferocious and whatnot but when it's cuddling with its friend its happy little gurgles get replaced with 4Kids' awkward attempts at recreating Gyarados' roars. Dialogue EditThe opening narration:
So I've noticed that nearly 100% of the narrator's dialogue has been getting rewritten lately. I wonder if the fact that they never, ever have to worry about lip sync with his lines gives them the confidence to just write him saying whatever the eff they want? The children argue about what they just saw:
A lot of this is fairly
close to what's being said in the Japanese version, while other parts,
like Kasumi's first line and Kenji's final line, are complete rewrites.
This isn't so much a dialogue edit as much as it's 4Kids converting a Japanese shoe size to an American / Canadian shoe size. Of course if you're watching this dub somewhere like the UK or Australia then the conversion here doesn't quite work (23.5 cm is equal to a UK 5 or an Australian 6) but 4Kids typically doesn't care about that kind of thing. Oddly enough, Kenji's later observation about Nurse Joy's body ("I'd say her arms were a good two centimeters larger in circumference and her shoulders about a centimeter and a half wider than the average Joy") or Magikarp ("Even a really big Magikarp shouldn't be longer than a meter or so. This one's over three meters, that's almost ten feet long") are all left (mostly) unconverted. The trail runs cold:
As you can see, Ash's buffoonish image of a Nurse Joy stepping her foot into an open paint bucket and then walking around an island, paint sticking onto every surface she walks on, is an invention of the English dub. Side Note The sound effect of...I dunno, loose change rattling around? is added to the scene of Joy giving the calcium tablets to the giant Magikarp. If I had to come up with an explanation for this unusual change I'd say that this was maybe 4Kids' way of making sure they'd be allowed to show a character having a bunch of pills poured into its mouth without the network censors getting on them? Is there literally any other explanation that would make sense? Dialogue Edit Misty and Tracey try to figure out what Joy's deal is:
So just about every line here got rewritten (Tracey's second line is kinda-sorta similar...?) but the big change I want to point out is Nurse Joy's explanation of what she does, where 4Kids claims that she travels to the smallest islands in all of the Orange Archipelago. In the original she explains that she only travels around to small islands in the area -- in other words, she's not making round trips around the entire region every single day. Also,
I wanted to point out that while Kenji uses the word fune, or "boat," in the second line
there the rest of the Japanese version of the episode refers to the
vessels that everyone's paddling as "canoes" (カヌー). If you look at the way
they're drawn you
can see
that they're actually kayaks
so the English dub decided to fix this error.
Tracey is right to step
in here; Ash just up and assuming he's going to get to eat for free is
kind of rude. Originally Satoshi and
Kenji just politely accept Joy's invitation. Nurse Joy checks Ash's
Lapras:
4Kids; protecting children from difficult topics like "fatigue" since 1995! Music
Edit
This is such an odd
choice.
One, there was nothing wrong with the background music used in the
original, and two, this song doesn't even make sense in the context of
this
episode. Are the lyrics about two friends being together forever meant
to be talking about Nurse Joy and
Chansey? Nurse Joy and these random kids who just decided to start
following her out of nowhere? Humans and Pokémon, in general? Dialogue
Edit
Never underestimate 4Kids' ability to misidentify a Pokémon despite the fact that it has the same name in both Japanese and English. Eyecatch
I guess the dub is going
back to the whole "feature a Pokémon from the following episode, not the current
one" thing they had been doing for a while before they randomly threw
Mewtwo into the mix last time. Dialogue
Edit
The big difference here is that Joy asks Satoshi to forgive the Pokémon while Nurse Joy asks Ash to forgive her, the health care provider who looks after it. Tracey asks Nurse Joy
about
her job:
This is the exchange that takes place right before the flashback to a young Joy. In the Japanese version we clearly see Joy setting up said flashback but in the English dub we get...Nurse Joy only just now realizing that she could've worked in a regular ol' Pokémon Center...? After the flashback:
As you can see, Joy doesn't single out "Pokémon who don't have Trainers to love and care for them" in the Japanese original the way her dub counterpart does. A storm's coming:
The "at this time of year" and "you've been in the Orange Islands long enough" parts were added by 4Kids. It implies that both Tracey and this Nurse Joy are natives of the Orange Islands, and while that is probably true it's not something that's really ever hinted at in the Japanese version. Nurse Joy fires back:
The English dub doesn't tell us that the baby Seel need to be given medicine every single day and so it's not super clear why Nurse Joy can't just skip a day in the English dub. Also, throughout the episode the 4Kids dub will word its dialogue as if there are multiple baby Seel who need treatment (i.e. her use of "a group of" and "they're") but the scene at the end of the episode where she finally does start taking are of the Pokémon makes it clear that it's only one baby who actually needs her help. After the (completely pointless) storm scene:
Nurse Joy in the English version doesn't mention anything about the waves having calmed down (despite that being pretty obvious anyway). Team Rocket arrives in the episode and so of course their dialogue gets rewritt...wait, what's that? It actually isn't!?
The Rocket trio make a joke in the original and 4Kids actually...left it in-tact!? Like, they did what localizers are supposed to do and reworked a joke rather than just completely rewrite it? Oh, but wait they go back into 4Kids mode just a few seconds later:
I feel so bad for the non-English localizers who had to go off 4Kids' English dub script for this show instead of being able to use the Japanese one. The original dialogue here is pretty straightforward and therefore super easy to translate but the English dub dialogue, on the other hand, is a confusing mess of awkward syntax (James' line) and archaic vocabulary that nobody uses anymore (Meowth's line) that must have been an absolute nightmare to figure out. Can you imagine being, say, the Spanish or German localizers whose job it was to make sense of this? Nurse Joy prays for a miracle:
I
think it's fairly obvious why 4Kids changed this one. We had a "God of Glass" not too long ago and now we've got a "God of
Pokémon," apparently. I wonder how many more deities we'll get
before we leave the Orange Islands! Team Rocket blasts off:
As you can see, there's no in-volved / e-volved "joke" in the original. Sound Effects Edit There are a lot of weird extra noises / sound effects added to Gyarados' roar after it sends Team Rocket blasting off that weren't there in the Japanese version. They all sound like random noises and not like any sort of purposeful attempt at changing anything so I'm guessing it was probably just an audio mixing mistake or something that somehow made it into the final product. Dialogue Edit Tracey gets philosophical:
The reach of the Pokémon Watcher's words here are different; in the original he's focused on just humans and Pokémon while in the English dub he expands his observation to cover the whole entire world. After Ash refers to the Orange League as the "Orange Islands League" for some reason the narrator takes us out:
The Joy who was the center of everything in this episode doesn't get any mention in the closing narration of the English dub at all. Seems kind of rude!
This page was last updated on January 24th, 2022 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
©
2024 Dogasu's Backpack. All international rights reserved. Portions of
the materials contained in this Website are copyrighted by other legal
entities and are used with permission or are excerpted under legal
authority for brief review. This Website is fan-created and has no
intent to violate the originator's copyright. The copyright holder for
this Website assumes no liability for fan-created submissions. Found an error or omission? Please help me keep this page current and error-free by e-mailing me with a description of the issue. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|