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Japanese Episode 094 |
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| Episode Comparisons | Orange Islands
Episode Stats: Japanese Episode 094: "The Gluttonous Kabigon! A Big Panic!" English Episode 239: "Snack Attack" Pokémon Dare Da? Kabigon (Japanese), Ivysaur (English) Dr. Ookido's Pokémon Course: Kusaihana Japanese Air Date: April 29th, 1999 American Air Date: March 25th, 2000 Important Characters: Nana (Ruby) Important Places: Seven Zabon Islands (Seven Grapefruit Islands) Our heroes are
riding along on Laplace one day when they discover that a string of
islands called the the Seven Zabon Islands are nearby. They land on
Zabon Island No. 1 and are about to help themselves to one of the
pummelos growing nearby when they're approached by a young woman named
Nana. She explains that a pummelo thief has been stealing fruit from
the area and so Satoshi and his friends decide to help her stop them.
Before long it's revealed that the pummelo thief is...a wild Kabigon!?
Our heroes try to fight off the glutton with their own Pokémon
but they're no match for its massive size and strength. Kabigon
finishes off all the pummelos on Island No. 1 and so it hops into the
ocean and swims its way to Island No. 2. Satoshi and the others follow
and, once they catch up, try a number of non-violent ways to get
Kabigon to stop. The Rocket trio also appears and try to hypnotize the
Kabigon to sleep, giving Satoshi and his friends the idea to get that
Purin that's always following them around to put it to sleep. They
successfully lure the singing Pokémon out and then wait for its
song to put Kabigon to sleep before Satoshi throws a Monster Ball at it
and gets it. Once everyone wakes up, Nana and the others thank Satoshi
and his friends for all their help as they set off on their next
adventure with their new teammate. Thoughts The Kabigon that Satoshi
gets here in the Orange Islands is the same one he'll use to defeat
Ibuki's
Kingdra in his final Johto League Gym Battle. It will go on to defeat
two of
Shigeru's Pokémon and two of Hazuki's
Pokémon in the Shirogane Conference at the end of his journey
through the Johto Region. In Pocket
Monsters Advanced Generation, Satoshi's Kabigon will help its
Trainer earn the Guts Symbol from the Arena Captain
Kogomi in the Kanto Battle Frontier portion of the series. And in Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl,
Kabigon is going to help defeat a random Trainer in the Suzuran
Conference. To
dismiss the Orange Islands arc as a mere "filler arc" is to dismiss the
contributions a Pokémon like Kabigon's made to the rest of
Satoshi's journey, and that's kind of messed up. Something else I really
enjoyed was how, when I was researching this episode, I came across
this realization that oh yeah, Kabigon's addition to the team was
absolutely spoiled by the show's opening theme, wasn't it? It's something I hadn't ever really realized before but looking back it just seems so, so obvious. Fans in the West weren't able to watch the show as it came out in Japan back in 1999 the way they're able to do now and so all I can do is wonder what it would've been like if we had social media back then. Would fans have seen this capture coming a mile away? And what would their reaction have been? The script for the
English dub is pretty bad in the first half but improves significantly
in the second half so I'm not really sure what's going on there. Like,
if the whole thing was one massive rewrite, or if the whole thing was
super
faithful to the Japanese original then that'd be one thing. But a weird
half-and-half situation?
Did they have different writers working on different parts of this
episode for some reason? Other than that, we get the usual music edits
(4Kids really doesn't seem to like the music from Pikachu's Summer Vacation, huh?)
and yet another random Victreebel voice tampering, making "Snack
Attack" a really
weird episode all around. Dialogue
Edit
If this was an episode from Generation 3 onwards the fruit in this episode would've just been called Obon ("Sitris") Berries but since those didn't exist yet they ended up using real world fruit instead. As for the woman who works there, Nana's name comes from the Japanese word for "seven" (七) while "Ruby" comes from ruby red grapefruits. After the title screen,
our heroes see the fruit:
And then, if we jump ahead a little bit:
The excuse our heroes give Nana for just taking the fruit they come across is that they got carried away since this is the first time they'd ever seen a pummelo before. This is an excuse that would have worked wonderfully as-is in the English dub since most Americans have probably never seen a pummelo before either, right? But! Because the 4Kids dub decided to randomly change "pummelo" to "grapefruit" this dialogue no longer makes sense as-is. So 4Kids just rewrote the line entirely. Now let's return to the beginning of the episode, to the part right before Ruby tries to bash a child's skull in with a large stick:
I just love the audacity of this rewrite considering how little the animation here actually fits the new lines 4Kids decided to give them. Why is Tracey looking around frantically when saying "That's terrible?" And what's with the look of determination Ash has on his face? Did 4Kids just write this with their eyes closed or what? Ruby finishes telling the children about her precious "grapefruit":
Nana doesn't really seem to have the same maternal instinct over fruit (!!) that her dub counterpart does. The culprit is found:
In the Japanese version the word that keeps being used to describe the pummelo thief is dorobou (泥棒). Dorobou, unlike its English counterpart, can be either singular or plural, or neither, depending on the context. The English dub had to pick one or the other -- the English language is less ambiguous about things like that -- and so the plural "thieves" is what they ended up going with. With how quickly the fruit is disappearing it's only natural to assume there'd be more than one person stealing their fruit, right? The rewrite of this worker's line here, accordingly, is an attempt to bridge that gap between the singular and plural versions of the word that the Japanese version just didn't have to deal with. Ash scans Snorlax with his Pokédex:
Four hundred kilograms is about 882 pounds and so 4Kids rounded it up to 900. The children pick a bunch of fruit:
Kasumi, unlike Misty, knows that just removing the fruit from the trees won't be enough to stop Kabigon and that they have to actually hand it over to the adult in charge there for any of this to matter. Misty, meanwhile, seems to think that her work here is done...? The next few edits I'll bring up all involve 4Kids adding in some idioms / play on words that undoubtedly gave headaches to the localizers who rely on this version of the show overseas. Snorlax starts to eye the next island over:
Kasumi's comment about Kabigon being unable to soar through the air gets replaced with a fat joke.
Satoshi's comment about Kabigon doing the butterfly gets replaced with a fat joke.
No added fat joke this time around; instead, 4Kids plays around with the phrases "in the first place" and "in the second place" in a way that wasn't possible in the Japanese original. The thing about these three rewrites -- "jumbo jet," "blubberfly," and "second place" -- is that while they work perfectly fine in English they only serve to introduce headaches for the poor staff whose job it is to localize this version of the show into other languages. How did the German team handle the "blubberfly" joke? What kind of joke did Spanish speakers get in place of the "jumbo jet" one? Did the Italian dubbers get the "first place" / "second place" play on words? Team Rocket tries to eat the "grapefruit":
Team Rocket's dialogue in the 4Kids version is usually rewritten in the sense that "we'll still give you the general gist of what's being said but we're still going to have them say pretty much whatever the hell we want." So these first two lines aren't all that surprising. But then we get to the "thin skin" part which is 100% a rewrite. Does Kojirou's face in the screenshot above look like the face of someone who's insulting his teammate? Anyway, Jessie claims the grapefruit is "thin skinned" and then in literally the very next scene we see Meowth break his hand trying to claw one open so *shrugs* James talks about what good these "grapefruits" are for:
The word Kojirou uses to describe the person who gave him the candied pummelo peels -- jiiya -- is the exact same phrase used to describe the old man in the Pocket Monsters Advanced Generation episode where he trades out his Chirean for a Manene. Now is this meant to be a reference to an episode of the TV show that won't air for another six years? Probably not. The word jiiya is a fairly generic term that means "elderly handyman" or "elderly manservant" and therefore doesn't really denote any one person in particular. So for all we know Kojirou's estate had a number of jiiya employed and the one we see in that one Advanced Generation episode is just one of many! Oh, and also 4Kids? You can absolutely eat grapefruit fruit. Eyecatch Kabigon vs. Ivysaur. Once again we get some unique artwork in the Japanese eyecatch that dub viewers just never get to see. Dialogue Edit Arbok vs. Snorlax does not end well for Team Rocket:
The idea of skinning the corpse of Musashi's Pokémon and using it to make an accessory for humans to use is present in both versions but the accessory in question is a bit different. Either way, this out-of-character reference to a real world animal -- in this case, a snake -- is present in both versions. Jessie calls out her next Pokémon to attack:
Jessie's revelation that her Lickitung can use Wrap attack is dub only; in the original she only issues a generic battle command. James' Victreebel -- who, for some reason, gets its voice altered for the dub of this episode -- gets flattened by Snorlax:
"Pressed flower art" -- oshibana (押し花) in Japanese -- is a traditional Japanese art form where you take dried up flower petals, leaves, stems etc. and press them onto paper using a specialized machine in order to create unique artwork. It's a traditional Japanese artform that's known worldwide but I suppose 4Kids thought it would've been too obscure for their target audience and so they rewrote it. Ash and his friends try to massage the Snorlax asleep:
Satoshi and Kasumi are doing this bit where they're acting like they're employees at a hot springs massage parlor while Ash and Misty are just talking to Snorlax as themselves. The script for the other attempts are all actually pretty decent. There are some number changes with Misty's counting segment (in Japanese she falls asleep when she reaches 89 while in English she finishes at 99) and the Rocket trio's singing is way more (purposefully) terrible in Japanese but otherwise it's pretty solid! The next dialogue change doesn't happen until the very end of the episode where Ruby explains Snoarlax's special power:
The part I want to point out is Kasumi's line, where originally she reasons that Kabigon being a bottomless pit could have something to do with its power to make plants bloom. We don't get that kind of theory in the English dub, though! Finally, the narrator takes us out:
The dub makes no mention of Snorlax or its gluttony the way the Japanese version does.
This page was last updated on March 28th, 2022 |
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