Japanese Episode 9

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Japanese Episode 9

Japanese Episode 9: "Pokemon Hisshou MANYUARU"

("Pokemon Ensured-Victory Manual")

Satoshi-tachi decide to stop for a tea break, and on their way to find fire wood the trio encounters a young boy, Jun. Jun is a student at Pokemon ZEMINARU (Pokemon Seminar), an elite university where students can earn gym badges without travelling around the world. Jun is a beginner student who is being bullied by his peers, and Satoshi decides to stand up for him. He demands to meet the student in charge, and the beautiful Seiyo emerges. Seiyo battles Satoshi to prove the validity of her school and is surprised that Satoshi's Pikachu wins using non-electric attacks. Jun decides to start his journey over from scratch, just like Satoshi did, while Seiyo stays behind at the school. Meanwhile, Satoshi-tachi continue on their way to the next gym badge...

Thoughts
I like this episode a lot, and I hope Satoshi-tachi will encounter the school again in the future to see how much it's changed over the years. There's a lot of Japanese writing throughout this episode, so you know 4Kids put their paint editors to work!

Cut-4 sec.
After the argument that begins the episode, we see Pikachu pop its head up, say Pikachu, and then the scene ends with the little Looney Tunes iris-out effect. And then we see the episode's title screen. That's it, right? Nope--4Kids cut out a little scene right after the iris-out of Kasumi hitting Takeshi with a big log, and then a shot of Takeshi on the ground with a huge, cartoonish lump on his forehead. It was a really goofy scene, and I don't know why 4Kids cut it. Perhaps they thought that the iris-out effect was a good transition to the title screen, and the cut was made to make the episode flow better? I don't know...

Paint Edit
Takeshi's talking about making tea, and he brings out a little wooden cup. It's one of those tea cups that the assassin Suzuka's (from Outlaw Star) always drinking from. Well, the cup had some Japanese writing on it (Rizaadon Haku Richuu, whatever that means) and 4Kids wasn't content with just erasing the text--they redrew the whole thing to look like a can of prune juice. And of course, the can has no English words on it, just pictograms.

Paint Edit
Takeshi's "Mt. Moon Spring Water" bottle was painted over much like his tea cup, and for the same reason--because there was Japanese writing all over it. The original bottle read O-Tsukimi Yama no Waki Mizu, translated to "Mt. Moon Water" or something like that. Since Japanese is a no-no, 4Kids painted over it with a bottle sporting a picture of a mountain.

What's weird is that in the scene directly following this...where Satoshi's crunching on the crackers while the very Japanese music plays in the background (yes, they kept it in the dub!), Ash is drinking from Takeshi's tea cup, not Brock's prune juice. Odd...

Paint Edit
The note that Kasumi just happens to have in her pocket about the Pokemon Seminar (doncha' just love plot conveniences?) has a lot of Japanese on it. So what 4Kids does is erase it all (of course), put a black-and-white picture of the school at the top of the paper, and put some blurred-out text (that looks a lot like French) on the bottom. The original note had nothing but text on it, and a lot of kanji on it, so I can't even begin to translate it.

Dialogue Edit
OK, not really...I just wanted to comment on Pikachu's voice. As you know, Rachel Lillis fills in for Pikachu whenever Ikue Ohtani's voice can't be salvaged from the original audio (because someone else is talking over Pikachu). Well, this occurs a lot in this episode, so we hear Lillis' high-pitched Pikachu a lot. The great scene where Pikachu is running on the treadmill thing is all done by Ms. Lillis, and it's just not the same. I'll have to make a sound clip of that scene in Japanese some day for you guys, because it sounds really cute in the original version.

Not a Paint Edit
Wow...they kept the kanji on the creepy student's book...amazing...

Paint Edit
Jun's picture of Seiyo has a little note from her in the upper-right hand corner of the picture. There's a bunch of kanji followed by Jun's name, so I'm guessing it's a note to him from Seiyo. The note was erased by 4Kids, and they did a pretty good job, too.

Dialogue Edit
The Rocket-Dan's little dialogue before the commercial break talked a lot about sakura (cherry blossom petals), but they're talking too quickly for me to even begin to make sense of what they're saying. But that's one reason you see cherry blossom petals fall in that one shot with Nyasu.

Paint Edit
Right after the commercial break, there's a sign at the top of the door that says "TORENINGU something-in-kanji" in Japanese. It probably says "Training Room" or something like that, but I couldn't find anything in my dictionary that matched the kanji. In the dub, they replaced the text with five PokeBalls, and they light up the way the lights on a hotel elevator light up.

Sound Effect Edit
For some reason, 4Kids adds this weird computer noise in the background during the scene before Jun battles on the simulation. The sound's not there in the Japanese version, there's just silence.

Paint Edit
On the lower-left hand corner of the simulation (which I really like, because it looks like the Game Boy game), right below the Utsudon, there's a little bit of Japanese text that reads Happa KATTA ("Happa Cutter," or "Razor Leaf" in America). So we know that Utsudon beat Starmii with the Razor Leaf attack. 4Kids got rid of this text by adding some hit point bar or something to cover it up...the thing is, there's already a hit point bar at the top-left of the screen. I guess they just wanted to come up with something (I'll bet they were tired of reconstructing scenes by this point in the episodes) and that was the best they could do.

Dialogue Edit
Now this just sounds flat-out corny:

Giselle: "There are some things you just can't learn in school...and thats a good lesson"

Man oh man, that line reeks. And the delivery doesn't help, either.

And at the end of the episode, Jun and Seiyo vow to meet each other in the Pokemon League. And the Pokemon League comes and goes, and they're nowhere in sight. Sure, we see Seiyo in the second opening theme, and she might make an appearance in the Uzumaki Cup (I'll have to wait to find out about that, though), but not Jun.

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