Pokémon (English Dub): The "Gotta Catch 'Em All" Edition (1998-2023)

I’m back after years…just had too much going on. (Didn’t help that I’ve moved a few times, upgraded my rig a few times, and had to do some major damage control after response to my release of a version of DBZ with upgraded audio was taken…not very kindly by a few people who had been circulating the audio for years and making bank on it, and now I had killed their golden goose. Blecch.)

This is something I’ve been working on on and off for a while, and now it’s in the beta testing phase, after which I intend to release it on Nyaasi (it’s actually already available, but for obvious reasons I am not going to link to it here). It’s…somewhere in between a preservation and a fan edit, so it’s a bit of a mutant freak. There’s actually a lot going on here.

For the earliest episodes I rolled back some of the “Harding” censorship that was done because of the “Porygon Incident.” (There is an HD remaster of the first episode, and for some reason ONLY the first episode, and this also has some of the Harding edits dialled down. I utilize that as much as I could.) When 4KIDS got the series, these edits had already been done (as evidenced by Japanese VHS rips from the time), but I still decided to roll them back.

I attempted to dial back the “dejapanization” a bit too. While some of the paint edits (particularly those regarding the alteration of place names) have been kept, I restored a lot of incidental Japanese text. A lot of these edits were very poorly done, but it was 1998.

Several seasons were released to home video with the DVDs absolutely crammed. Who puts 12 episodes of a series on a single DVD?! As a result, a large portion of the earlier part of the series has been replaced with HDTV footage from Japan (the station logos have been filtered out; this works remarkably well with the station in question).

A few cut shots were restored. In a couple cases these cuts were exclusive to the United States and could be restored with the Australian home video release (e.g., Ash walking around the city during “Fire and Ice”, or the infamous Prima shot in “The Mandarin Island Miss Match”), but in other cases (e.g., the weird take when the Pokédex reveals the source of Psyduck’s problems in “Hypno’s Naptime”, or the after-credits shot in “MegaEvolution II”) the restoration was made from Japanese.

Often the best source for video was non-English. “Sinnoh League Victors” had its video sourced from a Portuguese WEBDL; this was effectively an official remastering, since Portugal originally got a cropped SD release and this was an uncropped HD release! But the audio was taken from the US DVDs.

Streaming services seem to invariably have the more heavily edited European cut of “Black and White”, so I had to go and hand-edit a lot of things back down (there are very few edits in the US cut beyond title cards, eyecatches and credits).

There were a couple episodes with mastering errors, in particular, “Ariados Amigos” which appears to have had its fields desynched resulting in a weird blur over the whole episode, and “The Brockster Is In” which was mistakenly derived from an SD source instead of an HD source, and had to be re-derived from a Japanese TV rip.

In some places I created new endings based on the Japanese versions, but using the American themes.

The early theatrical shorts which had their endings removed from the US releases had them reinstated, and I am currently in the process of either translating, or procuring translations for, the songs in these segments.

Movie 6 (“Jirachi Wish-Maker”) leaves half the ending theme in Japanese. A friend of mine already translated this song for a different project and I’ve integrated his translation into the release.

I added a bunch of text to the last 3 seasons to bring it more in line with the Japanese version.

I created English textless openings and closings for movies 5 onward. (Can’t do that for earlier; they aren’t available.)

I remastered the “lost” episode “Beauty and the Beach”, which was only aired in English to my knowledge once (some sources claim twice) and never released to video. I de-censored the “What Kind of Pokémon Are You?” segment (when it was finally released on DVD, they changed a couple shots to avoid the phrase “kick your grass”). drfsupercenter acquired a number of discarded digibetas with Pokémon episodes, which I made use of for most of the available episodes and recycled some footage for the rest of their respective seasons; he also provided no-lyric versions of the Karaokémon segments, which I cut together to get rid of station bugs. Several title cards are redrawn, eliminating video/audio inconsistencies, spelling errors, and other problems.

A lot of the changes are very subtle and probably pointless to all but the most hardcore fan.