As a kid I didn't have access to a lot of TV channels, so I missed out on a lot of anime like DBZ, Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto which people raved over, and the internet was still in its infancy so I couldn't just watch it anytime I liked. What I could watch with basic TV was one or two episodes per day dictated by scheduling, and even that was notorious for episode repeats and episode order inconsistencies. More annoying still was that episodes aired at the exact time I finished school, so I had to rely on my parents to record episodes for me on VHS tapes and they would often forget. With repeats, episodes aired out of order, parents forgetting, and VHS-quality recordings, trying to watch this shit could only be described as "infuriating", and that would still be an understatement.
But I digress. Over the years, I've managed to catch up with Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, GT, and Super - and while it's not official I've also watched DBZ Abridged many times. I also watched all of Bleach all the way through until the anime ended, and One Piece up until the timeskip. I still need to pick that back up. Even managed to watch shows I did watch in their intended episodic order, like Pokemon S1 and Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02. Even watched banned pokemon episodes and DA/DA02 in JP just to see what the difference was.
As a sidenote/off-tangent rant, until I watched Digimon in JP I didn't realise that digivolving isn't even called "digivolving", it's simply "Evolution" with applicable added terms for anything from Champion upwards, or variations of Evolution like Warp or Armour.
Dubbing changes also include attacks, with the biggest victim of this being Gabumon/Garurumon. "Blue/Howling Blaster" as an attack name is very nondescript in terms of elemental typing. Because the attack name and artstyle didn't make it clear, the fire was blue, and Garurumon is introduced swimming (very well) in a lake, I simply associated it with water. So I thought Gabumon spat out water, and because of the additional effects in Garurumon's attack, I thought he spat out ice. Got very confused when Gabumon spat at a campfire to light it. In JP it's "Petit Fire/Fox Fire", which clearly tells you he breathes blue flames. Biyomon's attack "Spiral Twister", is also called "Magical Fire", so it's green fire. Which makes sense considering her fire-themed evolutions.
And those goddamn digimon analytic screens. In the dub they were still in Japanese despite being an English dub, so unless you knew Japanese they were useless for providing basic information about new digimon that appeared, bar their English names which were edited in. Because of this I wasn't aware of basic established concepts for the series like the three standard attributes Data, Vaccine, or Virus, or digimon stages which weren't even all verbally named in the dub until later. It's only when they're solving a puzzle in a castle to get back to Japan to chase after the third Big Bad Boss Myotismon, half way through the fucking season, do they namedrop stages and attributes.
Not to mention basic dubbing errors like Tai speaking with an entirely different voice saying "Hey check it out you can see right through this wall", or a random child saying "Biyomon over here! I'm coming!" in an episode.
The music choice in JP is a huge contrast to what the dub went with.
Right now I'm binging Naruto in JP (went with JP purely because I don't want to be put off by nonsensical dubbed anime censorship and I'm a fast reader).
For years I've been curious about what made the show so popular. It took me this long to do so because I was swayed by word of mouth and jokes on the internet that convinced me that the show was trash without even giving it a chance. But jokes get old, you start to think for yourself, and my curiosity has peaked.
I've done my homework to skip all the filler content, which I know the show is notorious for.
And I've got to say, I've been thoroughly enjoying it so far. I'm pleasantly surprised.
Has anyone else been in a similar boat, to catch up on shows you missed out on when you were younger?