Movie Stats:

Japanese Movie AG 02: "Rekku no Houmonsha Deokishisu"

("The Sky-Splitting Visitor, Deoxys")

American Movie 7:  "Pokémon Destiny Deoxys"
Japanese Air Date:  July 17th, 2004
American Air Date:  January 22nd, 2005
Important Characters:  Toh'i (Tory), Rondo-Hakase (Professor Lund), Yuuko (Yuko), Ryuu (Rafe), Shouta (Sid), Hitomi (Rebecca), Catherine (Catherine), Audrey (Audrey)
Important Places:  LaRousse City (Larousse City)

Four years ago, a meteor containing the DNA pokemon Deoxys crash-landed on an icy continent.  Rayquaza, a pokemon who lives in the ozone layer, feels that the pokemon is invading on its territory, so it begins an intense rivalry with the intruding pokemon.  The two battle it out until Deoxys is killed, after which Rayquaza returns to its home.  Rondo-Hakase, a researcher who lives in LaRousse City, gathers the crystalline remains of the pokemon to study it, and four years later he's still trying to figure out its secrets.  Suddenly, the Deoxys that was presumed to be dead is revived, and it travels to the high-tech LaRousse City to search for its remains.  Rayquaza follows, and the two resume their battle from four years before.  Satoshi and his friends, who have traveled to the city to battle in the Battle Tower, get caught up in the conflict and work together with a group of trainers to stop the fighting.  They are able to successfully generate the energy needed to revive a second Deoxys, who is believed to be the key to quelling Deoxys' anger.  The two Deoxys are reunited, and it seems that everything will be OK until the city's security system goes berserk.  Block robots fill the streets and threaten to overrun everyone, but Satoshi, with the help of Rondo-Hakase and his son, Toh'i, are able to stop the robots' rampage.  Now that the crises are over, the two Deoxys return to their home in space while Rayquaza goes back to the ozone layer.

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Thoughts
It's so weird to see this movie in English after such a short time.  I just saw this movie in Japanese theatres last July, and now here I am, only half a year later, comparing it to the English dubbed version.  The movie hasn't even aired on Japanese TV yet, but here we are, talking about the Kids' WB! airing.  Weird, huh?

The movie airing on Kids' WB! was a bit of a surprise, but at the same time, it was a brilliant ratings stunt.  After all, they're airing the movie about three weeks before the DVD even comes out in the U.S.  What fan wasn't going to watch?  It turns out that the movie was a big ratings victory for Kids' WB!, giving the network the best ratings it's seen since 2003.  Not bad for a dying franchise, huh?

I've already given my opinions about the actual movie itself back in July, so I won't repeat them here.  Instead, I'll just talk about the dub.  The movie keeps its original Japanese music (except for the vocal song), but that was a given anyway.  It's still nice to hear, and I don't want to ignore that as much as many fans seem to be doing nowadays.  The movie has been cropped into fullscreen (no surprise), but the panning and scanning is actually done a lot better than it has been for the past movies.  It's almost as if the DVD authors actually put effort into making the fullscreen version not look like a piece of crap, and I commend them for that.  They still need to release the damn thing in widescreen, but if they're gonna force us to watch the movie in fullscreen, then at least they're doing it right.  

The names for the main characters are kept, more or less, but the side characters undergo a bit of a name change.  Ryuu is now Rafe (weirdest name ever) and Shouta is now Sid.  Perhaps the most interesting name change is Hitomi, who's renamed Rebecca.  Hitomi's Japanese voice actress is a woman who goes by the name "Becky," so it seems like 4Kids calling her Rebecca is a sort of tribute to her original voice actor.

Like the very first movie, a number of Video Edits were made from the original film.  4Kids had nothing to do with these, so I've stuck them in their own page for you guys to look at.  It turns out that the Japanese DVD release adds a number of digital effects to the movie, but the dub uses the unaltered video before all those effects were added.  So think of the video used in the dubbed version as if it was the original Star Wars movie, and the version you see on the DVD as the Star Wars Special Edition version.

Deoxys and Rayquaza keep their Japanese voices, which probably made dubbing this movie a LOT easier for 4Kids.  The rest, as far as I could tell, were dubbed over.

Time Elasp
The entire movie is time elapsed for the Kids' WB! airing.  What does that mean?  It means that bits of scenes without dialogue or scenes in between lines of dialogue are digitally sped up to make the movie flow quicker, enabling Kids' WB! to get more commercials in.  You don' t notice it because it's sped up by literally fractions of a second, but throughout the course of the movie those fractions of a second really add up.  It's actually a pretty common practice for movies aired on TV, and this certainly isn't the first movie it's happened to.  However, because they did this, it made it impossible for me to sync up my Japanese copy of the movie with the version being broadcast on Kids' WB!, making the comparison much harder to do.

Of course, they probably could have gotten away with not time elapsing the movie by cutting out the completely pointless "World of Pokémon" bit at the beginning, but whatever.

Dialogue Edit
In the dub, Brock makes this reference:

Brock:  "Yuko, meeting you reminds me of a time in my life when I too spent long hours toiling as a professor's assistant.  I'm sure Professor Ivy would be happy to vouch for my work."

Originally, he makes no such reference, and instead tells Yuuko that he's surprised that someone as young and beautiful as her could be a lab assistant.  He then tells her that he would also be a good assistant, without mentioning Uchikido-Hakse.  

I guess Brock's gotten over his Professor Ivy phobia, but, as far as I know, there's been nothing in the original Japanese version to indicate that he's gotten over whatever happened all those years ago.  This would have caused 4Kids problems if his fear of her name was ever brought up in the future.  You'd think that after killing off his mom the company would be more careful about taking liberties with Brock's relationship to all the other characters but I guess not.  

Cut--1 minute, 17 seconds
Right after Toh'i runs away after Satoshi asks who he was talking to in the pyramid-shaped greenhouse, there's a funny scene with the Rocket-Dan that's cut.  We see the trio trudging along, complaining about being hungry.  They see a young boy approach one of the city's food machines (similar to the hotdog machine we see later in the movie) and order a hamburger, so the Rocket-Dan quickly run up and ask for a hamburger as well.  The machine asks them for a Passport, prompting a Passport-less Musashi and Nyasu to jump on top of the machine to try to break the hamburgers out.  A bunch of the city's block robots appear and orders them to stop, but Musashi shows what she thinks about them as she rubs her butt against the robot berating her.  The robot engages its weapon systems and electrocutes Musashi, and the scene ends with Kojirou and Nyasu running away from the block robots.

The very first shot of the next scene, where we see Satoshi running up to Toh'i right before he trips over the Kyamome, is also cut.

Cut--2 seconds
Right after Toh'i trips over some Kyamome (Wingull), there's a two-second wide-angle shot of Satoshi running toward Toh'i that's cut from the Kids' WB! airing.

Cut--5 seconds
A shot of Takeshi putting his hands together and exclaiming that he knows how to get Toh'i to warm up to the group is removed from the Kids' WB! version.  Instead of doing a clean cut, though, the editors decided to do a slow fade into the next scene, making the edit really stick out.

Cut--1 minute, 57 seconds
Shortly after the Takeshi cut is a scene where we see the gang eating lunch that's also missing from the Kids' WB! airing.  In it, we see Satoshi-tachi and Toh'i eating some of Takeshi's cooking (looks like a fondue-type thing).  After playing a bit, Satoshi presents Pikachu to Toh'i for him to pet, and the young boy actually manages to put his hand out for the little guy.  He gets too scared, though, and retracts his hand.  He then runs off and apologizes for being so hard on them earlier.  As soon as Toh'i runs off, Masato notices that Gonbe has appeared at their picnic table.  Takeshi identifies the pokemon for the group (the first time its name is said in the movie, by the way) as it eats the sandwiches that were sitting on the table.  It then walks off as Plusle and Minun appear and joins the group.

Cut--23 seconds
As Hitomi wonders about the lights that appear in the sky (shortly after Deoxys arrives in LaRousse City), Haruka looks up and talks about how lucky she is to see such wonderful lights.  Shouta shows up and says that they're lucky to have crossed paths, and Haruka wonders how lucky she really is.

Then there's a scene with Takeshi flirting with Hitomi in front of her computer and Masato subsequently pulling him away.  All of this was cut from the Kids' WB! airing.

Music Edit
The insert song, L-O-V-E-L-Y ~Yume Miru Raburii Booi~ is replaced by an English-created song called This Side of Paradise.  I absolutely hate the original Japanese song, and the song that replaces it is actually kind of catchy, so I'm not upset over this edit at all.  While it's disappointing that 4Kids is going back to replacing the vocal songs, especially after the last movie, it's not a surprising edit.

Cut--1 minute
There's a scene at night on the docks with Satoshi and Toh'i that's cut out.  In it, Toh'i tells Satoshi that the time they were playing in the park that day was the first time that he had ever played with a bunch of friends.  He had always kept to himself because of his fear of pokemon, and thanks Satoshi for his efforts.  He tries to pet Pikachu again, and right as he's about to make contact with the pokemon, Heigani appears in between the two.  This startles Toh'i, who jumps up and moves some distance away before being reassured by Satoshi that everything will be OK.  Satoshi then scolds Heigani, who just sort of absent-mindedly looks on.

Dialogue Edit
I'll bet this confused a few people.  It occurs after Plusle, Minun, and Gonbe come out of the grate:

May:  "Hey, that's the pokemon that ate every bite of our food!"

The others in the group then go on about how it ate their sandwiches at the picnic.  What's happening here is that May is referring to the lunch scene that was cut from the Kids' WB! broadcast, the scene where everyone sort of meets Gonbe.  That's just bad editing on Kids' WB!'s part.

Cut--10 seconds
A shot of Gonbe sleeping and of Yuuko taking off some headphones as they wait for Satoshi and the others to get food and water is cut from the dub.

Dialogue Edit
When everyone's getting Hot Dogs from the hotdog machine:

Brock:  "Whoah!  Gotta Catch 'em All!"

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

End Credits
The ending theme, L-O-V-E-L-Y ~Yume Miru Raburii Booi~, is replaced by This Side of Paradise, just as it was in the middle of the movie.

Also, while the credits weren't squashed the way everything else on Kids' WB! is, they're severely shortened.  They just credit the American producers without any mention of the Japanese staff, which I guess is the minimal necessary for American television nowadays.

Final Thoughts
When all is said and done, this movie didn't fare bad at all.  Once you realize that all those visual edits had nothing to do with 4Kids, you realize that this is one of the better-dubbed movies.

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This page was last updated on November 15th, 2014