You may be wondering… what is that alien language on that picture? Well, last december I made a post regarding how Hamtaro started airing again on a spanish regional TV channel. If you haven’t read that post yet, you should before you continue, because I won’t repeat myself and you may not understand what is going on.
Turns out that, as expected, they kept updating, each week 4 episodes, more and more Hamtaro episodes to the point when they reached episode 104. What was funny is that they did not just stopped there or went back to episode 1. The thing is… they continued with episode 105 and onwards.
This picture shows last week and this week’s episodes, which go from episode 114 to episode 121. Normally they delete the 4 episodes from the previous week when they upload the new ones, but this time they kept all 8. I don’t know if they’ll continue to do this or they’ll erase them eventually. Kristopher and a friend of his have been saving these episodes to eventually upload them to HHP. But you can watch them yourself going to this link. Keep in mind these episodes are in valencian. If you are from Spain, Italy or France you may be able to understand them. If not, you will probably have as much luck understanding this as you do with japanese episodes.
Well then. A super interesting thing about these episodes, is that they use the original japanese opening with japanese sound, and the original japanese ending video (te wo tsunagou) with the first ending dubbed in valencian music. But another interesting thing is… that they are using the japanese title screen, but with an english title! As shown here for episode 118 title screen. A funny thing I also noticed is that they have erased the japanese name on Brandy’s house plate during the opening screen. Guess they were too lazy to add a poor-edited ‘Brandy’ in there.
Now about the episodes themselves. I haven’t watch them all yet, but the few I have are incredible well translated related to the japanese dub. Which means, they are almost a 1:1 translation from japanese to valencian. That is sure going to help with subbing! Whenever I get stuck or unsure about what they are saying, I just have to turn to the valencian dub and check if I’m correct. Howdy jokes are another thing however, they do seem to be edited to make more sense or some are directly not jokes but other kind of interactions (for example this one time, instead of making a joke, Howdy is apparently cheering up Boss).
We can get some high quality rips from these too, to improve some of the japanese episodes that have good audio but poor video quality. So it is all good news!
Getting back to them using english titles (if you check the wikipedia’s list of hamtaro episodes, someone has been busy updating the episode names to their “official version” whenever new episodes appear, so thank you for that!), that rises a very important question: why are there officially translated titles? And why are they embed on top of the japanese title screen instead of fading in and out like they usually are?
Could it be that they made the effort to translate or even dub Hamtaro to some episodes we never watched? Spanish TV, same way as Italian TV, is known for dubbing directly from japanese (that is why we have a different Digimon dub than America, for example) so I can understand they could have translated and dubbed the episodes themselves (although I never watched the aired version of Hamtaro on valencian TV back in the day, I wish I did!) but if so, they would have translated the titles too and not show english ones.
TMS Entertainment catcheye can be seen in some of the episodes credits, so it is clear that they took the japanese video rather than an english one. But then why the english dubbed titles?
It is a mystery. For now, I just want to know up to what episode have they dubbed. I guess the most logical option is that they stopped at Paradichu arc (ep193), but I want to hold to the hope that they have dubbed all the way to episode 296. That would be the best!
For now, we will keep downloading these episodes as they become available. I won’t probably mention them again unless something extraordinary happens (like they actually go beyond Paradichu arc or they throw the movies and OVAs in there). I will send them a mail requesting information regarding this dub, hoping they reply. If they do, I will make another post. If not, then let’s just enjoy these episodes!
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