24 Years since Digimon Premiered in English!

[MarcFBR]

Anniversaries are always fun, and it is time for a big one!

It's been 24 years since the English dub of Digimon premiered.


It premiered on Fox Kids on August 14th, 1999 on Saturday in the USA! The first episode was "And So It Begins..."

We continue to get a ton of Digimon in English, with North America being one of the high priority areas for the brand.

The dub has gotten a remastered Blu-ray from Discotek, plus subbed Blu-rays were last month (with general disclosure of me being the producer in charge of both releases), the English dub of Digimon Adventure: has been recently released, and we continue to get tons of products, both imported from Japan and made for the US market.



And the general energy doesn't seem likely to stop anytime soon, with Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning coming in a few months, more games and products in general to come, etc., plus the 25th anniversary of the anime being just a bit over half a year away!




How/When did you first see the dub? Any fun memories about it?

 

[TMS]

Say what you I will about the dub, it was still the gateway drug that got me into Digimon proper, and a number of other things, so for that at least I'm grateful for it.

 

[MidnightWolfie]

Yeah back in my home country we had it in our native language - which was most likely translated from english. I loved every second of it.

I saw it when I was 6 or 7 years old. It was bieng shown right after teletubbies. So my little sister would watch teletubbies first, then I'd watch my boy Agumon get a fish on his back and turn into a skeleton. Great memory. I still remember the excitement of it. Man, we had so many digimon figurines. In ice cream, cookies, this and that. I had loads of them. I wish i didn't throw them awahy

 

[Storm Eagle]

I he

Say what you I will about the dub, it was still the gateway drug that got me into Digimon proper, and a number of other things, so for that at least I'm grateful for it.

I hear you. Hopefully all of the seasons will get Blu-rays with the original Japanese dialogue.

Even though I didn't keep up with it from there, I was there for the premiere. At the end, I saw the Sabab logo, and thought "that had to be Saban". I started watching regularly at the third season, and caught all of the reruns from the first two seasons that aired the previous summer. Now I'm looking forward to season 2 on Blu-ray, Zero Two on Blu-ray, and Digimon Movie Collection 1. I already have the DVD releases of all of the seasons, and the Digimon Adventure tri. movies and Last Evolution Kizuna on Blu-ray.

 

[Unknown Neo]

Really? Huh. Well, this was great. Oddly, I remember thinking Patamon would evo after the others. But then we got Devimon. & I think they restarted after that ep or something. Or was that something else. ...Anyway, It wasn't so bad really. It could have been worse. 4Kids would have dubbed it! Thank you. I'll be here every day of the week.

 

[vincenzocyan]

Good times. I remember after the anime it was all about grabbing booster packs from Target and magically seeing Digimon World 2 for sale. Spent so many late night hours during summer break when I was a kid playing those World games. Truly was a much different more favorable era in life.

 

[Golden_Fate]

Happy Anniversary! It's great that we can freely enjoy the series in English and in Japanese, I was really fearful when the movie dubs were being hinted at that a redub of the series may have been in the cards. But it would be such a loss to replace the actors we've lost along the way! Tri and Kizuna did their best, but nothing can replace the original cast.

 

[Cardcaptor Takato]

The dub gets a lot of flack for it's alterations but I think it doesn't get enough praise for how faithful it was at the time. Most episodes were dubbed with minimal visual cuts and the overall plot and character writing was the same. There was some censorship of death early on but even that they eventually let up on and they weren't afraid to keep some of the more serious family drama moments in the dub. And even though there was some Americanization with the names, the dub never hid that it took place in Japan which other Americanized dubs from that era still shied away from doing. I rewatched the OG Adventure dub recently and other than some moments where I think they use Hey Digimon too much I think it still holds up pretty well and the voice cast still gives a stellar performance that holds up.