Digimon The Movie: A 2000s Nostalgia Trip

0:00 Digimon is a franchise that's had its ups and downs over the years and at one point in time rivaled the likes of Pokemon in popularity, especially once it made its way to the west in the late '9s. So, executives at 20th Century Fox figured that Digimon should welcome the new millennium by making the leap to the big screen. And it's um certainly a lot to unpack. So, let's turn back the clocks and party like it's 1999 to unravel the tangled web of decisions that led to the amalgamation of a feature film that is Digimon the Movie. Now, to the uninitiated, Digimon might just come off as a ripoff of Pokémon, which isn't entirely true. You see, Digimon started as a boy oriented

0:45 counterpart to Tamagotchi the digital pet created by Whiz and Bandai in 1997 called the digital monster. But unlike Tamagotchis, you could actually connect two digital monsters together and have them battle, which is sick as [ __ ] These little things exploded in popularity in Japan, selling 13 million units. And like most toys that got popular in the9s, the best way to keep that gravy train going was by moving to another form of media, which took the form of a manga titled Digimon VTamers coming out in V Jump in 1998. But the success didn't stop as the next year Bandai and Whiz approached Tollway with the prospect of creating a Digimon anime, which took the form of the

1:31 20-minute short film Digimon Adventure. Now, the development of this movie is actually kind of tricky since just one month into the film's development, the Digimon TV anime was also green lit and started production and both the movie and the show had chosen the main protagonist from the Digimon manga, Taichi Yagami. So, that kind of tied director Mamora Hosada's hands a little bit because he couldn't create plot holes. So, Hana's initial pitch for the movie was to follow Taiichi's father and his partner Digimon traveling around the Japanese countryside around the time of the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 1964, which was promptly rejected by Tolli, who instructed him to just make a kaiju

2:18 movie. So, switching gears, Osada and the film's director, Reiko Yoshida, decided to focus just primarily on the kaiju battle at the end of the movie, which was already hard enough to do in a 20-minute time frame. To avoid plot holes, Hosada decided to set the events of the film several years before that of the show, focusing on a young Taichi and his little sister Kari during their first encounter with the Digimon. With the chief part of the movie being the climactic kaiju battle between Greymon and Parammon. Digimon Adventure premiered on March 6th, 1999 as a part of Tollway's spring animation festival alongside a little unknown show called Yu-Gi-Oh. You probably haven't heard about it. It's pretty niche. And the very next day, a TV anime also titled

3:05 Digimon Adventure premiered on Fuji TV, which ran all the way from March 7th, 1999 to March 26th, 2000. And it came to the west pretty quickly, airing on Fox Kids from August 14th, 1999 to June 24th in the year 2000. The English dub titled Digimon Digital Monsters was actually produced by Saban. You know, the guys known for westernizing tokosatu stuff like turning super senti into Power Rangers or Metal Heroes into VR troopers or B fighter Kabuto into big bad beetleborgs which had a banger theme song by the way. [Music] Man, it was a banger. The '9s was a fire time to be alive, but I was not alive

3:52 for most of it. Digimon was very wellreceived in the West. So wellreceived, in fact, that when the second season, Digimon Adventure Zero 2, started airing in Japan in April of 2000, the English dub started airing just a few months later in August. But I'm I'm getting a bit ahead of myself before we talk about the second season because there is one more movie in between the first and second season titled Digimon Adventure, Our War Game or Children's War Game. It it really just depends. Digimon Adventure Our War Game is the second of two films directed by Mamora Hassada with a runtime of about 60 minutes. This time around, Hada pitched two potential plots for this movie. The first was a road movie inspired by the 1988 comedy Midnight Run, and the second story being inspired by the 1983 technothriller War Games, where the protagonist saves the world

4:38 from nuclear war, all from the comfort of his own room, with Tolli choosing the latter. Interestingly enough, early scripts for our war game actually had the plot revolving around Y2K being caused by a Digimon. Ah, Y2K. Planes were going to fall out of the sky. The banks were going to lose all their money. The stock market was going to crash. And none of it actually did happen. Of course, Hosada stated that he wanted to use this version of the film to teach kids about the concept of Y2K, but it was eventually scrapped once it was settled that the events of the film would take place after the year 2000. However, mentions of Y2K can still be found in early promotional material for the film. Honestly though, a Digimon causing Y2K would have made for a really

5:25 cool movie, and I honestly still kind of want to see what that would look like. The fanfic writers, do your thing. The finalized plot of our war game takes place after the events of the first season with the Digi Destin being back in the real world and a corrupted Digimon is now spawned, eating up data on the internet, disrupting systems all across Japan. This little bugger eventually evolves in the Diaboron and ends up hacking into the Pentagon systems, launching an ICBM at Tokyo. The film culminates with Tai and Matt joining their Digimon in the net to fuse together to form Omnimon and defeat Diaboron just in time to deactivate the nuke as it crashes into the river outside of Tai's house. Digimon Adventure Rward game made 2.16

6:11 billion yen, which is approximately 1.5 billion USD, and that's in the year $2,000. So, it doesn't account for inflation, which would make it about uh this much. Maybe that's a lot. I don't know. I'm I'm doing that in post. And later, with the success of the Digimon 02 anime, it of course had to get its own movie, which would take the form of a two-part movie, which if you combine the two titles, uh ends up being I have to read this cuz it's very long. Digimon Adventure 0ero2, Hurricane Touchdown, Transcendent Evolution, The Golden Digimentals. That is a mouthful. So, for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to refer to it as Hurricane Touchdown for short. So, Hurricane Touchdown

6:57 released both parts at the Tolli Summer Animation Festival in the year 2000 to a great success. The plot of the film follows the cast of the second season of the show as they help a boy named Wallace track down his partner Digimon Choan who has been corrupted by a computer virus. There's also a subplot where the older Digi Destin geted by Choan which you know explains why they're not there. It's honestly a really good film that tackles a kind of serious issue about the bond between a Digiid Destin and their Digimon and has a runtime of about an hour and 8 minutes, which by far makes it the longest film in the franchise at this point. So, you might be asking, why am I telling you about all these movies? Well, dear viewer, that's because in 1999, Fox, seeing the success of the

7:44 first two Pokemon movies, wanted to replicate that by making a Digimon movie. But the problem was that Digimon didn't have a coherent featurelength movie. The closest was the two-part Digimon Adventure Zero 2 movie. So, they made a series of developmental decisions that would culminate into Digimon the Movie. When the production for the English dub of Digimon wrapped up halfway through 1999, writers Jeff Nemo and Bob Buch were approached by Fox to write Digimon the movie while negotiating their contracts to come back and write for the dub of the second season. Nemo and Bulos were tasked with localizing the already existing Digimon movies for Western audiences. Now, Nemoy initially pitched releasing the second film, Our War Game, on its own and

8:30 releasing Hurricane Touchdown as a directed DVD movie or a DVD extra later on. But producer Terry Leo Ali suggested using Our War Game and Hurricane Touchdown together since the animation styles are similar and both films have Digi Eggs as the key plot point and released the first film, Digimon Adventure, as either a DVD extra or as a TV special. Unfortunately, all these ideas were shot down as it turns out that Fox was contractually obligated by Tolli to adapt all three of the Digimon movies. So, the million-dollar question still stands. How did they manage to take three movies that really had nothing to do with each other and cut and stitched them together into a cohesive movie? Well, the answer is better than you'd expect. But I'd be

9:16 remiss if before getting into Digimon the Movie, I didn't talk about the Angela Anaconda short. You see, both the theatrical and home video releases of Digimon the Movie start with a short for the show Angela Anaconda. Now, Angela Anaconda was created on the Canadian network Teleune, but eventually aired alongside Digimon on the Fox Kids block in the US. This show is bowling shoe ugly, and I don't understand it. And this isn't even just a clip from the show either. It is an actual fullyfledged self-contained short with references to Digimon. Just imagine you are a little kid so excited to go see a Digimon movie and the first thing you see when the movie starts is this face. If Reddit or 4chan is anything to go by,

10:01 this canonically caused at least one divorce that we know of. The short was later repurposed into an episode of the show with all mentions of Digimon removed, even though Angela still has Tai's hair and goggles. I don't know. I mean, I guess Fox was trying to push this show as like one of its big shows on the kids block, but I don't know. I I don't really get it. I never really understood it. I I don't know how popular the show was in its heyday when it was airing, but I do know it has a pretty niche fan base nowadays, so I mean, I guess there's that. Okay, now with all of that background out of the way, we can finally get into the real meat and potatoes. So, guys, gals, NB pals, let's kick this off with a bang. I present to you the digi

10:46 rapigution. Did you see? Did you hear? Did you know Digimon the movie is split into three sections. There's 8 years ago, four years ago, and then the present day. The four years ago section is basically the entirety of the 20-minute Digimon adventure short film completely uncut. I mean, the biggest changes are K's narration because they put Kari as a narrator to connect all three films since she's the only character that appears in all three. There's also the added mention and clip spliced in of the character Wallace from Digimon Adventure 02, now called Willis, who plays a big part in the movie later, but we'll get to that. There's also some censorship of violence and blood during the Kaiju battle with Greymon and Parammon, but that's not really that noticeable unless you're looking for it.

11:32 Oh yeah, and the addition of licensed music uh such as uh Rockefeller skank by Fatboy Slim. Oh yeah, trust me, the licensed music in this movie gets crazy, and I will be pointing it out when it's relevant. But all in all, this serves as a pretty good opening act to a Digimon movie and segways into a 4-year time skip. The second act of Digimon the movie is once again a fairly uncut version of Digimon Adventure, our war game. pretty much bar forbar, word for word, the plot of Digimon R war game with some more westernized jokes thrown in and changes. The biggest change that was made was uh changing Diaboron's origin from being conglomerate just random computer viruses into a Digi Egg to actually been created by Willis in an attempt to create another Digimon

12:18 partner for himself. The other big differences are mainly the jokes. Like there's this um running gag of Tai's mom being a terrible cook. So she's talking about like all these horrible things like tofu or or like evaporated milk and like all this weird cooking which affects another gag later in the movie where Izzy ends up having to go to the bathroom in like the middle of a big fight against Diaboron. Uh, which in this version is because he ate Tai's mom's cooking, while in the original he just had to pee because he drank too much ulong tea. Another minor change that I noticed is that when Omnimon defeats Diaboron, uh, in the original he says nothing. But here they added the oneliner, connection terminated, which

13:07 yeah, it's the '9s, it's a kid show. You got to have a cheesy oneliner in there. So, it checks out. There are also a plethora of great licensed songs here like One Week by Bare Naked Ladies, All My Best Friends Are Metalheads by Less Than Jake, and The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones, just a beautiful collection of '90s punk rock and Scott. You know what though? The impression that I get playing in the background while the nuke crashes down into the river and Sora reads Tai's email about how he's sorry where but he accidentally says that he loves her. It kind of fits in a weird way. You know, if you if you listen to the lyrics, it doesn't make sense, but it sounds nice. If Digimon the movie ended here, it would be a pretty cohesive about an

13:52 hourong movie, but there's still another 35 minutes left to go. and uh it takes place in the present day. Now, this is where the cracks really start to show in Digimon the movie because Digimon Adventure 02 or Hurricane Touchdown is a 60-minute movie that now has to be essentially cut in half in order to fit into Digimon the Movies 90-minute runtime. And it really shows because now all of a sudden the movie is introducing you to an entire new cast of characters. You know, there's the new Digi Destined in Davis, Cody, and Yolle on top of Willis and their partner Digimon of Vimmon, Hawkman, Armadillon, Terrimon,

14:39 and the titular new antagonist Cookon. Basically, the entire cast of the movie has been swapped out except for Matt and TK and their partner Digimon Padamon and Gateon. This section of the movie really suffers from pacing issues due to having to cut up 0ero2 in order to fit in the runtime. Like the entire subplot I mentioned earlier about the older kids getting kidnapped and deaged by by Pokemon, it's just gone. They disappear. You see them disappear and that's it. They're gone. You never see them again for the rest of the movie. They're just gone. So, like this poster and the cover art of the movie where they're like cheering on the the newer kids is a [ __ ] lie. Not to mention there's a huge tonal shift because of 0ero2's darker tone

15:26 because Digimon the movie goes to be more of a light-hearted kids movie. It really contrasts with the darker tones of 02's original plot and that shows and ends up giving you like tonal whiplash. There's a scene in the original Hurricane Landing where Dais and Wallace have a bit of a heartto-heart where Wallace reveals that the Digimon they've been fighting is actually Chokon, his second Digimon partner. To which Davis or Dice just starts crying, saying that, well, if it was Vimon, he wouldn't be able to do the same. He wouldn't be able to do it. Wallace then reassures Davis that hey, it's not your problem to cry about and we might not have to defeat Choan to save the others. We might be able to save everyone and Choan. To which Dais stops crying and says, "You

16:13 know what? You're right. We're the Digi Destin. We can do anything." So, how do they adapt this heartfelt moment into Digimon the movie? Uh, like this. I'm the one with the problem, not you. Get over it. Okay. Yep. That's all you get. You just get a stop crying. Okay. It It's It's comical. It's It's really comical in like a really messed up kind of way. Could you imagine that if you just went to one of your friends who was crying for you and just be like, "Why are you crying? It's my problem. Stop. Get over it." And your friend just immediately stops crying. Is like, "Yeah, all right." It's like unintentionally funny. I don't know if this was intentionally meant to be funny, but like it it it's

16:59 really funny, especially with knowing the context of like the original scene. After this, the movie basically just fast forwards to the final showdown against Cookan, which remains mostly intact since it's the climax of the movie. And with the help of Anjamon and Angela Woman, summoning the golden Digi eggs, which is something that has never been talked about before, in order to give a power up to Terrimon and Vimon, who use it to kill Cookman, saving the other Digi Destined and the world as we know it, and laying Pokemon to rest. It's honestly really somber in the original at least. We do then get a nice scene of Willis reminiscing about Pokemon. Um, and you'll never guess what song it's set to. Um, another banger of a license song. It's It's set to Allstar

17:47 by Smashmouth. Yeah, that song doesn't really convey the proper emotions I would associate with uh mourning the loss of a loved one. Oh, yeah. And the credits are set to a cover of Kids in America by Len. You know, Digimon the movie was really ahead of its time cuz Allstar Allstar by Smashmouth and Kids in America were both when I knew growing up from Shrek and the dig and the Jimmy Neutron movie respectively. But this was like years before both of those. So, it really was ahead of its time, I guess. Despite my grievances with Digimon the Movie, it opened at the box office at number five and made a total of $16 million by the end of its theatrical run on a $5 million budget. That's that's enough to be considered a mild box

18:33 office success. So successful in fact that the international success of Digimon the movie led to Toshio Suzuki reaching out to Mamora Hosada and offering him the position to direct How's moving castle. Osada later left the project uh citing creative differences as his biggest reason. Still now, Digimon the movie was critically panned by critics and reviewers who stated their main grievances being the fact that the movie doesn't really focus on the plot or the characters and mainly relies on you having to have knowledge of the show, which it's a fair criticism if you didn't really know anything about Digimon. It kind of introduces you to

19:20 the characters briefly, but if you don't really know anything about Digimon, it's just kind of uh it's just kind of weird. But despite the production issues and the negative critical reception, fans and audiences alike love Digimon the Movie, and that's what really matters. I mean, even to this day, Digimon the Movie still generates articles, memes, urban legends. The soundtrack is a perfect encapsulation of the 90s and early 2000s. And I got to admit it, it did it did influence my taste in music. I say that like I'm ashamed, but my playlist are like 80% SCA. And I'm and I'm not sorry. And Digimon the Movie is to blame. Digimon the Movie will forever stand as a time capsule of the 2000s

20:07 from its writing to its comedy to its music. And to be honest, it's a stands as a pretty good representation of how Western studios viewed localizing Japanese media. Constantly changing things or trying to forcibly westernize it by changing things like theme song, character names, entire plot points. Sometimes they would cut out entire story arcs. I mean, look at Yu-Gi-Oh. I mean, they didn't even adapt season zero of Dual Monsters. And season 4 of Yu-Gi-Oh GX just was never dubbed because it was just deemed too dark. I mean, to be fair, yes, it is a pretty darker tone compared to the first three seasons, but like they didn't even try. Thankfully, by the time these characters returned in Digimon Adventure Try, the attitude of the industry had changed

20:54 more towards localizing rather than adapting. So, the plot of Try remains very much intact while still carrying the characters and actually a lot of the uh a lot of the original cast came back. The Digimon adventure may be finally coming to an end this year after Tollway announced it themselves along with the announcement of a new show, Digimon Beatreak. But Digimon the movie will always be remembered by fans as one of the coolest things ever despite its imperfections. Thank you so much for watching this video. I've been the wild card. This has been my bed. If you like what you saw, leave a like and a comment and consider subscribing if you want more. And I'll see you next time. Peace.