"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

Bet you thought you’d seen the last of these… 😛

I realized I’ve been neglecting my sub/dub comparison site for too long (IT’S ALMOST BEEN A YEAR WHAT), so as I went back to finally update the images for episodes 1 and 2, I thought I’d finally re-publish my 22 comparison; I’d held onto it for a little while at first because I wanted to rewatch it to add a Final Thoughts bit for consistency with the rest, but then eventually forgot as things came up, lmao.  So here, just have it and read up on how irked I was with the changes episode 22 got and having to hear Akiza’s whole “Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself!!” cringe bit…

I’ll still be looking into volunteering a bit going into November, and I’ll still be finalizing GX (getting 41 going now!) and doing those 5D’s dub-uncuts (I can’t wait to use this new Duel Links audio ahhhh), so my time still might be a bit constrained, but I do want to at least knock out the Fortune Cup by the end of the year.  Also might need a new webhost; I was paying a decent bit on Bluehost but then I let it expire accidentally and had to renew it by paying $54 for three months or something… a month or two ago? Yeah, might be a bit pricy… 

Stay tuned!

“The Fortune Cup Finale! The Lone King, JACK ATLAS”/”The Fortune Cup Finale (Part 1)″

Everybody, listen!

Here’s the newest installment of this short Dub-Uncut series! (Check out a quick preview here of the final thing~)

So, to catch people up, the official Spanish YGO channel on YouTube flubbed a few uploads of the 5D’s dub such that they ended up uploading a few episodes of the English dub instead of the Latin American dub (22-27)–but with none of 4Kids’s background music! Which meant that I could swoop in and re-insert the original Japanese soundtrack (which I did by matching each track to how it was looped in the episode), but I wanted to do more by also tweaking the dub itself so that not only was it matching the original footage, but the dialogue was more in line with the original dialogue timing-wise (since I couldn’t salvage what they changed).  Hence, the “dubbed uncut” gimmick here.

This one was actually kind of pleasant to go through; 4Kids gave it a decent dub, at least if you remove all the fluff like I did! Jack/Yusei’s backstory being mostly faithfully translated helped, and the lack of any overdone trash-talk during the duel was nice.  Applying the normalizing effect to the audio that I realized I could do as I finished editing 24 did help the quality overall, too.

So, to give a quick rundown, I removed the MC’s unneeded lines over Aki leaving with Divine (I left in the Japanese audio for a second later, so there’s a hint of Japanese Yusei, but he sounds almost like dub!Yusei in that scene, so it’s hardly noticeable if you haven’t rewatched this episode hundreds of time like me lmao), Rex gets to sound a bit less cheesy (”and UNITE YOU ALL” is gone before the OP, for example), I added a dub!Jack grunt from one of the BGM-less episodes so I’d get to keep in the COCKROACH STOMP, Lazar’s a bit less snotty as he makes his debut, JACK loses his unneeded monologue as he rides away with Yusei’s D-Wheel, I timed dialogue overall to sort of overlap more with the Japanese audio (like for Yusei’s thoughts pre-duel), I recycled a line or two from dub!24′s BGM-less audio to undo some of the trash-talking (like “It’s my turn!” from Yusei; likewise, we’re still undoing Let’s Rev It Up as I use my now-stock “I Synchro-Summon/Junk Warrior” clips), and… yeah, I think that covers it all.  Oh, for the preview, since JP!Yusei is using his Stardust chant and I can’t use the dub equivalent from Season 3, I used the clip of Yusei near the end of 26 as he’s about to attack with Stardust.  And I used an MC line from 26′s start that I’ll be editing out anyway over where Yusei reads the title.

(UPDATE [6/28/20]: As I’ve been revising my older releases after working on 21-24, I just briefly revised my crack at 25 to match how I’ve been handling those and updated the above link accordingly.  Luckily, I was already pretty satisfied with how it came out originally, but I still did a few minor tweaks, like in line timing to make sure some of the dialogue didn’t look too out of sync with the lip-flaps, as well as splicing in/tweaking Duel Links lines so I could add in JACK’s chant for Red Daemon’s [which for some reason still doesn’t match the translation Yusei has for it in DL…], as well as Yusei’s Junk Warrior chant from later on which I previously added to 21 [you can see these in action here].  I also added his Stardust chant back into the preview and spliced a “Let’s go, Stardust!” to match the Japanese script.  Sounds very nice.)

I ended up vocal-removing the DVD audio clip of the Speed World remix that’s played here to work with, which helped since it retained the background D-Wheel whirring to help the dub track, but I did that since the rip GoldenUmi on NAC had worked on skipped a bit or two so it was sort of unusable.  It’s a real shame it wasn’t released or used more often. 😭😭😭

Lemme know what you think, folks! Going back to work on GX 41 soon, so stay tuned!

The One With the Proposal

The Seven Stars’ next assassin is Abidos III, a boy king known as the “God of Dueling” who boasted a no-loss record in Ancient Egypt.  Judai duels with Abidos III, and Judai keeps up well in their match, asking Abidos, “You’re really bad at this, right?” Abidos experiences his first sense of resistance in a duel, as he gathers three sarcophagi on his field to summon Spirit of the Pharaoh, with four servants to fortify his defense.  But Judai also lays out the groundwork for his counterattack…

It’s episode 40! This episode’s not too bad, and we have another nod to Ancient Egypt with Abidos.  His deck is a bit underwhelming, though, as Judai and co. note, but it does help to set the stage for Judai’s first use of the HERO cards, and while they do go on to get some spread-out use through the rest of the show, I believe this is one of only two times HERO Flash!! gets used with them.  Also, where’s my post-series one-shot with Judai and Abidos guys

Not too much in the way of card fixes, though I did go and fix two card-related animation errors in some quick shots.  Details are in this little preview post I did a few days ago~

Enjoy, folks! Off to work on the next episode for my 5D’s dub-uncut project with episode 25, and then I’ll come back to work on GX 41, which gives us some much-needed Asuka/Fubuki time!