yumetabibito:

I meant to make this post ages ago, but it sort of fell to the wayside.  I recently got re-motivated when I went out to breakfast with my younger brother and the topic of conversation turned to YGO, specifically the changes between versions of this movie.

I don’t know how many people are aware that Pyramid of Light was heavily rewritten for the Japanese version, to keep it more in line with their versions of the characters. (To only somewhat limited success, honestly.)  It has slightly more than ten minutes of additional footage, a lot of it smoothing transitions and adding dialogue here and there. (It also replaces all the music with various Japanese tracks from the series, something that I can’t help but regard as an objective improvement.)

Nevertheless, this post is mainly about—yes, you guessed it!—Jounouchi’s characterization VS Joey’s characterization.  Mainly because it’s interesting to see that Japanese writers saw the difference and went out of their way to change quite a bit of his dialogue in what was originally a dub-only production, instead of the reverse.

This is the dub version of the scene outside the school, where Joey and Tristan provide a distraction for Yugi to escape the crowd of people itching to duel him.

As you can see, the point of this scene is a joke about how no one is really interested in dueling Joey compared to our main character, Yugi.  His anger is in regards to his pride being hurt by the accusation of being a nobody.  Most of the time, in the dub, Joey’s pride was played up as a source of comic relief.  The over-confident, tough guy with an inflated sense of his own abilities, usually taken down by the narrative or a quick verbal jab by his friends.

This isn’t to say Jounouchi never got in over his head—for example, his anime duel against Otogi is a clear example of hurt pride and his success at Duelist Kingdom being an unfortunately bad combination that leads to him wearing a dogsuit for a set of episodes while Atem sorts things out.  I just wouldn’t call it the main thrust of his character.

This is that same scene in the Japanese version:

The Japanese version makes it about Jounouchi defending Yugi from accusations of cowardice.  Rather than his own pride being wounded, Jounouchi is offended on the behalf of his close friend, and that’s what prompts him to challenge them to a duel.

It might just be that that earnest sense of loyalty doesn’t really scan well for the humor 4Kids wanted—as a general rule, I think Joey fits the Western concept of “sidekick” better than the more serious deuteragonist part Jounouchi plays for most of the Japanese series.  Regardless, things like this are always why I slightly side-eye people that think changing a script can’t change a character. 

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a fondness for a show you (probably) watched as a kid, but the changes to Jounouchi’s character as he made the transition to Joey overseas are what eventually made me lose interest in the 4Kids version entirely, more than anything else.  In any case, if you are curious, the Japanese version is really easy to come across on torrenting sites, as is the English version for comparison.  The differences in general are much bigger than this small scene.