What A Cartoon! - Digimon Adventure (The 1999 Movie)

I have never liked Digimon and until the moment of the podcast that explained how butchered the American version is, combining multiple unrelated movies, I was frankly disgusted with the YouTube version I watched as I had very little idea what the hell was happening and wished they would just SHUT UP and let the movie be quiet for a second. Whoever the hell was in charge of all those changes was a damn fool.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

My partner worked on Angela Anaconda. I asked him about the supposed character image plagiarism, and he said all the main character models were hired actors. Some of the costumes and props were sourced from the internet and background characters were often people around the office. But no lawsuits that he knows of. As the commentator above mentioned, I also thought of Mrs. Munger’s class when Bob mentioned the controversy!

April

I was a big fan of Digimon as a kid during the first two seasons. Learning about the short turnaround on the localization makes a lot of sense, in hindsight. I'm specifically reminded of an episode where a character finds a note, at which point his Digimon informs him "It's written in digi-code!" Even as an eleven-year-old I was savvy enough to recognize that the "digi-code" shown onscreen was just Japanese text.

I took a shot every time they did and now I'm dead.

littleterr0r

I'd never heard of Angela Anaconda but I just looked it up, and now I'm scared.

littleterr0r

Great episode on an all-time favourite short film of mine. One the series' that parented my obession with kaiju. I will not, however, abide by Angela Anaconda slander; she is a cool lesbian icon (no seriously look it up! her co-creators were the artists behind fido dido and Pepper-Ann)

Bless u devin for threatening to spend your precious slot on Laverne and Shirley

crystalhearts

Digimon was a big guilty pleasure for me as a 13 year old. The character designs always reminded me less of final fantasy and more kingdom hearts, with their giant heads and stick arms. Great episode as always, guys.

Bond Weissmann

I'm not kidding when I say that Digimon was the first TV show to make kid-me realize that I liked having emotional character arcs in my cartoons alongside the battles. Which, in retrospect, helped prime me for a life of otakudom.

KaiserBeamz

I was born in 1995 and my earliest distinct memory of watching an anime was Digimon Adventure. first grade me loooved it

Dan Z

Will you three stop saying "mon" so much?

nina matsumoto

loving the content guys!

I loved Digimon with all my heart and soul between the ages of 10 and 12 (although I never saw the movie, which, given what I've heard about the English version, means I probably dodged a Smash Mouth-branded bullet), and despite also being Pokemon fan at the time, I really appreciated the different approach it took, especially the ongoing story with an actual ending. Of course, I realize now that much like the Super Sentai shows in Japan, the reason Digimon had a serialized story with an ending was just so they could release a new line of toys with tie-in TV series every year, but it gave it its own flavour all the same. I haven't kept up much with Digimon outside that time, but I still enjoy going through the lists of the Digimon themselves and marvelling at some of the completely bonkers character designs there are. I've come to learn from interviews that some of the main inspirations for the design of Digimon were artists like Mike Mignola, Todd McFarlane, and Simon Bisley, which makes complete sense when you actually look at them. Still, making those guys' work the basis for your kids' franchise is really bizarre, in a good way. One thing about the dub that you didn't get to talk about was the sheer number of celebrity impressions they'd bring out for random characters. One of the main antagonists in the original series was an Elvis impersonator monkey, and there was also an old man tree who talked like Marlon Brando, among others. The one time I saw the dub of one of the much later series on TV, as soon as I heard a Digimon talking with a Christopher Walken voice, I thought to myself “Yes, this is the Digimon that I remember.”

Christmas Ape