In this episode, Joe helps a young girl reunite with her mother while inspiring a team of little league baseball players led by Mona Marshall not to give up, all the while Gran Bruce concocts a plan to defeat him by cutting him off from cheeseburgers.
This episode is probably taking beats from a sports movie (pick one), but the movie it seems to take place in is Friday the 13th. Yes, really. I'll get to that.
In the Japanese version's opening scene, Joe tries to do Junior's heroic pose a few times and each time Junior says it's not good enough. The English version has Junior tell him to take five after trying it once. It's another one of those instances where repetition is the joke, but not a necessary one when there needs to be time cuts.
The biggest change in this episode has to do with Gran Bruce's phone. In the Japanese version, Bruce has what is implied to be an offscreen girlfriend named Aquamarine and if I recall there's some kind of supplementary anime book that shows Aquamarine looks like a pink Bruce. In the Japanese version, Bruce is bragging to Aquamarine about his genius plan and then gets a call from the Biankies shortly after he hangs up.
In the English version, Aquamarine is excised from the story entirely and the phone call is changed to him talking with the Biankies, bragging to them about how good his plan is and then getting another call from them shortly after he hangs up. I'm not sure why this was changed. My guess is it could be because the ensuing humiliation and mishaps in this episode would be considered too cruel for someone with a loved one or the writers thought Bruce having a girlfriend was a distracting detail that I think only gets one or two references later in Japanese.
This change also changes the implications of Bruce's tacky pink phone. In the Japanese version it was probably given to him by Aquamarine. The English version changes a line later on for him to say that it belongs to Jadow and he'll get in big trouble if he loses it.
After Bruce tells the Bianky the meetup plan on the phone and dives, the Japanese version lingers on his dorsal fin moving back and fort on the surface of the water for a few seconds. This unnecessary bit of padding is cut from the English version.
The English version changes a bit of dialogue. After he looks at someone with blue shoes and not pink boots, the Japanese version laments that it's hard to find a girl with pink boots. In English they add the person in front of them saying "huh"? Then the dialogue is changed to Joe stumbling to explain to this person that they're looking for a girl he's never met. It's like the English writers are driving home how much of a dope Joe looks like.
When the water bubbles to signal Bruce is jumping out of the water, a brief close-up where Amy asks what it is is cut from the English version.
The place of the final confrontation is where the Friday the 13th reference comes in and where a lot of English version edits take place. As the truck barrels into the campgrounds, a shot of the camp's sign getting closer is cut because it's for Camp Crystal Lake, a copyrighted name.
 |
| There's no other reference beyond this name. |
Because of this sign, there's a cut to the baseball players cut out of the English version in which they see that the guy they met is actually a transforming super hero. For the same reason, a cut to them cheering is also taken out of the English version. Those bits are also unnecessary so maybe it was for that and time.
Like before, after Bruce gets his phone back, the Japanese version has him talking to Aquamarine while the English version has him talking to the Biankies again, specifically the ones that bailed after Joe threw the truck.
Apart from that one big change regarding Gran Bruce, most cuts in the English version were redundancies cut for time.
No comments:
Post a Comment