Digimon Adventure

NOTE: This page is dedicated to Digimon theme song singer Kouji Wada (1974-2016), the voice actor of Tai, Toshiko Fujita (1950-2018), the voice actress of Sora, Yuko Mizutani (1964-2016) in the Japanese audio version, Philece Sampler, the voice actress of Mimi (1953-2021) in the English dubbed version.

Digimon Adventure
In the summer of that year, strange things happened all over Earth.
Genre: Action, comedy-drama, isekai Running Time: 22–23 Minutes Country: Japan Release Date: March 7, 1999 Network(s): Fuji TV (Japan) Fox Kids (USA) Indosiar, SpaceToon (Indonesia) Created by: Toei Animation Starring: TBA Seasons: 1 Episodes: 54 Next show: Digimon Adventure 02

Digimon Adventure is a Japanese anime that first started airing in 1999. Despite its decline in the mid-to-late 2000s, it still airs today. It is based on a series of virtual pets created in 1997. The franchise focuses on Digimon creatures, which are monsters living in a "Digital World", a parallel universe that originated from Earth's various communication networks. In many incarnations, Digimon is raised by humans called "Digidestined" or "Tamers" ("Chosen Children" in the Japanese version), and they team up to defeat evil Digimon and human villains who are trying to destroy the fabric of the Digital world.

Why It Rocks

1. A ton of likable characters.
2. Awesome designs, for both the tamers and the Digimon themselves.
3. The theme song is absolutely awesome!
4. The Digimon themselves have 6 stages (Fresh, In-Training, Rookie, Champion, Ultimate, and Mega; Rookie being the default), and they can digivolve whenever they want.
5. Rotates their protagonists per season (Starting with Taichi "Tai" Yagami "Kamiya"), and still retains likable ones at that.
6. Stays true to the original theme of Digital Monsters.
7. Spawned pretty videos, which happened to be pretty decent.
8. Epic soundtrack.
9. A good balance between humor and serious moments, in a similar way to Pokémon.
10. The Singapore dub had a lot of censorship removed.
11. Though the dub was limited by the restrictions of children's anime at the time, it's still widely regarded as a positive example of a children's dub due to being faithful to the source material. It doesn't shy away from any of the themes that the Japanese version brought to the table either like a lot of dubs tended to do at the time. It even has plenty of notable, well-known voice actors like Kirk Thornton, Colleen O'Shaughnessey, Paul St. Peter and Richard Epcar, among others, and they all give some pretty good performances.
12. Some of the jokes that the dub adds are legitimately funny.

Bad Qualities

1. Despite the good qualities of the English dub, it is still a 90's-2000's dub of a kid's anime. As such, its more comedic tone and the times it does have to censor something can turn plenty of purists away. Even then, it has a few oddities that aren't relegated to the standards of the era.
   • While some jokes are funny, a good number of them can be a bit outdated or cringeworthy.
   • That one time when Yamato (Matt) and Takeru (T.K.) were referred to as half-brothers instead of just brothers, whose parents had divorced.
   • Early episodes would give the kids family members they don't have. To wit, Mimi mentions in one episode that she misses her baby brother, when in fact she's an only child, and Taichi (Tai) says that "(Joe) whimpers more than my puppy", despite owning a cat.
   • The censorship can get rather inconsistent at times; character deaths were censored up until the start of the Dark Masters arc, and some things such as alcohol or guns were removed while a reference to religion in one episode (specifically, the use of 666 (Number of the beast) is kept unchanged. It's especially odd as some episodes omitted Buddhist mantras that were used to fend off a hostile ghost Digimon, replacing them with "mind over matter".
2. The voices in the Singapore-English dub can be a bit cringy.
3. The animation aged poorly since they reused a lot of animation. You can tell this isn't the Toei show with the highest budget along with the character designs, too.
4. Due to how different Japan's culture is from America's, certain things can come across as off-putting to put in a kid's show such as Angewomon's design, which were all surprised managing to get past Fox Kids' censors.
5. There are out-of-place cartoon sound effects that were never in the original Japanese version, and several of the ones retained in the dub were edited slightly.

Comments

Loading comments...