Editorials
The Tale of ‘Ghost Stories’ and its Hilariously Offensive Dub Track
In 2000, animation studios Pierrot and Aniplex created a TV anime series called Ghost Stories (Gakkou no Kaidan), which was directed by Noriyuki Abe and loosely based on a book series by Toru Tsunemitsu. The story is rather basic: A young girl moves to a new town, befriends some of the local students, and then finds out that pretty much the entire town has ghosts roaming throughout. Yes, there are more details to connect all the dots but that’s the gist of it.
Anyways, the anime pretty much failed miserably, which is why there was only one season that featured 20 episodes. According to TVTropes.org, Pierrot sold the rights to the show in a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy back in 2005. When ADV asked what conditions there were for the series, supposedly they only got these three rules:
1. The overall story should be intact.
2. It had to be lip synced correctly.
3. No names could be changed. [Source]
ADV took this as an opportunity to create something wildly different and, in my personal opinion, absolutely fantastic. It was something that I don’t think anyone anticipated, nor could they have. What they did was turn the story into one gigantic running gag line, making things up as they went along. Rather than follow the story perfectly, they kept the overall concepts but then radically changed the characters and their lines simply because they thought it’d be funny. Hell, there are even rumors that the first person in the office on any given day was the person who got to call the shots!
I have to warn you that some of the jokes are not “politically correct”, so keep that firmly in mind if you watch the below compilation. There’s a great description of what happened from voice actor Monica Rial that you can watch on YouTube where she even states that they wanted to be, “…equal opportunity offenders“.
Also, you can watch the first episode of Ghost Stories over at Crunchy Roll.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
You must be logged in to post a comment.