Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Digimon & Tamagotchi Parody Was Weird

0:00 This early Yu-Gi-Oh episode was a brilliant Digimon parody that was so good it predicted future Digimon plot llines. You probably remember Yu-Gi-Oh as the card game anime, but in its early days, Dual Monsters was just one of many games that Yugi and his friends played. The early manga chapters and the Japanese-only season zero anime saw Yugi and his friends play all kinds of games. I remember reading the Yu-Gi-Oh manga that I got from the public library and being very confused. It was dark and there were barely any cards in sight. In manga chapter 21 or anime episode 7 of the season that never left Japan, there was a story about battling digital pet monsters that was clearly meant to poke fun at Digimon and Tamagotchi. Episode 7, the underhanded pet rebellion, starts off with Janotchi, aka Joey, having his Digivvice go off in class, which should

0:46 be a familiar experience to many kids who grew up in the monster taming golden years. It's not a Digivvice technically. It's more like the digital monster V1, the brick keychains that predated the Digimon anime. In this episode, digital pets have absolutely taken over the hearts and minds of the students at Yugi School. We see that these digital monsters can poop, can evolve depending on how you raise them. So, it's more Digimon than Tamagotchi, though it's clearly riffing on both of Bondi's digital pet toys. Not only can they evolve, they also battle. And there's a competition coming up where the grand prize is a trip to Australia. Honda aka Tristan starts the episode as a certified Digi Pet hater, but agrees to train Miho's pet to try and win her affection. For the purpose of this story, two other side characters are key. A timid-l lookinging boy named

1:31 Hayyama and a nasty big boy named Kuji. Yugi witnesses some money exchange go down in between classes where it looks like Kuji is maybe blackmailing Hayama. Kuji is portrayed as a real slime ball, challenging others to pet battles and having his Digi Pete eat the losers. Keep in mind that this episode dropped a couple years before any Digimon anime premiered, but here it's doing something resembling Tamers, where some Digimon from that season would consume the data of the monsters they defeated. Somehow, this early days Digimon parody was presenting ideas that Digimon itself wouldn't get to for several more years. Of course, Yugi's got a digital pet of his own, and its name is kind of great. He names his YouTube, presumably like Yugi Jr. or Mini Yugi. I love you too and his goofy hair. In the back half of the episode, it seems that someone has

2:17 been kidnapping not Vets, but humans. We assume it's that big slime ball kid Cooji. But the twist of the episode is that Hayama, the kid we thought was being bullied, is the real villain. His appearance changes. He utilizes a whip like a certain emperor character we know. And he calls Kuji his pet. He'd been throwing food and money at Kuji to grow him into this hulking soldier he wanted to control. Again, beating the actual Digimon anime to the punch here. This character gives major Digimon emperor energy. Though what this Yu-Gi-Oh episode has done here is somehow even darker than Ken Ichigoji abusing digital monsters in 0ero2. The concept of an emperor type character who started out abusing digital monsters then going on to abuse real humans is deeply troubling, kind of scary and very

3:02 interesting for digital monster fiction. With our villain revealed, Yugi and his digi pet you two step up to battle. Yugi declares that it's time that you two dig evolved. Okay, he doesn't use that English word, but he says shina, which is the word the Digimon anime uses when you hear digivolve in English. You two takes on a darker, more intimidating form, and together they pummel Hayama's Vet. Because this was early Yu-Gi-Oh, and it was shockingly dark, Yummy forces Hayama to live through an illusion of being eaten alive by his own DigiPet. Then he says, quote, "Petss aren't merely toys to play with. They require love. You didn't understand that up to the very end." This episode offers a surprisingly nice lesson about responsibility and treating things with care without being a takedown of the virtual pet phenomenon itself. I was kind of expecting this episode to be a cynical shot at the then new digital pet

3:49 craze, but it seems like it respected Tamagotchi and Digimon, genuinely thinking that virtual pets were cool and understanding why they popped off the way they did in the late '90s. So, I already mentioned how Yu-Gi-Oh's Digimon parody episode was weirdly ahead of its time, flirting with ideas like Digimon consuming the data of their opponents and a Digimon Emperor type villain. But I need to emphasize how ridiculously tight this timeline really was. What if I told you this story was published only a few months after the first Tamagotchi's released in Japan? And what if I told you that the Digivvice or digital monster hadn't even hit the market yet when this parody story was published? The timeline, as far as my research could show, is as follows. November 1996, Tamagotchi releases in Japan. Spring of 1997, Yu-Gi-Oh Chapter 21 is published in Shonen Jump 1997

4:36 volume 12. June of 1997, the digital monster V1 is released. And then in May 1998, Yu-Gi-Oh episode 7, the anime adaptation of chapter 21, is released. So, what happened here? Did Takahashi have a prophetic vision for Digimon and predict the digital monster craze that didn't even exist yet? No, not really. The thing is, while the digital Monster V1 didn't hit store shelves until June 1997, it wasn't developed overnight. It and Tamagotchi were in the works for years. And with Yu-Gi-Oh's Mangaka working in the shownen genre, having his story published in an action magazine primarily read by young kids, there's a pretty solid chance Takahashi had heard about these digital pets before they released to the public. He would have essentially been an industry insider in the late '9s. And it's not hard to

5:22 believe Tamagotchi and Digimon were being talked about while he was working on the Yu-Gi-Oh manga. Still, this jam-packed timeline is wild, and it's hard to believe Yu-Gi-Oh told a pretty successful Digimon story 2 years before the first ever Digimon anime. I think we need to amend the history books. Digimon Adventure 1999 was not the first Digimon anime. It was Yu-Gi-Oh episode 7. So, what did you think about this weird little episode? Had you seen it, read it? Maybe you heard about it? Did you know about how strange and tight this timeline was? Not going to lie, I originally assumed this episode came out after Digimon Adventure 1999 had already begun airing. And it's kind of mind-blowing to me that this story beat Adventure 999 to the punch by 2 years. If you enjoyed the video, consider subscribing to the channel to get us closer to 60,000 subscribers. And if you

6:08 miss Monster Tamer stories like Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, even Beyblade, I wrote my own anime inspired novel, Dot Monster Revolution, which is available now. over 200 pages of modern monster taming action, sort of structured like a season of an anime. It's up on Kindle, available in paperback, and I did a reading of the first chapter, which you can listen to on YouTube. Links to all of that are below. Thanks for watching. Comment with any other weird Digimon parodies or tributes that you've seen in other media. Take care, and I'll see you in the next video.