Hi guys, Justin here and welcome to the Otaku Mind. First off, happy Halloween. I know some of you were expecting to see the Halloween special but unfortunately Nitsuj and his friends are in jail and going to court tomorrow, so you’ll have to wait until the first of November to see the special. I know, a Halloween special in November, everyone’s only thinking about Christmas now. Anyway, for this Otaku Mind I wanted to talk about the hit supernatural horror from the 80s Ghost Stories. Also known as Ghosts at School, Ghost Stories was originally a manga written by Tōru Tsunemitsu in the 80s. At this time he was a school teacher and would share ghost stories he heard with his students. He began to notice that a lot of his stories centered around schools, so he decided to start focusing on that and asked his students for school-based ghost stories which resulted in him receiving 160 stories in two weeks. Toru decided to run with this idea and wrote a manga based off the stories he got from his students resulting in Ghost Stories being born. The story would focus on an elementary girl named Satsuki who moved back with her family to the town of her deceased mom. At school, she finds out that her mom sealed a number of ghosts throughout the town who are now being set free thanks to the urbanization of the town. Thankfully, Satsuki’s mom left behind a book detailing how to defeat the ghosts permanently and now Satsuki and her friends are on a mission to destroy the ghosts throughout the town and their school. The series was geared toward children who found the stories interesting and scary at the same time which resulted in the series being a big hit. It even had a live action movie down the line, so the next logical step was to turn the series into an anime. The studio that chose to cash in on this series was nonother than Pierrot and Aniplex who were determined to make this anime a big hit as they bought in a lot of big names to work on it and the results were. . .subpar.
Despite the anime being put in good hands the anime was only seen as a subpar anime. The ratings told the story, as the anime received low ratings on a weekly basis. Nobody found the anime fun to watch, everyone said it was boring and not the least bit scary. Rather than Pierrot and Aniplex gaining money they actually lost money, but luck would come their way years later. Thanks to the success of Toonami, people in the west were becoming more and more interested in anime and this resulted in a boom of animes being licensed here in the west. One of the animes that was licensed was Ghost Stories who got bought up by ADV Films in 2005. Now normally when an anime gets licensed the studio behind the anime have a few guidelines that the distributor has to follow such as say this, don’t say that, etc. Here, ADV Films was given no guidelines to follow. At this point Pierrot and Aniplex were just hoping to make some profit off this series and told ADV to make the anime entertaining. So with no guidelines to follow and allowed to do and say anything they wanted, this resulted in ADV giving us. . .one of the best dubs I have ever seen in my life.
I mean it, the dub of Ghost Stories is without a doubt one of the craziest and funniest dubs out there and I love it for everything that it is from beginning to end. It’s like what would happen if an abridged series became the official dub of an anime and they were allowed to say whatever they wanted without any repercussions for their actions and still got paid for it. The dub does a complete 180 on the characters giving them different personalities. For example, in the sub Satsuki was more brave, determined, and moody. In the dub, she’s a no nonsense kind of girl who can be a bitch at times, a little racist, and puts up with nobody’s BS. Hajime the second lead is like a male version of Satsuki in the sub but in the dub he has a huge ego and is way more perverted. Hajime’s friend Leo pride’s himself on being a paranormal researcher in the sub while in the dub he’s Jewish and has all the stereotypes. Satsuki’s little brother Keiichiro was the annoying character in the sub while in the dub he was autistic and annoyed everyone. Probably my favorite character change is Momoko an upperclassman who showed no fear and was always ready to help Satsuki and the others showing us how reliable she is and how she’s the big sister of the group that everyone can lean on. In the dub, she’s a hardcore born-again Christian with every line she speaks being a reference to Christianity. Every time she’s on a screen she either trying to convert someone to Christianity or taking a shot at non-Christians. The only character that doesn’t get a complete change is Amanojaku, a ghost who possesses the body of Satsuki’s cat. In the sub he starts off not caring for the kids but slowly develops an attachment to them and even helps them out. In the dub he is constantly insulting these kids and relishing every moment they’re in trouble. He still comes to help them when they need it but always does it reluctantly. As for the scenarios, they remain the same, but the way we get there and how they’re resolved is completely different in each version.
Observe: https://youtu.be/qIgmvyHhc6w
And that’s just a small bit of the series, the whole dub is like this from beginning to end. The writer for the dub was Steven Foster. You may remember him as the writer for the Highschool of the Dead dub which was decent and had a few good lines here and there, but the sub was the better version overall. Here, Foster’s writing is perfect for the series. Because he was given free reign to write whatever he wanted, he allowed his creativity to run wild and have fun. He goes on record saying he just wrote down what he thought would be funny with some of the VAs also ad-libbing here and there to make the scene funnier. What made the writing work out so well was the fact that Steven’s writing was really funny here, the delivery from the VAs, and the fact that everyone was having a blast working on this dub. They knew that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity as they knew that once this was done they would never be able to do something like this ever again, so why not just go all out and have fun with it. If this anime had been dubbed today, half the stuff they said wouldn’t have been allowed and they would have been attacked by SJWs. Yeah, we have abridgers who aren’t afraid to say what they want to say (most of them), but they have more freedom than a licensing company as they don’t have to answer to censors.
In the end, Ghost Stories is a great dub and something I would recommend to anyone looking for a good laugh. I know some people out there have bad-mouthed the dub saying that it betrays the source material and while I can agree with that, I can’t really bring myself to hate this dub. Like I said earlier, the sub was uninteresting and boring. The dub on the other hand was funny and thus made the anime watchable and interesting as you were curious what they were gonna say next and how they were gonna work in the humor for this particular situation. On top of that, Pierrot liked the dub and actually made a profit off it. In fact, it was said that Pierrot even considered doing a second season because of how successful the dub was. Does every dub need to be like Ghost Stories and be given no restrictions on what licensing companies can say? Of course not, guidelines are important and do help keep the dub stay on track for all western audiences to enjoy. If this kind of thing happened to Death Note, would it be as powerful and fondly remembered today as being one of the animes that made people fans? My guess is, no. Serious writing is just as important as comedic writing and knowing when and where to use them is important as well. Thankfully, the team behind the Ghost Stories dub saw how boring it was and knew that if they wanted to sell this anime they had to change it up to make it a success and I applaud them for it. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next time on Project Nitsuj, and look forward to the Halloween special tomorrow where Nitsuj and his friends are gonna have a bad time. Happy Halloween everyone, as parting gift, here are some funny scenes from the dub that I think you’ll enjoy.
*All videos, clips, and music are not owned by me and belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved*
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