Binge for Free: Dubbed Anime to Torture Purists

pcmag.com:

You don’t need to pay a dollar or subscribe to anything to watch great TV shows and movies. Free streaming services offer plenty of variety, from absolute classics to hidden gems. Here we highlight some of the top content you can binge for free.

Anime fans have it pretty good. Tons of anime comes to the US day and date of its Japanese release with professional subtitles, and enough effort is put into voice acting and direction that dubs are generally pretty good. Basically, we’ve come a long way since 4Kids’ attempt to localize One Piece.

There’s a certain level of entertainment when it comes to terrible dubs, though, especially when the actors are talented and clearly having fun with their roles while absolutely no one else involved cares. That brings us to today’s shows you can binge for free: Samurai Pizza Cats and Ghost Stories.

Kyatto Ninden Teyandee (Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee) came out in Japan in 1990 and was brought to the US by Saban just a year later as Samurai Pizza Cats. The general concept of the show was kept the same: a trio of cybernetic cat soldiers working out of a pizzeria protect a futuristic-but-also-feudal-Japan city from the evil machinations of a group of ninja crows. The idea of Samurai Pizza Cats was kept pretty close to Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, and of course as a dub the animation was kept the same.

Except that Saban decided to not bother to translate any of the dialogue. They apparently didn’t even have the original scripts or even episode summaries. Instead, everything in Samurai Pizza Cats was written from scratch, working to keep up with the general premise of cat cyborgs fighting ninja crows but otherwise doing and saying whatever. It was much, much wackier than the original anime because