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Lamest lines you've ever heard on the show

4kids has a lot of those xD

"It's a Cowterpie", "James, stop this crazy thing!", "Let's poke-round the laboratory", etc etc
 
4kids has a lot of those xD

"It's a Cowterpie", "James, stop this crazy thing!", "Let's poke-round the laboratory", etc etc

I thought that the "Cowterpie" line was pretty clever since I dunno what else 4Kids could've come up with to serve as the pun in that scene.
 
4kids' puns problems were that they were carried over to all the other dubs throughout the world, mostly with bad results.

For eg this line I mentioned above "Maybe it's a Cowterpie" were translated as "Maybe it's a cow". Yeah, Caterpie and my language's cow equivalent don't match at all.

Like, WTF????
 
4kids' puns problems were that they were carried over to all the other dubs throughout the world, mostly with bad results.

For eg this line I mentioned above "Maybe it's a Cowterpie" were translated as "Maybe it's a cow". Yeah, Caterpie and my language's cow equivalent don't match at all.

Like, WTF????
Latin American viewer, I guess? Because that sounds like the "tal vez sea una vaquita" non sequitur that that dub had. Then again, the only actors with free reign there were the ones that dub James and Meowth, seeing how they could say almost anything as long as it fits in the scene.
 
Nope, Brazilian Portuguese. It figures to be similar, I guess, since both dubs seem to base on each other (not sure about Pokemon, but in other shows)
 
More so bad storytelling/writing than dialogue but (paraphrased):
Narissa: "The gym leaders were so scared of my transformed Pokemon they gave up! A win's a win, okay?"
Brock: "NOT OKAY. Look, Rissa, you need to study about your Pokemon a lot more, or you'll never be able to bring out your true strength. If you don't know the moves of what your Pokemon transform into, you can't command them properly!"
N: "What do you know?"
B: "RISSA. Unless you come to terms with what I said, you'll NEVER grow as a trainer!"
(After she breaks down crying)
B: "What's wrong?"

Where do I begin? (Let's ignore the reveal of her lying)
-Brock, YOU didn't finish your battle with Ash when you gave him the Boulder Badge, you hypocrite.
  • It's not HER problem that the gym leaders were so scared they just gave up. If you have such a problem, take it up with THEM, not HER!
  • What's wrong? Gee, it can't possibly have anything to do with a grown man yelling at this little girl....

This dialogue just makes NO SENSE...
 
TPCi's dialogue in general is just so damn bad. Yeah 4Kids had lame puns but at least the characters talked like real people. The way they talk in TPCi's dub is just...ugh.
Have to agree with this, unfortunately, while most are conceding these days 4Kids' dub had the superior voice acting, intros, and music handling-- this was always something I didn't like from TPCi's dub for the majority of its run more (4Kids had their cringy and hit or miss lines from time to time, but good grief, the ratio of stupid lines to decent lines seemed to increase exponentially when JCC became the main & only dub writer from Season 9 onward- don't know if they finally changed him out because they are speculating this may have occurred recently in S25 due to his illness, though).

My worst ever list--

"There's nothing worse than having your head handed to you by a homie!" (Jessie/Meowth, "Sweet Baby James!")
"I got me the x symbol/badge!" (Ash, the TPCi dub for most of BF through early DP- Is he a caveman now? I remember this is one of the JCC'isms that bugged me the most during the initial change during the transitional Era from late 4Kids to late TAJ dub- in the previous 4Kids dub, he instead said, "I just won/We won" in place of this)
"Nathaniel reminds me of me!" (Ash, "Strategy Begins at Home!")
"And when we get it, we're gonna raise the roof!" (Ash, some BF episode)
Insert any of DP and XY dub Team Rocket's dialogue here, especially Meowth's "Dig dat, dude's got a Darkrai," "Dig it, jack," "Lugs," "Pilfering us up a bunch of Primo Pokemon," etc. etc. TPCi's Team Rocket handling from the DuArt Era onward to prior to the late JN Era-- excluding BW when TR were serious for a brief time and it forced Cathcart to translate them straight-- have the absolute worst dialogue in the entire English dub of Pokemon for me, nothing they say resembles how normal human beings speak and it's painfully unfunny stuff
"I've never seen Ash work it so hard!" (May, "A Chip Off the Old Brock!"- Sexual innuendo)
"Those fightin' type Pokemon sure know how to fight!" (Max, "Wheel of Frontier!")
"Alright Ash, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and these two men are gonna do it with or without a good woman at their sides!" (Brock, DP002, "Two Degrees of Separation"- JCC tries to make a boy and a teenager gay for each other...??!!)
"And now you're being off color!" (James, some DP filler, What does this mean??!!)
"Keep movin' ahead and ya can't wrong, because that's the way we roll!" (Ash, XY dub, early episode)
"I'm SO psyched!" (Ash, his TPCi dub verbal tic that began in the late 4Kids dub, Kathy Pilon tried to limit the JCC'isms but they began to sneak in during late Hoenn & went full blast from BF-JN dubbed)
"Boy, those bubbles sure know how to behave!" (Brock, BF dub- Do I need to say anything? WHAT?)
"You've just gotta keep on truckin!" (Dawn, DP002 dub)
"Hold the phone!" (Misty, MoMP dub)
"Knock his block off!" (Ash, MoMP dub- Lol what?)

Really, just put down the late TAJ/PUSA dub (Seasons 9-10) for the protagonists and the DuArt DP-Iyuno TPCi XY dub for Team Rocket (Seasons 11-19) for the worst Pokemon dub dialogue in the entire English run for me, respectively: 4Kids' dub (Seasons 1-8) had cringy puns from time to time, but my God, the dialogue got WORSE out of their hands overall (this is the ONLY show I saw this happen for, believe it or now, they dubbed).

More so bad storytelling/writing than dialogue but (paraphrased):
Narissa: "The gym leaders were so scared of my transformed Pokemon they gave up! A win's a win, okay?"
Brock: "NOT OKAY. Look, Rissa, you need to study about your Pokemon a lot more, or you'll never be able to bring out your true strength. If you don't know the moves of what your Pokemon transform into, you can't command them properly!"
N: "What do you know?"
B: "RISSA. Unless you come to terms with what I said, you'll NEVER grow as a trainer!"
(After she breaks down crying)
B: "What's wrong?"

Where do I begin? (Let's ignore the reveal of her lying)
-Brock, YOU didn't finish your battle with Ash when you gave him the Boulder Badge, you hypocrite.
  • It's not HER problem that the gym leaders were so scared they just gave up. If you have such a problem, take it up with THEM, not HER!
  • What's wrong? Gee, it can't possibly have anything to do with a grown man yelling at this little girl....

This dialogue just makes NO SENSE...
I'm going to add "I'm not a noob!" as one of the worst dub lines that came out of Ash's mouth, in the late DP dub on that note. WTF were they thinking?! (Season 13!)
 
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"Boy, those bubbles sure know how to behave!" (Brock, BF dub- Do I need to say anything? WHAT?)
What does that even mean??? I've read that line several times and it sounds dumber each time.
I'm going to add "I'm not a noob!" as one of the worst dub lines that came out of Ash's mouth, in the late DP dub on that note. WTF were they thinking?! (Season 13!)
That was a pretty bad one too, internet slang doesn't fit this show at all, that was from the same episode if I recall correctly.
 
"look what the Gengar dragged in..."
That was my first hint the Chronicles dub team was NOT the same one that handled the main dub in the 4Kids Era, there was also "Fabuloso" too.

Ted Lewis on script adaptation...never again, good voice actor though, oddly 2/4 of the dub James VAs produced my least favorite dub script writing (for 4Kids, Lewis but for TPCi, Cathcart).
 
The dub has always done that to be fair, but 4Kids was never very good about game mechanics and it's one of maybe two things IMO TPCi didn't decrease the quality of from the original Era they did (that's how we got the Arbok --> Seviper flub later too, I think they likely forgot Jessie released her Arbok). There's also the "Both of Ash's Pokemon are water types, and they're totally weak against fire types" one from Brock, christ (tbf, though, technically he wasn't wrong since Ash's Greninja lost to Alain's Charizard...kidding!).

We also got the dub error in M01 where 4Kids literally admitted they knew they mixed up Pokemon names like Pidgeotto in place of Pidgeot, but kept them in, embarrassing. TPCi cranked out much worse dub lines/dialogue in terms of characterization (Team Rocket especially became cringe-worthy in the modern Era), though, IMO.

For TPCi dub errors, some I can recall easily are "Houndoom, move out!" in XY (it was a Houndour), "Back up lotions!" from Lillie in SM (it was a potion on the screen), as well as DuArt's first DP dub episode wherein the Narrator said "After the Tag Battle Tournament in Eterna City" when it was HEARTHOME City, clearly TPCi forgot or DuArt didn't even recall the last TAJ dubbed episode beforehand or watch it).

My favorite TPCi dub error, though, this one:


"Sarah Natochenny erroneously pronounces Greninja as Greninjo in the English dub and it did not get noticed by the dubbing quality check before it aired. The English closed captions confirm that it was supposed to be Greninja and not some kind of joke added to the voice acting."

This is tied for the "Medicam" one in "Wheel of Frontier," they did not even try w/the voice work quality checking, a staple of the modern Era to me..
 
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Not exactly lame, but there is a dialogue that has stuck with me from the first movie.

"I didn't know Vikings still existed." "They must live in Minnesota."

Obviously, it is ridiculous by today's standards. Real world places don't exist in the Pokemon world, and it is a joke about the Minnesota football team, the Vikings. Still, as a kid growing up in Minnesota in the 90s while being a bit of a fan of football, I got a kick out of those lines.
 
Not exactly lame, but there is a dialogue that has stuck with me from the first movie.

"I didn't know Vikings still existed." "They must live in Minnesota."

Obviously, it is ridiculous by today's standards. Real world places don't exist in the Pokemon world, and it is a joke about the Minnesota football team, the Vikings. Still, as a kid growing up in Minnesota in the 90s while being a bit of a fan of football, I got a kick out of those lines.
Pretty much the worst dub film of the original Era- the whole thing is just hacked up, the one consistently positive thing I will say about 4Kids is they came a long way with the Movie dubs they did for Pokemon by the end along with the Pikachu Shorts, they seemed to put all their best efforts into those vs the Anime dub in the last few years (still far superior to what we've had since late BW began though, and TPCi's down-spiral the last 3 Sagas esp. from XY-present has really redeemed the OG run there, IMO) toward the end.

Tbf, TPCi apparently decided to do some WEIRD amalgamation in Movie 22 from what Dogasu said, they mixed the 4Kids dub script in the second half with the Original Japanese in the first half, used the current dub VAs on top of that, and then put in a "jelly donut" reference because of course people are going to like that with Bill Rogers doing Brock instead of Eric Stuart and it wasn't stupid enough under 4Kids...yeah, no? And then they brought Dan Green in, when Jay Goede is still around, because? Ridiculous stuff...I would have rather they went ALL the way if they were going to redo that Movie, the rendition they put out only lets down both fans of the original dub AND the Japanese Version for these reasons).

There's also the "And do the macarena!" line from Clefairy and the Moonstone- dated references, but not the worst either, I suppose.

Zoppi/Cathcart had one in the current dub, "Tchoktes free for you and me," cringy in late DP IIRC.
 
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Pretty much the worst dub film of the original Era- the whole thing is just hacked up, the one consistently positive thing I will say about 4Kids is they came a long way with the Movie dubs they did for Pokemon by the end along with the Pikachu Shorts, they seemed to put all their best efforts into those vs the Anime dub in the last few years (still far superior to what we've had since late BW began though, and TPCi's down-spiral the last 3 Sagas esp. from XY-present has really redeemed the OG run there, IMO) toward the end.

Tbf, TPCi apparently decided to do some WEIRD amalgamation in Movie 22 from what Dogasu said, they mixed the 4Kids dub script in the second half with the Original Japanese in the first half, used the current dub VAs on top of that, and then put in a "jelly donut" reference because of course people are going to like that with Bill Rogers doing Brock instead of Eric Stuart and it wasn't stupid enough under 4Kids...yeah, no? And then they brought Dan Green in, when Jay Goede is still around, because? Ridiculous stuff...I would have rather they went ALL the way if they were going to redo that Movie, the rendition they put out only lets down both fans of the original dub AND the Japanese Version for these reasons).

There's also the "And do the macarena!" line from Clefairy and the Moonstone- dated references, but not the worst either, I suppose.

Zoppi/Cathcart had one in the current dub, "Tchoktes free for you and me," cringy in late DP IIRC.
Jay Goede is likely a union actor so of course they aren't doing a low paying dub again.
 
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