| Yu-Gi-Oh! | |
The logo for the Japanese version of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (above) and the logo used in Western releases of Duel Monsters, known simply as Yu-Gi-Oh! (below). |
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| 遊☆戯☆王: デュエル モンスターズ (Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters) |
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| Genre | Action/Adventure Fantasy |
| TV anime | |
| Directed by | Kunihisa Sugishima |
| Written by | Kazuki Takahashi |
| Studio | Studio Gallop, Nihon Ad Systems |
| Licensed by | Magna Pacific 4Kids Entertainment |
| Network | TV Tokyo |
| English network | Nickelodeon, Network Ten YTV Republic of Ireland RTE Two Nickelodeon, Sky1 Nickelodeon, Sky1, Nicktoons, CITV Kids WB, 4Kids TV, The CW4Kids, Toonzai |
| Original run | April 18, 2000 (Japan)[1] September 29, 2001 (U.S.) – September 29, 2004 (Japan) June 10, 2006 (U.S.) |
| Episodes | 224 |
Yu-Gi-Oh!, known in Japan and the rest of East Asia as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (遊☆戯☆王: デュエル モンスターズ Yū☆gi☆ō Dyueru Monsutāzu) is an anime based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga. It is produced by Studio Gallop and Nihon Ad Systems, and the English-language adaptation was distributed by 4Kids Entertainment until March 29, 2011 when TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems sued 4Kids Entertainment, alleging that the company entered into illegal agreements with other companies, including Funimation Entertainment and Majesco Entertainment as part of the suit, the companies terminated the Yu-Gi-Oh! license from 4Kids.[2]
Duel Monsters is not to be confused with the earlier series of the same name.
The success of Duel Monsters was one of the main factors in creating a real-world version of the game that served as the focal point of the series, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game.
The series began its 224-episode run in Japan on April 18, 2000 and ended on September 29, 2004. In the United States, it began airing on September 29, 2001 and ended on June 10, 2006. In Japan, the series aired on TV Tokyo. The English version is broadcast on many channels. In the United States it was originally broadcast on Kids' WB, and reruns were previously seen on 4Kids TV and Cartoon Network, and can still be viewed online at www.4KidsTV.com. In Canada, Yu-Gi-Oh! is broadcast on YTV. In Latin America and Australia, it is broadcast on Nickelodeon, and formerly on Network Ten in Australia. In the United Kingdom it is broadcast on Nickelodeon and Sky One. In Hong Kong, it is broadcast on ATV from July 13, 2002. In March 2009, 4kids started releasing both dub episodes and raw Japanese episodes (without subtitles) on their Youtube channel, and is currently available to view everywhere except Asia. These episodes have since all been removed by November 2010, the reason is unknown. The series currently airs on The CW's Saturday morning cartoon block, Toonzai.
Like the earlier series, Duel Monsters is mainly about the various battles of a high school freshman named Yugi Muto through a card game known as Duel Monsters (Magic and Wizards in the original, although Duel Monsters is also used). However, Duel Monsters has a completely different plot. The plot of Duel Monsters is split up into several different storylines, or arcs.
Duelist Kingdom is the first arc in the Duel Monsters anime. Maximillion Pegasus (Pegasus J. Crawford in the Japanese version), using the power of the Millennium Eye, manages to seal away the soul of Yugi's grandfather Solomon Muto (Sugoroku Mutou in the Japanese version), and Yugi must save him by entering a Duel Monsters tournament on Pegasus' private island. Meanwhile, Joey Wheeler (Katsuya Jonouchi) enters the tournament in order to pay for his sister's eye surgery, and Pegasus and several top executives at KaibaCorp plot to remove Seto Kaiba from the head of his company.
In a continued attempt to remove Seto Kaiba from his position as head of KaibaCorp, KaibaCorp's former executives trap Kaiba in a virtual reality game based on Duel Monsters. Yugi and his friends enter the game to save him. The video game Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom was loosely based on this storyline. After the Legendary Heroes storyline is over, the show goes directly into the Dungeon Dice Monsters plot. When a new game shop opens to compete with Solomon's game shop, Yugi is challenged by its owner Duke Devlin (Ryuji Otogi in the Japanese version) in a game of his creation, with the title of "King of Games" on the line. The Legendary Heroes story only appears in the anime and the Dungeon Dice Monsters' has several differences from the manga version, one of them being that Ryuji is actually trying to gain vengeance for the defeat his father took from Yugi's grandfather, rather than challenging Yugi to regain Pegasus' honor as seen in the anime.
When Kaiba hears of the three legendary God Cards, Kaiba believes that with the three cards in his deck, he will be able to defeat Yugi. In order to obtain the God Cards, Kaiba hosts a tournament to take place in the streets of Domino, with the rule that each person that enters the tournament must ante up their rarest card for the winners of the duels to keep. Meanwhile, Yugi hears of the three God Cards and how they are tied to an ancient Egyptian legend - one that involves the nameless Pharaoh. At the same time, Marik Ishtar, guardian of the Pharaoh's Tomb, wants the Pharaoh's power for himself, and seeks to defeat Yugi. In the Japanese version, he actually wishes to torture and kill Yugi for revenge and to free his family from serving the Nameless Pharaoh.
The Battle City finals are held on Kaiba's dirigible, with the finalists being Yugi, Kaiba, Joey, Mai, Bakura, Namu, Marik, and Ishizu. However, things are not as they seem, as Bakura is possessed by his evil alter-ego, and Marik is actually Odion Ishtar, with Namu being, in fact, the real Marik. Furthermore, Odion's defeat causes Marik to be taken over by an even more evil alter-ego, who is intent on Yugi's total destruction.
This is an anime-exclusive story arc. As Yugi, Kaiba, Joey, and Marik are travelling to the destination of the Battle City finals, the airship they are riding in suddenly takes an unexpected turn. The main characters find themselves trapped in a virtual reality simulation, in which the former executives of KaibaCorp plan to take their revenge against Yugi and Kaiba.
After the conclusion of the Noah story arc, the Battle City finals are resumed, starting with a battle royale to decide who will fight whom in the finals. The first duel, Joey vs. Marik, is never actually resolved. Joey's mind goes into shock because of the sheer pressure of the Shadow Duel that Marik has set up, and he faints before the duel finishes. Marik is declared the winner, even though Joey only had to call out his attack to win. The second duel, Yugi vs. Kaiba, ends with a win for Yugi. Yugi takes possession of Kaiba's God Card, Obelisk, and Kaiba is thrown out of his own tournament. This leaves only Yugi and Marik in the Battle City competition. Marik sets up a cruel Shadow Duel, and the real Marik's spirit is almost destroyed. Yugi manages to free the real Marik from his dark self, destroy the dark Marik, win the Battle City finals, and gain possession of the final God Card. All of Marik's victims are revived. Now that he has all three God Cards, the Pharaoh is told to present them to the ancient stone tablet that he encountered earlier. Kaiba reveals his plan to blow up the Duel Tower, and the group barely makes it off of the island on time. Season three concludes with a series of flashbacks of the entire Battle City experience, including Noah's virtual world.
This is an anime-exclusive story arc. An ancient organization known as Doma (not named in the English anime, although the name Paradius was used in both versions as a front for their operations) steals the God cards and begins to steal the souls of people and duel monsters in an effort to revive a monster thought to have led to the destruction of Atlantis 10,000 years ago. To stop them, Yugi, Joey, and Kaiba join forces with the three legendary dragons, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermos, and take on Doma's members: the three duelists Rafael, Valon and Alister, and their leader Dartz. Also, at certain points Mai, Rex, and Weevil were also a part of Doma, but Yami Yugi beat Weevil, Joey beat Rex, and during her duel with Joey Mai realized that she was doing wrong.
This is an anime-exclusive story arc. With Dartz's group defeated and no money to return home to Domino, Yugi and company enter a tournament hosted by Kaiba, in his new amusement park, in return for a ride home. With Kaiba Corporation crippled because of Doma's activities, one tournament entrant seeks to finish the job and take down KaibaCorp for good.
With three God Cards in his possession, Yami Yugi (Dark Yugi in the original Japanese, "yami" being the Japanese word for "darkness") is ready to find all his lost memories. However, he's in for more than he bargains for when he is thrust into the World of Memory, an alternate reality inside the Millennium Puzzle based on the events that occurred in Egypt 5,000 years ago (3,000 years ago in the Japanese anime). There, the Pharaoh must relive the last days of his previous life, fighting his old enemies and reuniting with his old friends. But his new friends have not forgotten about him, and Yugi and his friends travel inside the Millennium Puzzle to find the World of Memory and help the Pharaoh recover all his memories. However, Yami Bakura (Dark Bakura in the Japanese anime) plans on using the information gained in the World of Memory to gain the powers of the Millennium Items and reawaken an ancient evil that has remained dormant for the past 5,000 years.
Pharaoh Atem has obtained all seven millennium items, acquired all three Egyptian God Cards, defeated Zorc Necrophades in the Memory World, and has found out all about his past, including his name. Now, the pharaoh can quietly leave the mortal world, and join his faithful priests in the afterlife. However, the doorway to the afterlife can only be opened if the pharaoh is defeated in a duel. Yugi takes on the challenge, dueling Atem to let him go. Even though Atem would very much want to go to the afterlife, he has a good pride in his skills, and will never let anybody beat him easily. Another reason is that Atem wants to see if Yugi is independent and can win a duel without his help. However, Atem is defeated by Yugi and proceeds to enter the afterlife, much to his new friends' dismay.
Duel Monsters serves as a continuation of the earlier series in terms of the story, yet there are differences in the two series where they overlap. In particular, the Death-T fight which is held by Yugi and rival Seto Kaiba, is redone, and Miho Nosaka, a supporting character in the manga and the earlier series, does not appear in Duel Monsters. Whereas the earlier series introduces the characters (by virtue of being adapted from earlier volumes of the manga), Duel Monsters assumes that the viewers are familiar with the characters from the onset, and scenes referring to chronologically earlier events are redone. Because of the relative speed between the manga and anime releases, three extra story arcs that are not found in later volumes have been added for Duel Monsters: Virtual World, Waking the Dragons, and Grand Championship. One of the other most notable changes is that, unlike the manga, the Duel Monsters anime, as the title suggest focuses on the Duel Monsters card-game more than the manga, and adds many Duel scenes that were not in the original manga itself, often changing parts of the plot to fit around addition of the duels.
There are two adaptations of the second series in English; a United States adaptation by 4Kids Entertainment aired in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and a Southeast Asia version by A.S.N. for Singapore and the Philippines. Both versions have edits, most of which are content edits.
The pilot airdate for Yu-Gi-Oh! was originally 9/15/01 but was switched to 9/29/01 because of the September 11 attacks.
In the 4Kids Entertainment adaption, names such as Hiroto Honda, Katsuya Jonouchi, and Anzu Mazaki were Americanized into Tristan Taylor, Joey Wheeler, and Téa Gardner respectively. Though originally taking place in Japan, the setting was changed to take place in the United States. All the characters that are originally Japanese in the original, have their nationalities and ethnic origins changed to American. The Japanese sound effects, background music, and opening and closing sequences were also changed. The sound effects being replaced with familiar American and newly created effects and background music to melodramatic synth music compared to the slightly more upbeat Japanese soundtrack. The opening and ending themes were changed from J-Rock and J-Pop songs from various artists to an instrumental song done with a synthesizer.
Most of the dialogue and several elements of the plot were changed for offensive content, time constraints, and marketing reasons, and visual edits contain removal of blood and reduction of violence in some scenes, change of some monster designs due to occult or sexual themes, and rearranging scenes to make previous content edits make more sense. Several continuity errors occur in the English version due to edits such as these. Due to U.S. TV regulations, the appearance of the cards has been changed from those resembling the real life product, to a new design only featuring the card art, attribute, level, and stats (ATK/DEF). In an interview with Anime News Network, Senior Vice President of Digital Media for 4Kids Entertainment, Mark Kirk, claimed that the reason for editing the appearance of the cards was because U.S. TV broadcast laws dictated that the cards were not allowed to look exactly like the real cards that are sold. This is because if the cards in the anime looked exactly like the real cards on retail, then the show would legally be considered a commercial rather than a cartoon, and the cost for airing commercials is exponentially higher than the cost for airing a cartoon.[3] Because this law does not apply to motion pictures, however, in the Pyramid of Light movie, all cards played in duel scenes look identical to the cards of the real-world trading card game.
A separate "uncut" DVD release was commissioned between 4Kids Entertainment and FUNimation, with a new adaptation that is more consistent with the original, using the original music and sound effects, no edits, and a script following closer to the original. Each uncut DVD contained 3 episodes available both in an uncut English dub and the original Japanese format English subbed, and a total of 3 DVDs were made for a total of 9 episodes. A fourth DVD containing episodes 10-12 was made (and finished), and ready to be released, but after a series of constant delays the DVD was listed as unavailable by sites and that it was not known if or when it would be available again. 4Kids later said in an interview that the uncut DVDs were 'competing' with the edited ones and they wanted to take out the competition, so they decided to 'indefinitely delay' the uncut DVDs. But to this day even after all the edited DVDs were released they still have yet to re-start the project or even release the last DVD done, and the current status of the uncut project is unknown. Lance Heiskell, a FUNimation representative, has noted legal rights as the reason for cancellation.
The 4Kids dub has been marketed across lots of English speaking countries, and the movie and special Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters have been made for the American market.
In March 2009, 4Kids started adding episodes to its official YouTube channel. The company was both showing the US episodes, as well as the original Japanese episodes with English subtitles. Viewing was initially restricted to the United States, but in April it became viewable everywhere except Asia. Subtitled episodes became available in April 2009, although some titles were mislabeled and everyone is still referred to by Americanized names for legal reasons.[4]
In July 2009, 4Kids had stated that they would be uploading the entire first season subtitled,[5] and added that they planned to release the entire series subtitled on their YouTube channel in the near future, but an announcement in August 2009 stated that all the Japanese episodes were to be removed due to legal issues with ADK (one of the primary producers of the anime) and Shunsuke Kazama, the original Japanese voice of Yugi.[6] However, the English dub is still available, and 4Kids still plans to release subtitled versions of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, along with their English counterparts. However, due to the legal issues with Kazama, 4Kids has stated that they may have to drop all of the audio for Yugi's lines.[7]
As with the 4Kids adaption, names of characters were Americanized. However, like the Japanese version, the setting takes place in Japan. The original background music, opening music and ending music are kept intact as well. There is also mild profanity, unlike the 4Kids version.
Duel Monsters is heavily centered around the card game, with plot details frequently added between game turns. However, there are several main differences between the rules found therein and the rules of the real-world card game.
The real-world rules essentially correspond to the "new rules for experts" set out by Kaiba at the start of the Battle City story arc. Prior to this, a simplified version of the rules, reflecting that of the manga, is utilized, with several differences including the summoning of monsters without the use of tributes, the inability to attack a player's life points directly, the restriction that only one monster could attack per turn, and certain types of monsters being stronger or weaker against other monsters of a logical type (similar to the often compared Pokémon).
These earlier rules take considerable artistic liberty in their depiction - for example, allowing monsters to be "partially destroyed", or to be played as magic cards. At times, some duels feature particularly unusual events which only "work" because the field and monsters are represented by holograms, allowing for exciting or dynamic visuals that accompany events which could never be realistically employed in the real-life card game. A prime example of this is Yugi's two-part duel against Panik, in which, among other things, the light from the manifestation of the Swords of Revealing Light dispels the darkness obscuring Panik's monsters, and the Castle of Dark Illusions has its flotation ring destroyed, causing it to fall on and destroy those monsters.
Some differences, however, are not just limited to the Duelist Kingdom arc. Throughout the series, some cards are in different classifications in Duel Monsters as compared to the real-world game - for example, Flame Swordsman is a normal monster in the series, but is a fusion monster in the real-world game. Spellbinding Circle was notably entirely redone as a "trap with spell card properties", complete with a different function. Also, duelists are shown normal summoning their monster cards in face-up defense position, while this is only possible in the real-world card game when permitted by the effects of certain spell or trap cards. Additionally, duelists constantly place their cards face down in their graveyard, as opposed to face up. In the Battle City story arc, the "advanced rules" also prevent Fusion monsters from immediately attacking, where there is no such provision in the real game. To avoid this rule in the anime, the spell card Quick-Attack was created. From the Doma story arc onwards, no such provision exists. By that point, the only difference is the starting amount of life points, which is reduced for purposes of brevity. These rules are carried forward into the follow-up series, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.
Several cards were created exclusively for the anime, including unique cards that are tied to story elements, such as the Legendary Dragons in the Doma arc. A few other anime-exclusive cards were created, but typically, these are seen only for one duel. Also, certain cards like "Dark Magician" and "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" are not nearly as rare as they are in the anime.
Each volume in this series has the subtitle "Battle City Duels."
Each volume in this series has the subtitle "Enter the Shadow Realm."
Each volume in this series has the subtitle "Waking the Dragons."
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