Hi I'm Dranzerstorm
You may remember me as a regular contestant on the caption battle contest.
Welcome to Retro Retrospective, my world dedicated to the old guard of the Otaku world; expect some reviews of the old & obscure, and in-depth geeky knowledge with the occasional top ten and I now have a logo.
Little info about me
Well I'm British and I'm in to all things animated and nostalgia.
I've grown up with every cartoon going and have watched hundreds of anime.
Oh and to answer a question I was asked once, no I don't wear glasses in real life, I would wear Loke's sunglasses though.
Next on Shojo Week is Italy's most successful cartoon franchise Winx Club. *Puts on Sunglasses*
TOO MANY SPARKLES!!!!
The story revolves around Bloom who one day discovers she's a fairy as well as a lost princess, upon this discovery she ends up in Fairy School and befriends other fairies forming a friendship group called the Winx Club. From there Bloom starts piecing together her past while fighting off evil witches, dark wizards and various other assorted enemies.
Remember yesterday that I mentioned that Italians loved shojo? Well this is what they call a Magical Girl show over in Italy, and for a series that is so obsessed with super thin waist girls wearing gaudy super colorful sparkly fairy costumes with about as much personal development as Barbie liking a color other than pink, it somehow managed to click with a world audience and is played in as many countries as more well known cartoons like the Simpsons and Tom & Jerry. In fact Winx Club is easily accessible here in the UK yet a number of popular Magical Girl shows aren't, it's actually quite baffling that this is easier to find than Sailor Moon.
I think the secret to Winx's success is being able to grab the audience with color and fashion, a technique well used by the Japanese in all their current shojo series, not to mention every season adds different transformations to keep the show fresh.
I still don't like it, considering that I usually let a lot of this stuff pass, Winx doesn't offer anything new other than style, the substance is the same thing every season and nothing really evolves, at least Pretty Cure had new characters every season, Winx Club just drowns you in sparkles until you vomit glitter and rainbows.
Well two shows in and it's not looking promising. *Still blinded by the sparkles*
First off, I would like to offer my thanks to theotaku and my fans for the showcase on Facebook, it really inspired me to write more and hopefully I can continue providing my usual British wit of writing to the website, so to celebrate I'm pulling out one of my biggest lists, the 100 cartoons may have been cancelled but this list and it's follow up list showcases the worst animations of all time. Cartoons & Anime will both be accepted and requests are open to suggest any series I don't list in the dishonorable mentions to be added to the main list. Without further interruptions these are the dishonorable mentions, spared from the Top Ten list. Yeah these shows are that bad
Android Ana Maico 2010: It's soooooooo boring, a good looking character doesn't mean it'll be used for a good story.
Comic Party: I still hate Comic Party with a passion, a mixture of the most annoying fans mixed with it's most hypocritical critics.
Mega Babies: Rugrats on acid channeling Ren & Stimpy.
Matt Hatter Chronicles: A story where you enter the movie world to fight B-Movie monsters sounds like an idea that couldn't possibly go wrong; yet it did and this was the result.
Slugterra: Turning slugs into a new collectable toy range was never going to catch on, not to mention scraping the barrel of ideas.
Teen Titans Go: Despite all the terrible things that have been said about it, I don't find it as bad as some of the other shows I've seen.
Fanboy & Chum Chum: As long as this show exists Nickelodeon will always be haunted by the fact that it picked this over Adventure Time.
Sanjay & Craig: But in all seriousness Nickelodeon deserve the pain it gets for all it's poor decisions and this Regular Show ripoff is just another one of those crappy shows.
Uncle Grandpa: I don't hate it, I know it looks really terrible but I just don't hate it.
Almost Naked Animals: Has got the humor of Spongebob, at it's worst it's atrocious, at it's best it's barely funny.
Kung Fu Dino Posse: A shameless Ninja Turtles ripoff
Johnny Test: A show that doesn't deserve to stay on air for the length of time that it has.
Elliot Kid: Over active imagination is one thing, make believing everything like you're on drugs is just wrong.
Idol Densetsu Eriko: All the worst qualities of Jem and the Holograms.
Dragon Booster: The worst you can offer from a CGI action show.
Long Runners: They did good in the past but seasonal rot is still rot.
4Kids: More a company problem than their products.
Failed Pilots: At least they realized they failed, Allen Gregory, Bubsy, Doozy Bots, Saban Moon, Battletoads, Defenders of Dynatron City, The Groovenians are all just examples.
Preschool Shows: You know my rules by now, I can't review preschool shows because the target audience are too young to defend it. If I had my way, Peppa Pig would be the worst cartoon of all time.
Video Brinquedo: Their work consists of copying popular animated films so horrifically it makes China facepalm in disgust but they do films and were looking at animated series.
So that gives you a fair idea of what to expect, now the fun bit is seeing what else is possible to dig up from you guys, the viewer, thanks again everybody.
Not long ago I showed a Cartoon from Argentina and mentioned briefly about the cartoon superpowers along with some lesser nations, but what about South Korea? Japan's closest neighbor and a country that can at least compete on Manga but what about cartoons? Well there's a good reason, today is about Cubix.
Connor likes robots and manages to encourage his father to move to the Robot City of the World, Bubble Town. This is where RobixCorp is, an organization who have perfected an Emotional Processing Unit to give robots human like emotions. (I've seen that enough times to know where this is going)
Connor joins a Robot fixing club called the Botties looked after by Professor Nemo's daughter Hela. Nemo is the head of RobixCorp but has been missing after a horrible accident with a potent substance called Solex.
Connor and his crew, which include token female Abby, annoying smart kid Chip & token fat guy Mong (Say what you like about Pokemon X & Y's tag-a-long crew but they have more personality than this lot) they find a robot called Cubix which is deemed unfix-able. He kind of resembles a mash up of thrown away Rubix Cubes, but before they get any further, Dr Wily, I mean Dr K the evil villain turns up and steals everyone's robots but this incident triggers the awakening of Cubix who defeats Dr K and his army of bad robots and the series repeats this formula for 25 more episodes.
If you've seen this show, yes it's a 4Kids property, and yes it's an early CGI, not a terrible CGI, certainly better than Gormiti's CGI attempt. Cubix is pretty harmless, it doesn't exactly evolve beyond it's set formula and the title robot Cubix is endearing enough to not be annoying with it's lack of speech, although credit to the Koreans for ending the show when Cubix got his full voice in the last episode, they saved us from pain. It ran for two years from 2001 and probably has a DVD release, I'd only watch it out of curiosity and a look at the Pokemon voice cast in full outside of anime.
I'm curious to see if South Korea can give me anything else to look at, while this isn't terrible, it's still a surprise from what I thought Korean animation would be like and I'm curious to learn more.
To end my run of bad translations I'll end with a top 10 worst 4Kids Anime. Same rules as previous ones, I cannot put down what I haven't seen and for this feature I shall not be putting Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh! on this list because they were actually good and I've not seen Zexal. So let us begin the top 10 worst 4Kids Anime. Trust me it'll be worst than invisible guns
10. Pretty Cure
Rated quite low due to the fact that it mostly works well with 4Kids but at the same time it's European Translations are way more superior.
9. Shaman King
4Kids tried to release an uncut version of Shaman King on dvd but failed miserably but one thing that stands out for me was a scene that was supposed to be censored but 4Kids forgot. Anna defeated both the red & blue ogres which causes Hao to bleed from his forehead, 4Kids forgot to censor it.
8. Ultimate Muscle
The series itself was already silly to begin with but at least watchable, it remains as a lost gem of tv anime but I can also see why people hate it.
7. F-Zero
This surprisingly worked well but nothing in the dub could ever rival the epic Falcon Punch Scene. The dub will never make that scene epic.
6. Kirby
Kirby doesn't talk. Good!
Everyone else does. Bad!
Yes the voice acting was enough to ruin some perfectly good ears.
5. Dinosaur King
I can forgive 4Kids for wanting to license a Dinosaur anime because nothing says kids like Dinosaurs but it felt like watching a poor mans Pokemon. For every nice design there was horrible dialogue and ear grating misery.
4. Fighting Foodons
I'll sum up this show with this.
I've suddenly got a stomachache.
3. One Piece
Everyone knows how bad this dub was. The Rap Music, the stupid edits, the horrible script. The only reason this isn't number one is that, at least this anime was saved by Funimation.
2. Tokyo Mew Mew
This was unforgivable. The fact that they weren't even allowed to keep the Tokyo part of this show was worst than renaming all the characters. This is why Magical Girl shows are dying in the west. This is why were stuck with Winx Club.
1. Sonic X
But nothing did more damage to a franchise than this. I've always wanted a proper Sonic anime but what we got was this putrid pile of mess. Sega abandoned the console race, Sonic's established voice actor was gone, it took years before Sonic would ever have even a half decent game ever again. The American cartoons are Oscar worthy compared to this, even Zelda Wand of Gamelon is better than this. I would carry on but this is a PG-13 post and the language I want to use is very unpleasant.
So that's your lot, be glad 4Kids are bankrupt so they can't ruin anymore shows.
