In the annals of cinema, there are bad movies, there are terrible movies — and then there are 4Kids anime dubs.
Vastly known in the anime community as being among the absolute worst of all American re-cuts, the 4Kids dub of “Yu-Gi-Oh” is downright hilarious in how awful it is.
While it would be fun to comb through the series and discuss its vast multitude of shortcomings, the movie is an excellent focal point.
The 2004 movie “Pyramid of Light” is so wrong on so many levels it’s astounding. It attempts to root itself in Egyptian mythology, but fails spectacularly by not even attempting to understand the history of those stories.
The main villain is Anubis, who is depicted as an evil mummy of some sort. In the actual legends, Anubis was the lord of the dead, at least for the duration of the First Kingdom, after which Osiris took over in the mythos.
This movie instead equates him to a Brendan Fraser “Mummy” villain, taking a godly figure and making him play a card game. Honestly, the biggest snag for this movie, and the franchise in general, is the idea that the world revolves around this card game.
A fair amount of anime is built around silly concepts, but this is ridiculous. When looking at the plot, you suddenly realize the crux of the story is a teenage boy attempting to stop a takeover of the world by a mummy by way of playing cards.
It’s when one realizes this that the whole thing completely falls apart. Since the movie can’t decide if the monsters the cards depict are real or not, it’s hard to tell the effect the duels have on any of the characters.
Several duels occur throughout the movie, and the last one between main character Yugi and “antagonist” Kaiba is the most problematic in this regard.
The plot intends to imply that Kaiba was manipulated by Anubis in his desperate efforts to beat Yugi and his ridiculously broken deck. The movie then promptly refuses to clarify if Anubis could make monsters real to “drain their life force,” or whatever they were doing.
Speaking of Yugi’s ridiculously broken deck, the mechanics of the game make about as much sense as the plot does. Speaking as someone who never owned Yu-Gi-Oh cards but has played Magic, trying to decipher how the game works from this movie is a virtually impossible task.
Furthermore, the movie expects you to believe any sensible game company would print “the Egyptian God cards,” three monsters so obscenely powerful that there is only one way to defeat them — well, two after Anubis’ meddling. But the movie implies that the game’s creator, Maximillion Pegasus, only printed one copy of the only way to defeat the most broken cards in the game.
Just the notion of that is infuriating. And while we’re on the subject, Pegasus is so obviously coded gay that it’s embarrassing.
His voice actor apparently looked at the character design and said, “You know what would be great for this wealthy industrialist? A fey, mincing voice so comically insulting that it will send LGBTQ rights groups into a frenzy.”
His voice actor apparently looked at the character design and said, “You know what would be great for this wealthy industrialist? A fey, mincing voice so comically insulting that it will send LGBTQ rights groups into a frenzy.”
It’s not just the movie that shares these problems. The whole series is a giant mass of crap on a nearly unequaled level, joining the likes of “Speed Racer” and “Astro Boy” in the league of infamously bad English dubs. It’s an excellent addition to your bad movie nights, but be prepared for a whole lot of things that don’t make sense.
