My Distaste For The Mid-To-Late-90s Output of DiC Entertainment

Unfortunately, I kinda stuck my foot in my mouth a couple of months ago about the really, really, really popular anime Sailor Moon.  I made some statements that I more than likely should not have, and for that I am terribly sorry.

However, I want to use this platform to clarify just why I made such uncouth off-the-cuff remarks, and why I admittedly hate Sailor Moon... at least the butcher job that happened to it in America, and why I will no longer watch dubbed anime.

First, I have to explain why I hate DiC Entertainment in the mid-1990s with an explanation of epic proportions:

Before the time of Sailor Moon's total hackjob, DIC was known for actual halfway entertaining cartoons!  They did a fabulous job adapting the Ludwig Bemelmens Madeline children's books (a staple of my childhood I am proud to say) for TV, specifically HBO.  (This was long before they decided to screw up that goodwill totally and turn it into a full-fledged series about the time they fell out of favor with me, BTW).

They put out Inspector Gadget (still one of the most catchy theme songs from my childhood), and they made the Mario cartoons (rather decently if I dare say so myself).

So, where did all this start to go epically, horribly wrong?  Before I detail just how quickly they fell out of favor with me as a company, I need to speak about the director Tex Avery.  He is quite possibly one of the best animation directors who ever walked this earth.  He is on a whole higher level than Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and many others.  So, cut to the late 1990s.  I'm watching a Saturday morning cartoon called The Wacky World of Tex Avery (gag, even writing THAT title is making me want to retch violently) and I was telling some friends and they were going, "you mean The Tex Avery Show [a show on Cartoon Network at that time... prior to them going totally off the deep end and refusing to show actual CARTOONS on Cartoon Network, much less classic cartoons like they did in those days]?"

So, I took this friend's advice, and watched The Tex Avery Show, and my mind was BLOWN.  So much so that DiC very quickly fell out of favor with me because they pretty much sullied the legacy of the greatest animation director who ever lived with a show that not only didn't pay proper tribute to the man's legacy, but did it so unbelievably distastefully that they couldn't even get away from there without making distasteful fart jokes.

So, after all of this malarkey, I finally got to see this show called "Sailor Moon" on Toonami because my father had just gotten DirecTV or something like this.  Anyway, Sailor Moon was... to put it mildly... not my particular cup of tea.  The main character was totally screechy, her friends didn't seem particularly bright either, and the guy was interesting, but not interesting enough.  I had no idea DiC was behind this hackjob until the very end of the episode, and DiC had fallen so far out of favor with me at this point that I finally couldn't take Sailor Moon anymore.

This led to what initially got me in deep trouble and frankly, I may very well have been wrong about my initial extreme distaste for it.  However, if I do see any episodes of Sailor Moon, I am not getting bootlegs (was already burned by that with Muppet Babies...), nor am I getting extremely expensive DVD boxsets that are either imports or extremely out of print.  I will also not be supporting DiC's horrific hackjob of Sailor Moon, nor will I ever watch dubbed anime ever again.

I know, I know, dubbing anime is a big-money job for many Hollywood voice actors and actresses, but the problems involved with getting people who have NO idea what the anime is that they're watching come up when you watch an anime like Sengoku Basara.  I was lucky enough to be able to see a fansubbed version of the first two or three episodes of Sengoku Basara at an anime club at the time because I went to their meetings.  I got the first episode off iTunes and at the exact time I expected to hear "Put yer guns on!", I heard "Let's gun it!"... which made me absolutely incensed.  Incensed enough to make absurdly sure that I *never* watched or bought any anime without a language option for Japanese with English subtitles ever again.  So, there is hope for this budding otaku yet.