>>32593711>Who really cares about an one-off special, though?Who cares about the series as a whole? There's no continuity, when there was it was fleeting. The 'end' of each series is highly telegraphed.
In a short runtime, the special manages to eek out a lot of world building, and showed a different engle to the world.
It showed us 'three kids setting off' something alluded to, but never shown in the series proper. It's the only appearance of 'Silver'. It's one of the few times the anime leans heavily into Pokemon nicknames. Kris is a bae.
> nowadays, they'd skip over it- a bad dub is better than no dub.I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Chronicles. This special was left undubbed, for about 5 years. It wasn't until the Japanese 'side stories' pilled up that 4Kids went back to dub this, and the 1999 Christmas special, among others.
They removed the whole opening scene, letterboxed the next scene, made a male Rocket Grunt female, renamed league finalist "Vincent" as "Jimmy", it called Eusine "Eugene", and removed the entire end scene.
Raikou was, objectively, the messiest Pokemon dub ever released. Don't get me wrong, I was exposed to the special through the dub, I still have fondness for the performances, but as a whole it's a fucking joke.
