Digimon Fusion (Xros Wars) The Last American Digimon Show | Billiam

0:00 over the last year or so I've been watching all of Digimon as a kid I saw every season and although I knew I liked some more than others I enjoyed every single one revisiting the series the seasons I enjoyed more as a kid are still my favorites but for reasons I didn't really know how to articulate there are many things within this series I appreciate more than ever even the seasons I didn't like too much have redeemable qualities like Niemann I just liked Digimon like Nieman I initially started talking about all the Digimon series I really only wanted to do what I had seen however I can justify not watching something like Apple Eamon because it's technically a spinoff but Digimon fusion or cross wars was the only series I hadn't watched as a kid so

0:46 I mind as well check it out when Digimon cross wars first aired I checked out the first episode and I wasn't really into it for the first time I felt disconnected to Digimon because of my age Digimon cross wars infusion feels like a kids show and I can't really say that for the other shows Digimon has always felt like it to show about childhood a celebration of childhood which is nostalgic in its nature not really within its iconography but within its content the best Digimon seasons aren't just shows for kids they're shows about being kids Digimon fusion however is unapologetically a show for kids

1:34 [Music] which is weird because I've never felt that way about the other seasons I'm fully aware this maybe because I didn't grew up watching it but I didn't really even feel this way about the seasons I didn't alike although the show isn't totally void of redeeming qualities I often found it boring repetitive and lacking substance I'm not alone on this fusion didn't do well critically in terms of ratings and many within the fan community see it as the worst season but it's also the season which almost killed Digimon I'll be referring to this season as Digimon fusion and as the characters to their English names because it's what it's more commonly known as even so the English dub exists people watched the

2:21 English dub therefore it's worth talking about just as much as the original version is however there was easy access to the original dub so I watched about 15 episodes scattered throughout the series to compare the two most of the issues I bring up aren't even dub specific except for the editing of mervamon I guess you can't go a single season of Digimon without having explicit fanservice last time the fans were void of it they got a little creative when the show begins were introduced to Mikey Kudo he and two friends hear a distress call from a hurt Digimon who somehow has slipped into our world they rescue him and then are transferred to the digital world there they meet a whole bunch of Digimon including Shoutmon who wants to be the king of the digital world unfortunately the digital world is

3:06 fractured into 108 different zones with a code crowd holding the power over each one it's a race between our main group of the fusion fighters and several other armies to collect the code crowns there's blue flare run by a human named Christopher and the bagra army led by the evil bagram on using a fusion loader a device mysteriously given to him Mikey can collect Digimon and have them fuse to make new combinations over the course of the series Mikey makes new friends catches new Digimon it comes face-to-face with increasingly stronger enemies the collection of each code crown is usually split between two episodes where Mikey and the gang spend time fighting bagra henchmen making new friends and meeting the locals often times the future fighters will only win because of the aid of a new Digimon who joins up with

3:53 the team the characters in Digimon fusion are either passable or completely misrepresented versions of other Digimon archetypes Mikey makes a good leader because he thinks goggles are a cool accessory Marcus Damon doesn't like goggles so he will be deemed a failure I like Mikey I mean I would like Mikey if he were a real person he's very agreeable a loyal friend and makes several fatal fashion decisions which means he doesn't really have anything to prove to anyone but he's not an interesting character when talking with the other kids he'd always rather go with someone else's plan because he doesn't want to start conflict but guess what makes stories interesting conflict he has no immediate apparent flaws except for his weird quirk where he feels the need to save people which is a pretty odd character trait for a preteen

4:39 to have and the Japanese dub Thai keys catchphrase is I won't turn my back on him which is a similar concept but much less dramatic than a need to save people which implies mikey has had on multiple occasions an opportunity to save someone's life or watch them die he's a 13 year old athletic prodigy so that's pretty neat totally picked you out he decides to help Shoutmon save the digital world and achieve his goal of becoming the Digimon King and then you have his friends Angie and Jeremy I sort of started to like them I thought they were charming enough but they leave the main cast halfway through the show and it was suddenly a

5:24 lot better so I guess they're more deadweight Angie just wants to get home and Jeremy wants to be seen as anything but dead weight but he is oops Christopher is the new Matt but a lot less like if the good man and a lot more like the bad max Christopher wants to be the best but he doesn't like teamwork so he's gotta be the best on his own unlike Mikey Christopher's Digimon are color coordinated and robotic so you know he means business Christopher's storyline is that he doesn't think teamwork is valuable then he learns the value of teamwork at least until the next time we see him and he has already forgotten the value of teamwork and he needs to learn the lesson again and again then he forgets Inc its tempted to the dark side and

6:10 learns the lesson again over and over it's exhausting I like him a lot more when he finally joins up with the team about 2/3 of the way through but until then he's just boring and brings attention to some of the more repetitive aspects of the show and then there's Nene I like Nene's presence in the show but she's not very interesting on her own does that make sense she's kind of aloof and I was having trouble nailing her personality down so I looked her up on her wiki page Nene is an enigmatic beautiful girl who leads a mysterious army okay but like in terms of her mysterious personality once the mystery is solved there's not much there Nene is like a new friend who never talks you think they're all mysterious and whatnot until you find out they're just kind of boring mysterious only works if there's

6:57 something to reveal Nene is looking for her brother who disappeared into the digital world when we first meet her we get to know her motivation but then we don't hear about it for like 20 episodes and it's brought back up the episode before we see her brother so even her motivation isn't regularly apparent when we do meet her brother eewan he's just kind of whining he thinks the digital world is just a game so he wants to kill everyone so he can win but then he's proven wrong I'm sure glad that's not a repeated plotline in all of Digimon and then there's the Digimon there's a lot of a regularly appearing Digimon because each of the characters has this huge collection all of Christopher's Digimon are boring but Mikey's highlights are Shoutmon a feisty

7:43 red Digimon who wants to be the king of the digital world at first we believe it's because he's selfish but he really wants to protect weaker Digimon ballistamon a boombox and to rule amon a drill lion who used to be evil but is now not and also there's BL Zaman who's a more boxy version of this Beelzemon Nene has sparrowmon a prettier version of JJ the jet plane the monitamon the super cute fun little ninja spy Digimon and later mervamon this series justification for 13 year olds to believe they're old enough for Digimon mervamon is fun she's super eager to run into battle and in the English dub many shots of her are censored there are many gratuitous but in cleavage shots which were totally edited out of the show which is completely justified for a children's television show the idea of Digimon

8:29 fusing isn't really taking advantage of the core line of evolutions the series sees is Shoutmon fusing with someone to make Shoutmon times 2 through 7 but because it's branded as Shoutmon it ends up feeling like a standard evolutionary line rather than a cool combination option between all the characters early on the Pikmin are fused to make a wide variety of different objects which is a fun creative idea but eventually they just become a sword over and over again there's a moment towards the end of fusion where a bunch of cool combinations are made and a moment where they're trying to make a Digimon laughs so a bunch of funny combinations happen but I feel like the fusion thing is mostly a creative potential which is consistently slept on I think part of

9:15 the reason I was turned off by fusion initially were because of the Digimon designs although Digimon has always been a glorified toy commercial the Digimon designs always felt like they existed separately from the toys however the Digimon in fusion all look like they were designed as toys first ballistamon shoutmon and BL Zaman are very sharp looking it looks like they were made as an easy time old Shoutmon has screws in his elbows and I know they all have mechanical designs but I really don't think that's because the director liked robots even Daru lamon has a super wide stance which would make it easy to stand up to have the legs be separate parts and whatnot however there's no mervamon figure yet

10:01 digi-fuse okay before we continue with the video I just wanted to give a thank you to today's sponsor special thanks to her for sponsoring this video head out to VR video slash William to get a 30 day free trial of verb Premium verb is genuinely one of my favorite streaming platforms it offers a great selection of curated content channels including Cartoon Network's boomerang crunchyroll and even Internet content creators such as tested in roosterteeth I've been traveling a lot recently for both school and work and one of my

10:48 favorite features a verb is their offline sync which allows you to watch content offline I was using it to watch Digimon fusion while I was traveling to LA and I use it this past weekend in order to catch up on rooster teeth's new show genlock I've been listening to roosterteeth podcast s-- for years but for some reason I've never actually watched any of their content and I figured this would be a great place to start gen lock is this super unique sci-fi anime style next show it has a killer cast including Michael B Jordan Maisie Williams and David Tennant I'm on episode 2 right now and I've been dying to talk about it with some people so if you join my discord in the description down below you can head over to the anime club channel at me and we can talk about gen lock so check out gen lock and all the other great ad free shows on

11:35 Verve premium and go to the RV dot Co slash Billiam to get a 30-day free trial special thanks again the verb for sponsoring this video halfway through the show Mikey Angie and Jeremy all traveled back to the human world Shoutmon is granted to the power to digivolve which admittedly is a cool moment but only because it's seen as something unique and special and it happens late into the series only Mikey goes back to the digital world and once he does over a year has passed and lord bagra has basically won Christopher Nene and many of the other digimon mikey has collected are now missing and they later have to reconnect instead of collecting code crowns the show's format is now about defeating the seven dark generals a group of villains appointed to the

12:22 seven zones of a resurrected digital world I have to admit I enjoyed the second half a whole lot more than the first its pacing and structure is just a whole lot easier to follow and it's more enjoyable it's nothing profound or special it's just Digimon fighting and cool transformations and whatnot Digimon doesn't have to reinvent itself to work the kids don't have to turn into digimon be cops or travel around the world looking for objects all that they have to do is beat up bad guys and what separates the show worth watching multiple times and something worth having on as background noise are the details in that the ideas the characters the themes all of which are incredibly weak in Digimon fusion fusion is a bit

13:08 disoriented with its many different characters and plot points I feel like the easiest theme to point out is shoutmon's philosophy and believing it is the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak or friendship always wins or whatever although I didn't really like the previous two seasons too much I always felt like the creative team was taking advantage of an opportunity to have a creative voice but in many ways fusion feels like whoever was writing it was just phoning it in and I may be wrong but it's just so vanilla like smash bros without items or missionary work digimon fusion is a series many people didn't watch in fact it was the lowest rated show of the entire franchise so much so it was

13:54 almost canceled during its run in Japan which from my knowledge has never been the case with any other season what saved cross wars or the toy sales that's right to rule a month i GAAP saved the show when fusion was localized it was picked up by Nickelodeon who aired the first episode and then missed the subsequent time slots for the next three or four episodes there was no consistent airing and they moved it to the Nicktoons channel where the rest of the series aired digimon fusion had a pretty good line of toys in the US as well our relaunched card game toys and video games all were released but I can't imagine any of it did too well after fusion the next two shows in the series weren't localized several video games

14:41 weren't translated and the most recent card game wasn't either it was only because of fan outcry that a subtitled version of the more recent games have been released but not all of them were financially successful it would be a fair conclusion to say digimon fusion nearly killed the series in the West however while fusion ended there was a follow-up season in Japan Digimon cross wars the boy hunters who lept through time hunters takes place sometime after the first series were introduced to a new character tiger ooh and his Digimon come German a little excitable Digimon most of the other cast is pushed aside with Ewan and Mikey staying around even though the other characters come in and out tiger ooh and gum German are the main focus tiger ooh

15:26 is a little interesting but just because his motivation is to become better than Mikey a character who was written with limited flaws in an unreasonable athletic skill this totally seems like an acknowledgement of how he was a boring character instead of travelling to the digital world the characters travel to the digital courts a place in between time and space the human world in the digital world each episode has a Digimon finding a desperate child and creating trouble in the human world then the team beats it up in captures it there's a much larger focus on collecting Digimon this time around which is an interesting thing to see within the Digimon franchise this series is significantly more episodic than fusion which makes its repetition less noticeable because there's not an endpoint in sight with

16:12 Fusion I was just waiting for them to fight the big bad but the big bad and hunters only serves as a cool finale episode in which all the old Digimon heroes come through time in space to defeat quartz maan even though it makes no sense canonically it's a pretty hyped moment and it all ends with Tiger ooh saving the day not only surpassing Mikey but all the other heroes - I enjoyed hunters a lot more than the first seasons if you're going to make a show episodic make it truly episodic I have no hot takes on it because its issues are totally inoffensive and it's worth isn't anything profound it's just clean light-hearted fun something fusion didn't quite reach if you look at the franchise past cross wars what I see is Hawaii being very unsure of its future the following

16:58 season was aptly maan which was a complete rebranding of Digimon in the next season after that was Digimon Adventure tri which went from a series of 26 episodes to a series of six movies which tells me that to--a wasn't really able to sell ads based on the previous mediocre ratings of the show however I hope it continues cuz I've genuinely enjoyed watching through all of Digimon the good the bad and just a passable however I'm not touching peplum on for a while but if you've subscribed to my channel for Digimon content I'm not completely done there's a bunch of games I want to talk about there's a whole set of movies I want to talk about and it's just interesting and I and I enjoy it

17:44 anyways thank you for watching this video if this is your first video of mine please consider subscribing and following me on social media also thank you again to ver for sponsoring this video the link is in the description down below anyways once again thank you for watching and I will see you next week