English Dub Season Review: Shaman King Season One Part One

It’s a commonly understood phenomenon that big nostalgia phases cycle through every twenty years. The 70’s had 50’s nostalgia, the 80’s for the 60’s, the 90’s for the 70’s, the 00’s for the 80’s, and the 2010’s for the 90’s. And now that cycle seems to be continuing into nostalgia for the 2000’s, which is a whole existential nightmare for me as someone who was growing up during that time, but also interesting to see what old properties rise from their grave to cash in on remembrance for them. Among those is this remake of the 2000’s anime based on a late 90’s manga, Shaman King. I have a weird relationship and history with this show, as while I did read it in Shonen Jump as that was first hitting American shelves, I only briefly caught the anime based on it on Saturday mornings and quickly lost track of it. Shaman King was another one of the shows that was dubbed by 4Kids at the time, and so went through extensive localization edits, including its theme song, which was actually one of the better 4Kids themes.

Another neat detail is that the original anime was directed by Seiji Mizushima, who directed the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, and like THAT show, the first Shaman King also ran while the manga was still ongoing and so had to make up its own story once they ran out of material to adapt before eventually being remade due to popular demand (also FMA 2003 had 50+ episodes while its remake had 64, whereas here, it’s the other way around). So now, Shaman King is getting what is known as the “Brotherhood” treatment now that it can successfully adapt all of its source material in one go. Netflix has actually been pretty good lately at getting at least part of the series out while a show is still airing in Japan so it’s not in “Netflix Jail” for as long, but they’re the ones who got it and so are only releasing the first quarter at the moment. So, is this remake a worthy successor that can pull it new viewers as well as long time fans?

As one may already know, Shaman King follows Yoh Asakura, a laid back young man with the ability to communicate with ghosts who is training to enter the Shaman Fight, where he has a chance to become the titular Shaman King. It’s a story based on a 90’s fighting manga, so it is filled to the brim with shonen tropes, but quickly shows how it was one of the best at using those for its time. And by quickly, I mean at a pretty break-neck pace, as this remake looks to be going at approximately twice as fast as its 2001 version. I’ve only gone back and watched the first ten or so episodes of that version, but I think I liked how that handled introducing things than this, which almost seems to rushing through so as not to bore returning viewers, when what they should be worried about is confusing new fans who may want to actually know what the heck is going on. It’s probably not helped by this remake having apparently a dozen less episodes of room to work with than the original, which I am not sure was the best call, but we’ll see more of how that works out as more episodes are released.

Also interesting is how many of the 4Kids voices they brought back to reprise their roles in the English Dub. It’s not a lot, but there are definitely some surprising picks, among them Manta’s actor Oliver Wyman (whose character was localized to “Morty” in the original dub, which actually fits pretty well with the ghost theme oddly enough) and Dan Green of Yugioh fame back as Silva. Michael Sinterniklaas also returns as his main supporting character Horohoro, but that’s less surprising since he’s still a pretty active voice actor. But still, it’s pleasant surprise that there was this much effort made in acknowledging the old dub, something that Netflix may be learning from, given the hoopla that came from them replacing the Evangelion cast. I have no idea how popular the first Shaman King anime or its English Dub is among its own fans, but it seems to have been worth considering to put in this extra bit of attention. With three quarters of the show left to dub and release, we may see some other surprise returning voices along the way, which would be pretty cool.

However, in terms of recommending this series (or at least this first batch of episodes), I’m honestly struggling a bit. It seems to be not as good in terms of pacing or even animation quality as its predecessor, though its voice acting is noticeably better due to the standard for dubbing having risen in the past twenty years. Having come out now that the manga has finished publication, it now has the chance to explore stages of the story that haven’t been animated before…although some cursory research seems to indicate that the ending from old anime may be more better accepted than the manga’s intended ending. So there’s that. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how the other three quarters play out whenever Netflix decides to let us have those. Maybe we’ll have the second quarter out before the year is done! Please? Wouldn’t that be great?