March 6, 2000 21:00
Well, it's now been about 3 hours since the first episode of Gundam Wing ended on Cartoon Network (I just had to say that to help get over the shock...a year ago, I never imagined my favorite anime series would ever make it to American TV!). And what did I think of it? I thought it was good...VERY good. In fact, in many ways, it was better than I expected (Then again, I can be a very pessimistic person :P). In the past few weeks of watching the promotions (and boy, the promotions sure did get heavy in the past couple of weeks!), I built up a little hope, because what they were showing looked (and sounded!) very good. I was happy to hear some dead-on translations from what I've seen in my fan-subs actually being said in English. But, being an anime fan in the US, I knew I shouldn't get my hopes up too high. After all, maybe the quotes they were showing in the promotions were the only accurate ones. Earlier today, I was relieved to find that this wasn't the case at all, at least not with the first episode, which is all I can discuss right now. Maybe things will go down hill from here, (I sure hope not ^_^) but speaking for the first episode, things look very good for the Gundam Wing dub.
One of the things I was worrying about most as the show began was not about the translation, but about the music. The promos helped ease my mind a bit about translation months before the show came on, so the next thing to worry about was the music. The majority of anime dubbed for TV has, for reasons unknown to fans, had the original back ground music replaced with American stuff which usually fails to portray the original feel of the show (ala Dragonball Z). I was worried because I simply couldn't imagine Gundam Wing with any other music. I have all of the Gundam Wing CDs in exsistence and I love the music which is used in the series. I can listen to my CDs and know exactly what kind of scene the music is for. These are a few of the reasons why I was so relieved to hear that familiar, kind-of threatening music in the background as the narrator began going through that oh-so-familiar explanation at the beginning of the show, which conveniently brings me back to the topic of translation.
The majority of the translation of this episode was completely accurate. If I wanted, I could watch my subbed episodes and the dubbed version side-by-side and see many of the things being said in the dub being written on the other screen. Another thing that isn't really translation but I'm putting it here because I'm not sure where else it would go is the names. As far as the first episode, there are really only three things I need to say. One of them was something I was expecting to happen, and the other two don't really matter anyway. First, what I was expecting to be wrong: the pronunciation of Quatre's name. The way he said it in this episode, it almost sounded like "catra." Actually, that's closer to what it should sound like than the way it was pronounced in Japanese, "katoru." You see, like many anime, Gundam Wing has a naming theme: Dragonball has a lot of food names (and endless other themes ^_^), Sailormoon has gemstones, Magic Knight Rayearth has cars, and Gundam Wing has a number theme (And a small Wizard of Oz theme, but I'm not discussing that right now ^_^). "Quatre" is the French number four, and, according to what I've heard from people who take French, the "re" isn't really pronounced. But that's a small thing, really, since it wasn't pronounced correctly in the Japanese version, either. So, now I'll talk about the other two small things. First, in the dub, they talk about the "Earth Alliance". On my tapes, it's the "World Federation". This is something only a purist would freak out over, but it's really a pretty understandable thing. Anyone who takes Japanese (Or probably any foreign language, for that matter...) knows that there can be several ways to translate the same words. You could give something in Japanese to five different people to translate and would most likely get five different translations back, all of which would basically mean the same thing. I think that kind of thing applies here. It doesn't matter whether they're called the Earth Alliance or the World Federation, what really matters is their role in the series. So moving on to the next minor thing which, because of my personal opinions on certain little bratty characters, I really couldn't care less about :P In the dub, Relena's last name seems to be pronounced like it's spelled "Dorlin." The katakana for it in the original are "do~rian" and it's usually written romanized as "Darlian" in official Japanese books. I think this is again an issue of translating the same thing differently, although with katakana, it's not really translating; in fact, it can actually be more difficult than translating, especially with names, because there are so many different ways the characters can be interpreted. An example of this would be Vegeta from Dragon Ball (Yay ^_^). The katakana for his name are "beji~ta", and I've seen his name interpreted as Vegeta, Begeta, Vejiita, Vegita, Vejita...this list goes on forever, so I'll move on and get back to Relena *shudder*. Anyway, whether they say "Dorlin" or "Darlian" doesn't really matter, because the name is mentioned probably all of three times after episode 5, anyway. That's pretty much all I have to say about the translation, although I will bring it up later in this review because of a certain commercial I saw while watching this episode...
Next up is the voices. It's really hard to judge voices after only seeing one episode (After all, four of the five main characters only had two or three lines in the first episode), but I can make comments if I want, so :P One of the first things I noticed was actually a bit amusing to me: As I listened to Zechs talk, I noticed he sounded very familiar. I quickly ralized that his voice sounded quite a bit like everyone's favorite Saiyan prince Vegeta. I was wondering about it the whole episode and when I saw Brian Drummond (Vegeta's season 1 and 2 voice actor) in the credits, I felt very proud. I have a little talent for recognizing Japanese seiyuu, and now that talent seems to be expanding to English voice actors! Yay for me....but this has absolutely nothing to do with the review, so I'll move on ^_^;; Anyway, some other names I recognized in the credits were Saffron Henderson (Gohan) and Scott McNeil (Piccolo [Piccolo-san Da~~~isuki! *Piccolo smacks Spazz* Itaaa~~~i]). I'm not sure who they play, so they must either come along later in the series, or my talents are not as good as I thought they were -_-;; MOVING ALONG now, maybe I should talk about some of the voices I actually heard o_O;; Sometimes, the problem with dubs is that the characters don't have enough feeling in their voices; I found the opposite problem here: Heero and Trowa's voices had too much feeling. Those two often speak in monotone. Now, once again, this is only the first episode, so I'll give the voices time before I do any real complaining. I will mention one thing that I thought was *shock* better than the original: Relena's stupid little groupies (You know, those girls who sit around talking about Relena since they obviously have no lives of their own :P) were a lot less annoying in the dub. In the original, they said such stupid things ("The colonies are much more beautiful because Relena-sama is up there" :P *gag gag gag*) and their voices were so high-pitched and annoying I just felt like throwing things at the screen every time they were on (I think I actually have thrown a pillow at them once ^_^;;). Now, I only want to throw things because of the stupid things they say ^_^ But anyway, for the first episode, many of the voices sounded good, or at least tolerable. Now, next topic, the one I was wondering about earlier, and one that kind of worried me a bit...
I'm sure many of you must have caught the commercial about the daily midnight run of Toonami, saying that they would be showing Gundam Wing at 12:00 A.M. and Dragonball Z at 12:30 A.M. But what was that he said? "Midnight, Gundam Wing, uncut." Huh? Is that true, Mr. Announcer Guy? "Yeah, you heard me." Well, that just made me wonder something: if episodes are going to be showing uncut at midnight, does that mean they're going to be cutting things out of the episodes showing at 5:30? This really made me worry and made me think that Gundam Wing showing at 5:30 might end up like the season 1 and 2 episodes of Dragonball Z. But the thing is, I have all of the Gundam Wing series in Japanese, and I'm not really sure what would need to be cut out. In the entire series, there is no nudity whatsoever. There is a lot of death, but most of the deaths are someone getting blown up inside their Mobile Suits, so there isn't even very much blood usually...The most blood I remember seeing is in episode 10, when Heero...uh, sorry, not going to give away any spoilers yet ^_^ (Although they showed part of this scene in one of their promotion commercials...). The other time there was a lot of blood was in OAV episode 3 when Mariemaia...oops, another spoiler ^_^ Anyway, other than that, there isn't very much violence or "objectionable material" so that left me thinking there was only one thing left that might be different between the two versions: dialogue. I wondered about this as Heero said "I'll destroy you" at the end of the first episode. In the original, he says "I'll kill you." This made me wonder that maybe, in the "uncut version", does he say "I'll kill you" like he's supposed to? If so, that worries me. I noticed in this episode they seemed to avoid using "kill" and "die" quite a bit, substituting them with "annihilate" or "destroy." Well, that's definitely better than Dragonball Z's "another dimension" solution to death, but it still worries me. According to Treize in episode 48, over 100,000 people die during the war in Gundam Wing (Well, he said 99,822, but then Lady Une added to that number). While it's good that they're not denying that they're dead ("I can see their parachutes. They're OK" o_O;;), I still have to wonder why it's not OK for the characters to threaten others by saying they'll kill them. It's Heero's favorite line! "I'll destroy you" just doesn't have the same impact as "I'll kill you" But anyway, getting back to something that might be good about a dialogue change is that maybe, just maybe, some of the words they couldn't say before, words everyone hears everyday but for some reason aren't appropriate for children's TV, such as our old friends "hell" and "damn", will finally be able to be said, as opposed to totally lame substitutes like "heck", "darn", and "holy cosmos" (I about freaked out when I heard Vegeta say that in one of the season 3 episodes!). I think it would be really cool if they did that for the uncut version! That way, when Duo's Deathscyhte is upgraded later and the name is changed to Deathscythe Hell, they won't have to change it. That would be sweeeeet ^_^
The last topic I will discuss will help end this review on a high note: Good things that were there that I wasn't expecting at all. For one thing, all the Japanese writing was left in. I thought it was really cool how they left the title of the episode on the screen in Japanese (In this case, "Shoujo ga Mita Ryuusei") while Heero read it in English ("The Shooting Star She Saw"). This is a sign that the titles of episodes won't be changed from the original names, which is good, because there's no reason to change them in the first place, even though most dubbers seem to think there is :P They also left in the "To be continued" ("tsuzuku") at the end. Although that was cool, I'm sure the majority of the people watching the show have no idea what it means. Maybe they decided it was easier to just leave it in instead of going through the trouble of painting over it during the last few seconds of every single episode. They also left in the "Next episode preview" kanji (I have no idea how those kanji are read ^_^;;), which people also won't understand but hey, it doesn't really matter, so I'll say no more about it. One more thing that was left in which I really wasn't expecting was the little eyecatch that plays when they come back from a commercial. I knew Toonami had their own eyecatch sequences, so I definitely wasn't expecting that they would show both theirs and the original one...but there it is ^_^ Perhaps they're trying to leave in all the things that people who usually don't watch dubs will appreciate to help get on their good sides. Who knows, but for whatever reason these little things are still there, they're still pretty cool ^_^ Oh, and one thing I wasn't expecting to be there and it wasn't was the theme song "Just Communication." Toonami still did their thing with various quotes from the show before it comes on. However, they did play the instrumental version of "Just Communication" at the end of the show, with clips from the opening theme showing in the background. I have to say that, as far as ending themes go, this is an improvement (at least in my biased opinion) over the original ending theme. I can't just stand to watch it! First, it has Relena sitting around for about half of the song looking majorly pissed off. Then it switches to her in some safarri getup running around and playing with (*cough*torturing*cough*) various animals (If I were that rhino, I would have sat down and squashed her ^_^ "Don't pull my tail, bitch!" *squish* ). So anyway, what I meant to say with all of this is that I'm glad that at least they have the instrumental version of "Just Communication" playing, even if they don't play the song itself, and I'm glad they ditched pissed off Relena and her torturing-animals-as-a-hobby ending theme song ^_^
So, in conclusion to this long, drawn out review, I will say once again that there were many good things about the first episode, a couple things that made me worry, and even some things that were better than I expected. I will continue to hope that this episode is a demonstration of things to come in later episodes, and not just a flashy pilot (Ha ha, pilot, get it?...OK, I'll stop with the stupid puns) to attract viewers but will decline in quality as it goes on. As for the uncut version, I plan on recording those to see what's the deal with them and, if things are really different, maybe I will even make a page noting the differences between the two versions. That would certainly make my site more interesting ^_^ (If you're reading this, that's obviously already happened, but I wrote this when I wasn't yet sure what I would do ^_^) Well, that's all for now everyone, Jaaaaaa na!