Cardcaptors Was Way Better In Australia
Like most people of a certain age, I grew up watching a lot of dubbed anime on morning television. There was Pokemon, of course, and Dragon Ball Z, too. A bunch of Digimon (Frontiers is still the best) and of course, Sailor Moon. But my favorite out of all of those was Cardcaptor Sakura, which had been renamed to Cardcaptors for reasons that are impossible to understand.
Recently, when I was doing some research for an upcoming article (watch this space), I was looking up the opening themes to all of my childhood favorites. “Hell yeah,” I thought to myself as I listened through Dragon Ball Z’s iconic Rock The Dragon opening theme. “This is great,” I mumbled under my breath when Yugioh’s banger of a theme played. And then I discovered something truly awful: the Cardcaptors theme.
Upon clicking on that video on YouTube, I couldn’t have imagined what awaited me when the page loaded. I watched a lot of Cardcaptors, I own the dub (and the sub) on DVD, so I like to think I know it pretty well. The theme song that played on YouTube was not the one I knew and loved.
Madhouse Inc.
No, instead it was an absolute trash fire of a weird, rock-ish power ballad, ripped straight from late 80s cartoons like Thundercats or Masters of the Universe. And it’s bad, oh so bad. Where did this weird mystery song come from? Was YouTube gaslighting me? Had I been Mandela effected?
After some additional research, I discovered the real reason it was so different: America got shortchanged. So incredibly shortchanged. See, I grew up in Australia, the land down under. This had its pros and cons – the wildlife and weather is actively trying to kill you sometimes – but the biggest pro was with Cardcaptors.
Instead of the awful theme the US got, Australia got what was essentially the original Japanese theme song, just translated into English. Some other English-speaking countries, like the UK and some parts of Canada, also got the good theme song as well, but the US and the rest of Canada got the bad one.
What’s worse is that the US run of Cardcaptors was absolutely butchered. Everywhere except the US got a 70-episode run, with the non-US English versions of the episodes being largely unedited from the original Japanese. The US on the other hand chopped up the episodes heavily, cutting out basically anything that didn’t involve Syaoran in some way, leaving it with just 39 episodes in total. The US series even started 8 episodes in, with the introduction of Syaoran, rather than, y’know, at the start.
If you grew up in the US and hated Cardcaptors growing up, honestly, I don’t blame you. It sounds like the worst possible way to watch what is otherwise an utterly incredible series. It doesn’t seem like the good English dub is available anywhere to stream, sadly, and even the sub is a bit difficult, as it tends to hop between different streaming services like Netflix and Crunchyroll. Still, if you have the opportunity, you should give it a second chance — you just might like what you see.
