Digimon Adventure 2020 [Episodes 1-5] Discussion | Billiam

0:00 hey so i've really been enjoying digimon adventure 2020 and i know a lot of you guys have been wanting to hear my thoughts about every single episode so i found myself trying to talk about each episode and not really being able to uh say enough in order to create an entire video around each episode so i decided to change formats completely for this watch through of the series as it's airing one thing i keep saying about this show is it's something i've been really excited to watch with my friends a lot of the other digimon shows haven't really aged well whether it's their awkward english dubs or their clunky animation and because of that it's really hard to get people who have seen a ton of other anime at this point to get into digimon and accept it with all of its flaws that i have accepted over the years because it's something i grew up with

0:45 i really want a good version of that original series not to replace the original in my mind but to experience some version of it with my friends so this format from now on is going to be me getting together with my friends to talk about these episodes we're currently working on a podcast right now called the cool kids table and we're getting stuff together to do a book club style read-through of the percy jackson series if you want more details about how you can participate in that follow me on twitter but since we have the setup we might as well use it to talk about digimon so we're still learning just keep that in mind this was the first time we ever sat down and actually tried to record something we're doing a lot of practice before we get to the actual podcast so without further ado allow me to introduce my friends

1:33 and we're going to talk about digimon every few episodes at a time so maybe these will come out like once a month every four episodes or so uh i'm niko i've known uh billy for 10 years yeah he is in my earliest videos yeah i helped i helped him with his uh first ever video right yeah yeah some of my first ever youtube videos like before billion we've just known each other for just years i i never watched it when i was a kid i knew about it as a kid but i just thought it was a rip-off of pokemon so i never really got into it so you haven't watched my videos no i am lexi i essentially have the exact same experience with digimon as nico i was very anti-digimon as a child because i was so pro-pokemon that anytime i saw

2:20 anything digimon i was like that's stupid that's like rip off of pikachu i hate it and anytime i would get like a toy or mike my grandma or somebody would be like you like this right i'd be like you're a disgusting idiot how dare you think that this is what i like and you also never watch any of billy's digimon videos that's also not true i i have i have i have watched your videos all right alex is better than me i have one friend and this is arizona hi hello what are you doing here how'd you get here i live here that's so genuine unlike nico and lexi i actually watched digimon as a kid but i watched it in mexico because that's where i lived at the time and digimon was super popular everyone was obsessed with it and i remember really liking it but also like

3:06 found it very confusing because it's a weird show but i loved bioman and agumon i had a little bioman like gel squishy toy that i like carried with me in my bag everywhere and then i watched all of the old series and movies with billy when he was watching them for his videos so yeah i got to experience it all over again as an adult i had a really positive reaction to a lot of the first two episodes i thought it was a very good introduction to the series even though there were some controversial decisions made with the fandom which we'll get into later you know i'm not here to school you guys on how the original series is that's that's why i'm here to get your brand new perspective episode one what'd you think it was good yeah i was actually quite

3:52 surprised at how good it was shout out to baby flame one time yeah exactly limited to one time making it an unlimited amount of times yeah i i really enjoyed it like agamon and taichi immediately like they have like a very good dynamic because they're both like very very positive you can tell just by the way like tai chi talks to koshiro like at the very start they do not mess around with the first episode like battle it it looks genuinely really good just from that alone along with just like i immediately liked agumon a lot and i thought i want to see more of him so i just want to give him a little kiss you know yeah just yeah he's a very very good boy with his little tummy my favorite part of the intro is when

4:38 they're running together and like he's looking back to make sure that tai chi is like keeping up with him he's like but then he like he starts falling back a little bit he's gotta get himself watching the new intro like i wasn't disappointed that it wasn't the old one it was like i was like this is great i also really like you get to see who taichi is as a person like really early on because as soon as he's in the digital world he's like hanging out of that cube for dear life he's just like floating there oh yeah yeah and then he sees like the squishy little pink agumon baby falling and he's like i gotta save him and he just eats himself off that cube and he's like i don't know what's gonna happen to me but i gotta save him i gotta do it i gotta save the baby you gotta save the baby yeah they do a really good job showing the

5:26 kindness in all the characters in different ways like taiji when he's like introducing uh yeah it was introducing like koshiro to uh yamado he's like oh he's the best he's so cool like wow he's amazing and he's like you literally just met him but you are gassing him up so much because he deserves it yeah i know that's what i'm saying you've seen that ipad and he's in like the fourth grade hacking the military like excuse me yeah are we gonna talk about how kojiro was on 4chan i mean you just did this man's is nine years old he's nine years old and he's on 4chan on 4chan what a dead

6:13 shy baby d-gen every time anybody gives him a compliment he's like this you know final thoughts digimon's vary yeah i'm having no exposure to digimon other than like knowing that you liked it and seeing them around i thought it was really cute like i wasn't i didn't really know what to expect i was like it's a it's gonna be a cute show that's for kids but it was it's just really sweet and it's you know tai chi is just this sweet little kid that doesn't you know he's he's he just meets this other kid and he's like yeah come outside whatever we'll hang out and then he meets this dinosaur monster and he's like yeah come on come inside let's hang out there he's like yeah whatever if you're nice to me i'm nice to you and we i think we can all learn something from tai chi in the present hell yeah i really liked it i thought it was a a nice fresh interpretation of it and a good way to get new fans

7:01 oh into the series so the original recording of this podcast was over an hour and a half long yeah there was a lot of technical difficulties and other things so we may have missed a point where we explained that i asked people on twitter to give me their comments about the series to respond to so in this next segment we're responding to these tweets watching episode five right now how do you feel about the slower pace of the series especially watching episode five right now how do you feel about the slower pace of the series especially where it seems the kids will all be introduced slowly over time and do you think there will be any surprises like new digivolutions okay okay so he's saying in slow pace because of the introduction of the characters so but story beat wise yeah it's not it is it is fast i don't like so in the original

7:47 series you meet seven of the eight kids all within the first episode and then from there they go off into individual character episodes where you kind of get to know them better but i like just introducing them like all one by one yeah like a lot because i feel like you get to actually spend time with them yeah you get to like them more versus it being like hey you're seven kids that you know nothing about yeah it's the problem with like having like an ensemble like cast essentially is that if you introduce all of them at once it it does feel super overwhelming so them pacing it out and and showing them like in the first episode there's tai chi and koshiro and we get to know them and their relationship yeah and their relationship and then in the next episode it's uh what's his name

8:33 uh yamato yamado and then you know we go from there and there's sora and now uh i don't know the the plant digimon who looks really cool by the way i really like to find the gmod and whoever that kid is is teased for the next episode so i like that but like i still like that's why i'm saying like the pacing is super weird to me where it's super fast but the introductions of characters is super slow i feel like it was just supposed to be a really exciting like introduction it's just trying to hook you in yeah it's like it's a really good hook a couple of episodes in general i give like a show like three episodes to like hook me in and this got me hooked in the first one because it because there there's a lot of there's snakes where it's uh his family like on the train but then

9:18 the elevation to a missile was like such a big leap and then at the end it was at the end of episode two where they like they fail the missile is launched and they still have to figure it out and then by the end of episode three you're like at least to me i'm thinking what are they going to do now and it turns out they have to meet god i love the ending of episode three though yeah it's really good i was really expecting them to set up this like uh there's a lot of series where the characters are in the real world and they kind of have to deal with what happens when the digimon come to the real world and i thought they were setting that up uh to be that sort of way and they were going to go to the digital world and beat a digimon and come back to the real world and solve the issue kind of like that and just having that like

10:04 i guess like a 180 where they like end up in the digital world and like they lay out the original series and by the time they get there they already have a relationship with the digimon a little bit yeah i really really really appreciate that and i think it's neat i feel like you still get to see like the relationship growing though like when they were on the raft like i really liked how when they went under the tunnel like they both look at each other and they like smile they're like oh my god that was so much fun yeah yeah but that's that's the thing is it's like little moments like that that that i really appreciate and it's maybe just because i'm a fan of that i'm like i want more of that do you want more substantial like breathing room yeah a little bit because it just seems a little too fast yeah it is they are they're speeding along very much yeah so that's why i'm always like where are they gonna go i feel like they're gonna slow down now though

10:50 because they're in the digital world they're gonna be walking around like probably the forest so like go find the little plant digimon and that other girl so you think they're gonna slow down until like team building yeah yeah seeing a lot more like oh look we're walking through the forest hey look at that cool ditchy mono in the original series there's a lot of like discussions about them setting up camp and stuff and like having that whole dynamic and i think once we finally meet everyone it'll kind of hopefully yeah become that exactly that's what i figured because they also established that she went and bought all the camping supplies so i'm hoping that's going to be a uh more of a part of it this early on in the series the thing i'm really concerned about is the characterization of the characters mostly getting their personalities down

11:35 even in the original series the characters don't really get developed until probably about the second arc they're introduced really well in the original and right now we're just kind of going through those introductions so even though we're getting to know these characters at a surface level i'm really hoping and expecting them to go into who they are a little bit more as the series progresses so once we get to know everybody that my concern will shift to character development after thinking about it more i'm not as angry as i was seeing uh omnimon which is the name of that digimon no that's the english name it's omegamon in japanese rush in so quickly but it seems like that the omegamon fusion has something to do with hickory and tk who's the brother not ty and matt so despite me not loving that it is it isn't a testament to their bond

12:21 i'm willing to accept it uh as something completely new however i do think recycling the entire plot of our war game which is the name of the movie that just takes place with literal nukes was too big of a threat for the start of the series it makes me wonder what the stakes the rest of this series will have yeah i feel like that's fair to pick it back off of the fandom being furious about this fusion i guess fusion you might call it yes this is fusion as you would call it depending on the series they call it different things okay well i don't really care good i'll be honest it was my thesis it was that new people watching this weren't going to care about what the old show did because guess what they've never seen the old show it's it's a creative decision and you have to

13:06 trust the the people for a minute yeah give them a few episodes yeah no don't like we're two episodes in episode two yeah you're two episodes in and then you're like this is the worst thing they've ever done already and he was at the end then and he should be at the end now yeah yes that that like when you told me this it kind of blew my mind a little bit people were upset yeah exactly like i was just and also they like did you get the impression that they are they this is not something they can do every like every day i've sort of figured it because it seems like a big deal yeah and like when they're looking at like the silhouette and in episode five yeah and they're like yeah we that's not

13:53 like every day that's right they're all looking at it like holy crap we did that yeah that's something we do on special occasions and also those feathers yeah they're like a part of the holy digimon yeah obviously yeah uh and i feel like that temple getting destroyed means they can no longer tap into that power oh that's that's what i'm saying we saw the shadow of the feather not actually the feather yes episode three was right before the hiatus so like getting there finally finally seeing them get to the digital world and then having to wait like two months yeah to see it i just wanted to see it and yeah but then you get to see beyond like right at the beginning yeah they did get to be oman

14:39 right away so what do you think of sora i think that's worth it do we do are we sora stands she she's friends i yeah i like her we like sorry pretty cool yeah what about the old man just jumps out of the bushes and is like crying and she's like i'll hold you it's okay you're my baby now this is child my child you will not touch it yeah she's like oh creepy giant scyther looking dude like i'm out that's scarymon schneemann sneeze neemon or snymon i don't know scyther i'm correcting you and i'm half right also i want to interject here in my other videos a lot of times i explain how in future digimon series after adventure i think a lot of the kids who meet digimon end up reacting to it in a very

15:24 casual way which bothers me a lot of the times and in digimon adventure 2020 there seems to be a lot of casual reactions to digimon not necessarily accepting it right away but not freaking out either and i'm actually okay with this because we're seeing every kid one by one get to know the digimon and if you really want to see somebody act scared when they meet a digimon i think they may be holding out for somebody and because we're seeing all of these different kids meet digimon for the first time it could get a little redundant to see a very sweet meeting or a very afraid frightened meeting with the digimon over and over again i wrote down in my notes uh piomon kinda looks like a neopet that's like a chocobo pink chocobo with

16:12 stripy hair because of my childhood i will compare it to pokemon obviously like almost endlessly and i will give digimon fans this one little nugget one morsel one one tiny morsel of me admitting something that i prefer that digimon has that pokemon doesn't is that i really like the fact that even though they evolve they go back to baby form yeah and oh i can accept that i can accept a good example of this is in the new like in the sword and shield anime like they had score bunny and then he evolved into reboot and i like reboot a lot but score bunny was super super cute but we can never really go back to that whereas in digimon we get greymon and we

16:57 get agumon we get baby flame and we get mega flame so we get the best of both so in english baby flame is called pepper breath awful zero out of ten and when you have such a god to your name like baby flame and you're gonna you think that it's a good idea to change that for any reason i'm sorry i can't i can't stand behind i think pepper breath is okay but it doesn't stand maybe if you didn't know about baby flaming you'd be okay if i didn't like pepper breath that's kind of cute because he ate something spicy and he just went yeah with pepper breath cause like baby flame you you know you picture this is flame you picture fire but like pepper breath i just imagine him like burping after he ate some chips like dude whatever wimpy whatever argument opens his mouth i literally just

17:45 that's so envisioned even when he's not making noises i love him oh yeah which is amazing when he when he's like when he's like hi or whatever he i literally just imagine go man shane bergerman got the short end of the stick in her debut episode animation-wise amen yeah yeah yeah they did not do her any favors have you guys so this is a toei anime and so toei in recent years has been really known for rushing episodes to broadcast and then redoing them extensively in uh the blu-ray releases this is how goku looked in the broadcast version and then this is how goku looked in the

18:30 blu-ray oh my god yes and the same thing happened with sailor moon yeah there's a lot of shots i'm looking at like that would that would really be serviced well to be redone a little bit yeah yeah and something i don't like is when they get really big when you see them floating down the uh the tunnel how it's just like one one frame of animation yeah it's yeah it's not great it can get a little clunky when they get bigger but that hop oh but that hop though yeah when he's playing jump rope with the little touch yeah with the vines so another moment we didn't get to is i didn't talk about how amazing the evolution sequence from episode four was i think part of the reason the action in episode four and five are kind of not amazing when

19:18 compared to the first few episodes is because they're probably saving their budget for the more important fights and they probably blew a lot of their budget from episode four on that evolution sequence it blew me away i was expecting them to cut out evolution sequences entirely and i'm really happy to see that they're not choosing to use an evolution sequence for every single evolution because that's when they get redundant but right now the way they're using just agumon's evolution sequences keeps the battles as something that's very uh worth getting hyped over and i'm hoping as the series goes on we'll eventually see more elaborate evolutionary sequences for the other digimon but we'll have to wait and see it's riding on nostalgia too much none of the fights so far feel earned and it makes me feel as though no future fights will have any

20:03 stakes i'd love to hear the perspective of a newcomer to the series though someone who isn't carrying 20 years of digi baggage i mean i think the fights are pretty pretty good i think the first episode had a very very good fight and i think the like digi fusion in episode two was also pretty pretty solid though the only time where it kind of felt a little off was when pioman you know evolved and like they were doing that fight was it meteor wing yeah move i did not like it oh did you not no it just i it just felt really weird because they're like they're like oh meteor wing and then a bunch of fireballs just kind of spawn out yeah i think i agree with that yeah and so like that it's not great but i i think the first battle

20:49 was very very good do you like the uh do you like the episode five fight i kind of liked that one yeah i did uh it does big boy flying uh it's baby flame but it's big boy flame yeah it's really a big boy flame what do we all agree yeah i don't i don't think the fights lacked stakes because you know in the first episode you see aguman getting attacked by a digimon and being unable to get it off of him and then tai chi has to come and help him when they're fighting with yamado you see the two digimon getting like thrown around and it's like you know yeah like when they're trying to taking damage yeah they're not just like oh we're gonna win just ko you know i mean there is there's definitely stakes because like i said at the end of episode two they fail like a timer runs out i like it but i don't know if i would

21:35 ever go out of my way to watch it on my own yeah you know because i have no stakes like i have no like connection to it my like all my critiques are very i wouldn't say analytical but like they're more towards like oh yeah the pacing's kind of awkward yeah it's fine it's good it's very adorable yeah do you are are you excited to watch each episode i i'm excited for the story because i want to know like what what's going to happen with that really scary looking digimon like that dude freaked me out like genuinely like he was a little scary like he he literally has like the menacing aura from jojo like behind him what about what about you lexi what are you thinking what are your final thoughts you excited to see every episode you

22:21 like agumon you think he's like a good boy but also the show's pretty good as itself like it's a good show yes no i do i think that it's um it's exactly what you want it to be for us which is just a good time to like share with each other like you know when we're winding down at the end of the night we have our food it's like okay 10 watts did you mind like i get excited because like all this is like a cute thing that we like we'll comment on and be like oh my gosh look how cute this is or like look how silly this one shot is of his big giant feet and like you know stuff like that like when he's running exactly oh when he's running we had to rewind to so it's just i i'm i'm happy that we found another another show that we can all just like sit and watch and enjoy not only the show but each other's company are you excited for the next episode absolutely oh oh what about you arizona miss i watched

23:08 digimon the kid's a kid and with you a couple times like a billion times a billion times yeah a billion times because i'm excited to see all of the new digimon i want to know why matt knows so much about everything because he's just like oh yeah we just got to do this and it's like how do you know this dude he's been around the block a few times so i'm really enjoying it i'm happy you guys are liking it and happier watching it with me i i very much want to see this as like a remix of the original version where they hit upon a lot of similar beats but do things differently yeah so like you know as a long-lasting fan i don't mind when they take something that was previously really exciting and uh make it something that's just

23:55 used to hook me in to the new show i am really excited to see where the show is going to go because they are doing a lot of new things and it really feels like digimon how i remembered it as a kid um and they are also borrowing a lot of elements from other digimon shows that i feel like has added layers to the franchise as a whole as the series has gone on and i'm really excited to be watching it with you guys and i'm happy you enjoy it and i'm finally happy i have a show i can watch with people who've never seen digimon before that's really important to me okay