Pretty Cure - First Dubbed Episode Review!

Three Cheers for Toei For Getting Everything Right!

I did a rough review this morning, running a subtitled episode against the dubbed episode on my television (not an easy thing to do!) and it's posted after the jump.

All in all, there were less edits made in this first episode compared to the edits in the first episode of Sailor Moon. One of the hallmarks of Sailor Moon was the background music which was changed in entirety just for the English dub - the original music was all kept for Pretty Cure, and it sounds a lot clearer when compared to the DVD releases of Sailor Moon. From what we have learned, Toei is handling this series instead of 4Kids, much to the relief of fans everywhere! It seems though that promotion is running a little behind for the series. YTV hasn’t featured it in any newsletters in the last few weeks, and promotioanl pieces just started to hit the industry mags yesterday. The show wasn’t even promoted by its parent company in their March Highlights! So Canada, let’s try to be a lot more supportive with this effort from Toei and watch the show when you can okay? The quality of this dub will probably even satisfy you hardcore Pretty Cure fans! Toei has put subtitled episodes of the show for free viewing on Crunchyroll.

The new voices aren’t as cutesy as they are in the Japanese version, but they work! Barely any difference between the original and this one in terms of scripts. Opening titles changed slightly, and we love the girly punk theme song! They even used similar lyrics in some places to the original theme. Episode title screens still the same and the translation is close. They have kept the Junior High School Names the same. Looks like they have kept all the original music and it’s been mastered pretty well. Names have been changed into English, but that was expected. Hannah’s crush plays for the baseball team (instead of a kendo team in the original). They have certainly done a good job of adapting this to school life in the western world while still retaining most of the original’s lines. They made one change during the conversation on the train - in the original, one of the friends says that Hokona/Hannah and Nagisa/Natalie would work well together because Nagisa is popular with boys and Hokona is popular with girls. In the dub, she says that it’s “the best of both worlds” since Hannah is good at school and Natalie is good at sports. Playing it safe there, eh Toei? Again, an edit we understand completely (though we are kinda reminded slightly of the issues with Haruka and Michiru). Hannah’s dog is named Chuutaro! Another slight change in the scene where Natalie’s mom asks her brother to go check on her. In the original, there is a lot of noise and her mom asks him to go check up on her. In this one, she asks him to go up to tell her dinner will be late tonight. The writers got rid of Mepple’s end-sentence trademark “Mepo”! Pissard’s name is Pichard now. Somehow I can just picture Roland Parliament’s voice as being perfect for Mepple if he toned up his Melvin just a little! Fans will be happy to know that the henshin hasn’t been digitally altered in any way! And they have kept the whole Emissary speech... this is bringing back fond memories of Sailor Moon for me and probably will for the rest of us watching this show. Our monster of the day’s name isn’t that decipherable? Hakenna? It sure doesn’t sound like Zakenna. The voice is all warped. The name of the attack has been changed from “Pretty Cure Marble Screw” to “Pretty Cure Marble Twister”. “Mipo” is gone too. The credit screens are different than the Japanese. I don’t recognize any names in the credits with respect to Sailor Moon. The Ocean Group has produced this dub, and it is being recorded at Blue Water Studios in Calgary Alberta. The show is also only airing one episode a week (twice on Fridays, once on Saturdays). The episode previews have also been kept, and it’s nice to see the Toei Animation Cat at the end of the episode.