Duel Monsters doesn’t function like an actual trading card game, it functions like the half-understood schoolyard version of it. Rumours and speculation read from a magazine and spoken of like myth and prophecy from a holy tome. Except in this world that’s how everyone treats it, not just the small children. An old woman, more a fortune teller than the shopkeeper of a games shop, speaks of playing the Red-Eyes Black Dragon card with the tone usually reserved for speaking of the hero destined to save mankind from darkness.

Shōgo’s reaction to this hits the same register. He is terrified of playing and losing, terrified to put his life on the line, but he must learn that you need to face your fear and play a trading card game, even if that means losing at a trading card game. Of course he never actually has to face the prospect of losing in the film either as it’s actually Yugi who duels Kaiba and he wins so I am not really sure that Shōgo learnt the right lesson here.

Speaking of the duel, the version of the duel disc here makes Kaiba and Yugi’s match look like an actual wizard battle. It is honestly cool but also where do the actual cards go when they throw them to the air to create a hologram? Does Kaiba have some sort of big hoover in the ceiling sucking them up? Also why do the holographic projects support making the backs of cards? And it reacts to people in the audience shouting things? Makes about as much sense as anything in this series.

Kaiba being introduced still spying on Yugi directly with security cameras in the games shop he opened specifically to spy on duellists is also really funny, though it’s a shame that he doesn’t have green hair and pronouns any more.

Seeing as I’ve been on a Yu-Gi-Oh! nostalgia trip I decided to give season 0 a watch for the first time. Interesting seeing all our friends in a slightly different context with some different stories and also Bulma Miho is here.

As there’s no official English dub this is also my first time hearing this version of the characters. Yugi always looked younger than he should but here he sounds like an actual baby with Yami sounding more like how I would have expected Yugi himself to sound. Anzu doesn’t seem feel much different from Téa, Jonochi is more pervy than Joey and Honda is a weird fascist about keeping the school clean and obsessed with Miho but at least that gives him something to actually do as a character compared to Tristan. Miho herself is just annoying and adds pretty much nothing.

It does feel like it has somewhat of the opposite pacing problem compared to Duel Monsters. Instead of having multiple episodes dedicated to one match of the same card game we already know the rules to, most of the runtime of each episode is set establishing the villain of the week and then the somewhat perfunctory shadow game is rushed through at the end. Funny how so many of the villains get palette-swapped versions of the school uniform and then in Kaiba’s case continue to wear it even though he immediately stops going to school after his first episode, even as he shows up more and more and we get to see Duel Monsters gradually swallow the franchise (though, like with the Duel Monsters show, a quick pivot and disappointing pivot back to Bakura for the finale). You can also see the actual rules of the game get figured out as it goes too, with it starting to actually feel more like a real game with actual rules in the duel against Daimon.

Seeing Yami develop is also interesting. From the start even though Yugi blacks out when Yami takes over Yami still seems to have parts of Yugi’s personality and memories and clearly cares about Yugi’s friends. It is treated much more as a different side of Yugi here than it ends up developing into as he becomes his own character and also less evil.

Other random thoughts:

• Yugi you cannot just see a man with dark skin and robes and go “woah, an Egyptian!”
• I feel like Seto Kaiba acting so nice in his first episode must have caused him physical pain.
• It is so funny how he just immediately starts obsessing Yugi to the point of stalking after losing one single game against him.
• Also what did Kabia plan to do if he did, in fact, end up killing a bunch of teenagers and one of their grandparents in his death tower in front of a live audience of thousands of people?
• I enjoyed evil Mokuba with his ridiculously oversized fur coat.
• The Blue Eyes White Dragons are a bit more monstrous and a bit more Geiger-y in a way that I like here.
• The fact that the characters compare Monster World as a cross between a board game and a console R.P.G. and that Yami Bakura is using a laptop to run the calculations for the scenario makes it seem like the writer had never heard of T.T.R.P.G.s and accidentally reinvented them for the purpose of writing the Bakura episodes, which would be very funny if true and I am not going to look up if it is or not.

Bakura was really fucked over by adaptation, wasn’t he? Because of filler arcs he’s been gone for over fifty episodes and I don’t know how many episodes ago it was that he put part of his soul in the Millennium Puzzle. Then the big final arc then establishes his threat as the true main villain in much the same way as his earlier appearances in the show: Repeatedly losing at every turn. His final shadow R.P.G. might also have been less jarring if his first appearance was as the Monster World guy instead of every season 0 element having been either excised or reframed in terms of Duel Monsters in this show. And you cannot possibly expect me to take seriously or care about the main villain suddenly announcing “Actually I’m some monster named Zork!” and then Zork turns out to be just a generic devil design with a dragon for a penis. Zork.

I had vaguely remembered this as feeling like a cheap cash-in where they were trying to sell a different game other than Duel Monsters¹ but I had completely forgotten about Yugi’s Magnamon armour combining with monsters to create new action figure designs. There must have been toys they were trying to sell with this, right? These are such action figure designs. I am not going to bother looking up if that’s true or not. Also shoutouts to the Five-Headed Dragon jobbing the filler arc one last time.

what if I started calling myself Seto Caoimhe

Yu-Gi-Oh! briefly takes a break from being weird about Egyptians to being weird about indigenous Americans.

Rebecca is a strange character. No one else in this show has aged at all but she seems to be twice as old as the first time she showed up. It almost makes her seem like a reasonable love interest for Yugi until you remember he is not actually ten and is meant to be the same age as the rest of the cast despite being half their size, making it all very weird.

Reviving some of that season zero darkness and Atem having to face the consequences of that before letting him go back to being more straightforwardly heroic for the finale I think really justifies this as being more meaningful than just a filler arc and I do love Kaiba being jealous that the pharaoh let someone else beat him. Some great Kaiba moments in general in this series. His continued insistence that magic isn’t real does start to strain credulity but I find it funny more than anything else and “Nah. As the president of a major corporation I have to [destroy people’s souls] every day.” is iconic. I was shocked that the editor cut that one short in this. One of the few editing decisions I fully disagree with. The U.S. navy escorting them to an aircraft carrier to tell the protagonists to go play a children’s card game is also great.

I don’t have the hatred of filler arcs that some do but it is very funny that they do a storyline of everyone getting trapped in virtual reality again and have to face off against the Big Five again who use the Mythic Five-Headed Dragon as their boss again. Deck masters are a cute idea it would have been nice if their rules made any sense but this is Yu-Gi-Oh! The more plotty side of things also has the benefit of focusing on our boy Kaiba. Back in the the Battle City finals the reversals in the Kaiba vs. Yugi duel were fucking ridiculous. I love this stupid show.

Nothing really new to say about the edited version other than it’s still a really fun way of revisiting things and also Egyptian god slime¹.

Battle city definitely feels like the definitive arc of Yu-Gi-Oh! It’s the longest running, it introduces the Egyptian god cards¹ and the duels almost have consistent rules now. Even just watching back over edited down versions filled with gags I can’t help but get excited over the Mime Control duel being hype as fuck. I also love shit like such a huge deal being made of the Egyptian god cards¹ and then making a big moment of Kaiba sacrificing Obelisk to summon another Blue Eyes White Dragon. It’s also funny looking at the attempts at censorship of the rare hunters’ Saw traps into shadow games and how I did not question it at all as a child. And the show itself still so funny in the deathly seriousness of it all. The announcement on the Kaiba Corp. blimp of “We have reached the official duelling altitude” absolutely sent me.

Battle City feeling like the most important part of the show does highlight how the rest of it felt a bit disappointing. Bakura never felt like a credible villain. He’s barely relevant in Duellist Kingdom and gets overshadowed and beaten by Marik here. And to have gone so hard on Duel Monsters to try to pivot back to ancient Egypt and general shadow games at the end was weird. But I’m getting ahead of myself now, that’s for a future review.

Setting aside my nostalgia for the show to talk about the jokey edited versions of the episodes I am actually watching: Bing Bong continues to make very fun editing choices: Leaving in every instance of the phrase Egyptian god cards¹ and the rules of what Pot of Greed do, the general abrupt responses and abbreviated card names.

“Time to awaken the Winged Dragon of Ra by reciting the ancient chant! Please.”

Fun fact: Parts three and four of Friends ’Til the End were released on Game Boy Advance Video but parts one and two were not.

Duellists, rise up!

Oh fuck I am twelve again. Absolutely perfect way to come back to a childhood show and see these characters again. Just as ridiculous as ever. I guess Dungeon Dice Monsters didn’t work out considering that Duke runs a food truck now but Joey still gets to live his puppygirl dreams with him.

I am very glad that the English dub was done in the style of the 4kids show to the point of even getting a remix of Kaiba’s theme in there.

And oh fuck I do love Seto Kaiba. He is still a complete and utter maniac and this is his movie. He finally accepts magic is real and deals with it by simply inventing an anti-magic field and adding it to his duel disc, then builds a space portal to the afterlife so he can finally have a rematch with his ancient Egyptian pharaoh boyfriend. It is incredible how much he is in love with Atem in this movie. I love Kaiba so much she should transition.

re-experiencing Yu-Gi-Oh! through the magic of the “I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s nth episode down to about a minute” series and everyone in the room lost their shit at this line

I have a great fondness for Yu-Gi-Oh! but I don’t think I could ever revisit it. Much like the prospect of replaying Pokémon I just don’t think I have the patience as an adult to put up with how long it is and how little happens. Cutting down each episode into a rapid-fire barrage of plot beats, memorable moments and gags is a fun and efficient way to bask in some nostalgia without having to actually watch a hundred hours of playing a card game.

What is fun about coming back as an adult, is seeing the ridiculous way Duel Monsters is treated in-universe. I don’t even mean how deathly serious everyone takes it, I mean how unseriously they take it as an actual competitive game. None of the top players in this game know how any of the cards work! They are continuously surprised by their opponents decks and don’t know what anything does (though, in fairness, none of how any of the cards work in the first series makes any sense whatsoever). Everyone is so incredibly bad at it. Yugi is apparently using the exact same deck that his grandfather used to play with years (decades?) ago and he wins the biggest tournament in the world! Pegasus being able to read his opponents’ minds wouldn’t be half a good as a cheat in a real competitive card game where you probably know what your opponent’s strategy is, but obviously here everyone is making it up as they go along.

Speaking of Pegasus: While everyone drawing the exact cards they need at a given moment and always drawing convenient combos together is table stakes for the whole show, the fact that his deck goes through a full JRPG boss phase transition and obligingly starts giving him creepy cards instead of cartoon-themed ones once he evokes the Shadow Realm is amazing. Does not make any sense if you think about it at all but it’s all in service of the atmosphere.

Bing Bong’s editing is also very funny itself, with the overly abrupt responses, fixing Monster Reborn and the friendship (friendship. Friendship, friendship) episode.

Other random observations: Kaiba’s theme fucks immensely and Joey being forced to be a dog happens earlier and more persistently that I remembered.

After reading yesterday’s post my friend Ruby reached out to me and told me that she was able to find the shortened Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes one hundred and two, one hundred and three, etc. by searching Nitter instances. Nitter doesn’t really work any more either due to Twitter’s A.P.I.s having been locked down significantly but there are still running instances with archives of a lot of accounts.

After finding some posts that way and then opening them in Twitter itself I could see that was blocked from viewing them due to the posts had been flagged as potentially containing adult material and Twitter wanted to verify my age before I could see them. Another system working well, then. And another way that the internet is being closed off. Presumably this is actually why they didn’t show up in searches for me.

I tried a couple of Nitter-scraping tools to see if I could mass download the videos but I couldn’t get them to work. I had also previously tried to use an Extreme Picture Finder template on the Twitter account too but it couldn’t go past the most recent thousand posts from the account. Not really having any luck with automating this I went to bed but while I was asleep Ruby painstakingly went and manually downloaded every episode she could that I was missing and sent them on to me. Thank you so much, Ruby!

There were a few that none of the Nitter instances she tried seemed to have and don’t seem to be findable on Twitter either. As such I am still missing episodes 121, 188, 215 and Capsule Monsters episodes 5 and 8, but I have most of it now at least.

The show is now living on my Jellyfin server with its own extremely high-effort cover art for it that you can see above.

Update: I managed to find episode 121 and Capsule Monsters episode 5 through Googling the exact phrasing of the posts and I was able to find the post for Capsule Monsters 8 via a Wayback Machine snapshot of Bing Bong’s Twitter profile, but episodes 188 and 215 don’t seem to be indexed on Google or Bing nor visible on any of the Wayback Machine snapshots. There are only a few snapshots on there from the period where he was uploading the episodes, unfortunately.

Update: My friend Ruby has managed to get me most of the episodes that I was missing.

People have often said that if it exists then you can find it online and that the internet never forgets. These people have never tried to find an archive of the Irish dub of Avatar: The Legend of Aang or dug through tech support forums full of dead links and a dozen pictures of the same yellow frog saying that the image you’re looking for is no longer available. The internet is, in fact, extremely forgetful and its memory is deteriorating rapidly as the companies that have been relied on as communication infrastructure rapidly close themselves off more and more.

There’s a guy who goes by Bing Bong who in 2021 posted a video online simply titled I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s 1st episode down to about a minute, and over the course of months posted similar edits of subsequent episodes, eventually covering the entire show. I really liked Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up and it was a really fun way to revisit them without actually having to watch the entire show again. It’s two hundred and twenty-four episodes long and quite frankly not a lot happens in most of them. The high-speed recap giving me the gist and jogging my fond memories was, I think, a nice way to dwell in some nostalgia without having to spend a hundred hours watching something I don’t think I’d have the patience for as an adult. It also has a few of its own fun running jokes in how its edited, such as trying to “fix” characters saying Reborn the Monster instead of Monster Reborn and leaving in every single instance of characters explaining the rules of Pot of Greed or every utterance of the phrase Egyptian god cards¹.

Bing Bong is still uploading similar videos to his current Youtube channel (he’s covering Bleach at the moment) but the Yu-Gi-Oh! videos are long gone. I said his current Youtube channel because his original one was banned due to copyright claims. These videos were posted elsewhere but it has been a pain trying to track them down again. It looks like he was uploading them to a Tiktok account for a while but it only has the first ninety-seven episodes and hasn’t posted in months. Still, that was at least a good chunk of them and I was able to save them with yt-dlp.

Trying to find these videos with Google and other search engines can be difficult because they all think they know better than you what you are asking for and keeps giving me results for Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. Still, I found that he uploaded at least a couple of episodes to Vimeo at some point but I genuinely don’t know if the rest of them are on there. Apparently Vimeo no longer allows you to open a user’s profile to view their uploads or even search for videos that you have not already added to you “library” and if other episodes are uploaded there then search engines do not seem to have indexed them.

These videos were also uploaded to Bing Bong’s Twitter account and as far as I can tell were never taken down but Twitter is barely functional any more. It simply won’t show you anything any more without an account and even with one it’s almost impossible to find things. Trying to scroll through the media tab to see older uploads it just stops loading new posts after a while and the search function seems to be falling apart at the seams. I tried searching for posts from his profile in a range of specific dates for when he was uploading these but whether it actually returns any posts seems random, often showing only two results when trying to search a specific month and then potentially showing nothing when I put in a different date range even if it actually contains the dates the posts I just saw posted on. Incidentally, apparently at some point Twitter added the ability to filter advanced search results by engagement metrics, i.e., only showing posts that reach a certain minimum threshold of replies or likes, which is not something I have ever seen on a site before. They truly have just laid bare the ideology of the site.

After some experimentation I did finally get some results searching for the specific titles of individual videos and managed to get episodes ninety-eight through one hundred and one that way but then get no results for the subsequent four episodes. The one hundred and sixth episode does show up but immediately after that they’re missing again. So I might be able to, slowly and painfully, fill in some blanks this way but it is not reliable at all. I can’t even just message him about getting them because Twitter no longer allows direct messages from people you don’t follow unless they have paid for a premium account.

This is not ancient history; these videos are less than five years old and attempting to find and archive them has been a frustrating mess. Anything online that you might take for granted could easily become inaccessible tomorrow and the trend at the moment for it is to become ever-more closed off.