I never actually finished watching Tamers until years after it aired mostly because the entire series and especially near the end it was really damn creepy.

this is so awesome!

I loved this show when I was a kid, but damn I didn't get *half* of all that texplanation Ü_Ü

I honestly was suprised by quite a bit of the thoughts behind it you explained here, so I'm kind of re-discovering it ;)

The weirdest thing for me personally is the English version of Calumon I see in your clips, because the German version stayed closer to the Japanese (in which calumon said nearly nothing except his name and here he doesn't seem to be able to shut up at all^^)

Anyway looking forward so much to the rest of it, this must have been such a huge amount of work, thanks so much, I'm enjoying it tremendously

Calu? was meinst du? Calu?

I think the wierdest thing for me was finding out Renamon was female, since the German version had a male voice actor for Renamon. I thought that it was only female when combined with Rika.

yeah most of the textplanations about the Hypnos stuff kinda went over my head back then too, aswell as the creepiness for some reason. When I rewatched it later, it was like "why didn't this scare me shitless."

im looking forward to the next few parts
i really like tamers and think its the best digimon series

Though technically Renamon was informed by humans that it seemed feminine. ^^

Shit it's here. It's finally here.

ya i know remember back when this was all suppose to happen in one month lol

Monster Makers huh..? idicates a whole lot more about the group than their japanese name The Wild Bunch.
I'm pretty sure that whole the Devas are trying to take over the world thing was something the dub added,unless I'm mistaken, their only goal was to get the power of evolution, Calumon, back.

The Devas had various motives/levels of understanding about what they were supposed to be doing. The lower level thugs were just sent to "prepare the world for the coming of the Sovereign," while the more crafty Mukuramon (monkey) and Catsuramon (dog) had more of an idea of what the Sovereign wanted. Heck, Vajramon (ox) tries to kill Calumon at one point because he's a human sympathizer, so he clearly had no clue as to the real plan. XD I'm pretty sure Vikarylamon (pig) was just a distraction so Mukuramon could snatch Calumon while the portal was open.

I guess you could explain Vajramon trying to kill Calumon by him just not being aware of what Calumon really is, but your explanation also makes alot of sense.

anyway can't wait for more!

I'm surprised JO that you didn't go into the symbolic nature of the Takato creating a Digimon and acting as father to it.

Yay! JO got back to doing these!

For the record, I consider Tamers something of a rollercoaster - second and final arcs were good (especially the final arc), but the first and third weren't so great (the third being the absolute nadir point of Tamers).

its better then using the same 10 year old for 700 episodes in another monster catching show

I never said Pokémon was good, or even comparing Tamers to it. I view these things by their own merits and their merits alone.

Nice job JO.

I had watched the first two seasons when I was younger, but passed this one over, sorta regret that now as it looks to be the superior one.

My only complaint I can come up with comes from my inner dork, seeing the constant use of big walls of binary. My brain just hurts seeing it, because YOU DO NOT CODE THAT WAY. Coding in raw binary is basically unheard of in over 30 years, and was only used when you were just checking the results of ONE byte of data. (ie, stuff like punch card machines)

It's a petty complaint, but I'm a programmer, so it bugs me. :p

http://xkcd.com/378/

But are you a REAL programmer? :P

It's true, people don't program in binary anymore, but TV is all about symbolism and putting out some C++ text in there would probably mean nothing to anyone who doesn't know what it means.

Yar, it just reminded me on how awesome this season was.

I really enjoyed the premise for this one. The idea that a game or story comes to life has been done before, but considering it's using previous seasons as a base, we don't just get some vague explanation of things the characters are familiar with - we know as much about it as they do. I think that gave the creators a lot more to play with. This was actually my second-favorite digimon season (I missed 90% of season one, but saw most of season two, so that one is the most nostalgic for me). However, I only saw the first 18 episodes of Tamers, so when I went back to watch it again years later, I realized I had barely gotten a glimpse of just how dark the series got. Hard to say what my child self would have thought of it if I'd seen more.

Honestly I have never been a fan of Konoka his work on Astro Boy was great, but his work on Hellsing was awful, and Big O season 2 completely changes the tone to make it confusing (you can at least figure out Evangelion is about depression), and I think three people saw GR: Giant Robo (though that' not his fault, Imagawa's Giant Robo was a masterpiece, and people have wanted more Giant Robo from him)

For me as an 18 year old, who was just getting into different kinds of anime such as Dragonball Z, Slayers, Tenchi, Outlaw Star and in particular Gundam Digimon Tamers simply started off too slow. I could simply watch a bunch of anime somewhere else. This is why even though I watched Digimon Adventure, and Digimon Adventure 02, and had been watching Fox Kids since the beginning (I mean that literally, to this day I still love the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes cartoon) I stopped watching Fox Kids (kind of interesting as Fox Kids ended the next year).

I'm still waiting for WhatTheEgad's full analysis on Tamers. This should tide me over till then.

If you haven't heard of him, I HIGHLY recommend his videos on Digimon Adventure 1&2.

Aah, here we have it. The biggest piece of shit on planet Earth. The thing that killed my entire childhood in just mere few minutes. Never have I despised anything more than Digimon Lamers. This is to me what Garbage Pail Kids is to Nostalgia Critic, what One More Day is to Linkara, what Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is to Angry Video Game Nerd.

I can't believe how unspeakably bad this series would be. Hell, I'm so effing shocked that this show even has a fanbase!

Let me start by saying: I love Digimon Adventure and Zero Two. To me, the two seasons together form the best piece of anime I have ever seen, and to date remains as my favorite animated series period. The story, the characters, the music, the animation... Everything was so likable, well-developed and beautiful.

And then comes this piece of shit Digimon Lamers. It has nothing to do with the first two seasons, the characters are beyond god-awful(ESPECIALLY the annoying b*tch Rika and the overrated sl*t Renamon), some stupid-ass cards that belong to Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and not in Digimon... It manages to do EVERYTHING wrong. Even the music is horrendous(apart from the 1 or 2 songs that they recycled from Adventure, but that's about it).

If they renamed this show to just "Tamers", called the creatures in this show "Monsters" and removed the -mon suffix from the end of every creatures name(Guil, Terrier, Imp etc.) and removed every trace from Digimon, then it would be fine. But just the thought that some people think this is an actual sequel to Digimon is insulting.

Oh well, at least Frontier came and managed to revive the franchise(Patamon's in it, that alone makes Frontier like 9001 times better than Lamers. Not to mention they actually get to the Digital World in the very first episode of Frontier).

Hate me as much as you want, but that's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.

Thing is, you didn't provide any reason you actually hate it. You just got overly emotional and said crap that doesn't really make any sense. Your opinion doesn't mean anything, and thus there's no reason to share it, especially full well knowing that you talking amongst fans and flat out admitting that you knew you would piss people off.

If you have an argument for why this anime sucks, present it. If not, then shut up and stop trolling the fans.

I did provide reasons. Maybe you didn't catch them, so here they are, listed in numbers.

1. It completely ignores the plot of the first 2 seasons. Rebooting franchises is usually a VERY bad thing to do, unless it's done when the series is already dead. In my opinion, only 2 reboots have worked so far: Christopher Nolan Batman movies and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

2. The characters. MAN, where the hell do I start? Well, maybe from the fact that in my opinion, 99% of the main characters in Adventure/Zero Two were well-developed, interesting, and most importantly, LIKEABLE(Cody was the only exception to this rule). Lamers, on the other hand...
Takato: A bland idiot
Guilmon: A bland idiot with a food fetish
Henry: Entirely forgettable
Terriermon: An annoying idiot
Rika: One of the most obnoxious b*tches in fiction history
Renamon: The most overrated furry in existance, not to mention has about as much of a personality as a spray can
Calumon: Annoying idiot 2
Impmon: The only even remotely likeable character in the series(even if it's for the sole reason that he trolls the hell out of the other main characters in the first episodes), but his voice in the Finnish dub... It makes my ears bleed

3. The trading cards. Okay, in Adventure and Zero Two, the only means of defeating stronger foes were digivolving, be it via the Digivice, Digi-Eggs or DNA Digivolution. But in Lamers, it goes like
"ololo we're fighting against a mega well no worries, I use these cards to give Guilmon wings, laser eyes, invincibility and hellfire"
Seriously, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX had a better excuse to fight with trading cards than Lamers did.

My biggest gripe is still that it has nothing to do with Adventure or Zero Two. Or, should I say, the fact that Lamers acts like the far superior previous 2 seasons were only fiction inside it. Well, to me, any of the characters in Adventure seemed much more real to me than the whole cast of Lamers combined.

There you go. If I'm not allowed to have an opinion, then fine. But I just hate it when people f*ck up my favorite anime series of all time this bad.

1. Um...the series WAS dead. After the ending of 02, what could they do to continue the series? Every character had an ending written for them, Everyone knew about and had a digimon, and all danger or evil in the world was effectively stamped out. There was nothing they could do beyond that conclusion.

2. I like how you ignore all the development and growth that happens with the characters in order to make your case.

3. When did the EVER use the cards to defeat a Mega? The only time the cards were ever used to defeat a stronger opponent was when they teamed up, and the rookie levels managed to beat a Champion. It never once broke the power scale, and instead offered more strategy and complexity to the fights.

Again, the series being meta-fiction has no way of changing the previous seasons, it's just used as a world building tool, and it's by no means trying to say it's better than Adventure or 02.

Digimon Tamers is THE best thing to ever come-out from under the Digimon brand

Your utter failure to point-out any valid flaws just proves that you are a troll at best, and a retard with no right to live at worst

"... a retard with no right to live ..."

Dood, what the hell?

It sucks because it's not the same?

Not the best reason to dislike something.

That's fine, You can lead a twit to water but he'll probably just drown himself in it.

So wait, let me get this straight, the villain in this series is him: http://c.imagehost.org/ 0498/SovereingClose.png?

Awesome!

I have never been fan of Digimon but I must admit that premise of this series is kinda intresting.

Ok this was an awesome and long video!
I never watched this series on Digimon as I didn't care for the concept! I much profered the 1st Seasona nd all it's characters! And this one had to do the "meta" thing and say that was all fantacy! Also, I might've been getting too old for the show by this point, but now I might try to track it all down o DVD!
God, I wished oyu had all this finnished and up because it was just starting to get really good!
I did do like the kid this series was about when I watched the 1st season show on Fox I drew and designed my own Digimon, but all that crap has long since been lost!
Wow, so the creator of this version of the series was mostlyknown for disturbing horror animes? Not unheard of! I've come across some really disturbig crap about writers and artist of manga nad anime! Alot of them will do child friendly stuff by day nd sick sick sick hentai by night!
Is it just me or does alot of the voices form this version sound like the exsact same ones form the origional show?
And thank you for getting the show's trnasformation song caught in my head agian before bed!
And you know how much Nostalgia I got for the trailer you shown I remember seeing that and getting angry!

This series was definatly more Darker than the rest of the series in m opionion which is why i assume tamers had more of a fan base.
Great Video by the Way J.O

Have you reviewed Lain? It was my first hard-to-understand anime. I had to use a special guide to get anything out of it.

I'd really love to hear your thoughts, JO.

Really good review. Looking forward to the rest.
never seen the show, or even heard of it, but damn if it doesn't seem awesome. From the first minutes of the review I thought it was going to be a hastily thrown together scheme to make a quick buck, but it sounds like tremendous amounts of thought went into it, and that it paid off.

Just figured I'd stick my comments all together here now that it's up on TGWTG.

. You keep calling the channel block "the FoxBox". The block Digimon, Power Rangers and the like originally aired on was called Fox Kids! After 4Kids bought the block and Saban sold their properties to Disney, the new block replaced it was called the FoxBox, and showed stuff like Kirby, Sonic X, Ultimate Muscle and Fighting Foodons. Digimon never aired on the FoxBox.

2. I've searched around and I can't find anything about Chiaki J. Konaka having anything to do with the Demon episodes. As far as I can tell, his only contribution to Zero Two was as a guest writer for "The Call of Dagomon".

3. This isn't directed at JO, but to anyone who attempts to call her out on something that a lot of people are mistaken about. While nothing was ever stated about Digimon being a television show in the original Japanese version, it wasn't something the dub totally made up. Konaka stated on his site that the first two anime series did in fact exist in the Tamers universe, even if it was never directly mentioned in the series itself in Japan.

4. It wasn't even a month between the series. Zero Two Episode 54 aired March 25, 2001. Tamers Episode 1 aired April 1, 2001. Exactly one week between series. Not a single break.

5. THERE ARE NO DIGIDESTINED IN THIS SERIES. *Ahem* Sorry, that's a bit of a hot point with me. The term is never used once in Tamers, nor is its equivalent "Erabareshi Kodomo (Chosen Child) used in the original Japanese. They were not chosen by anyone. They were just Tamers.

6. Minor nitpick. Henry/Jianliang is the same age as Takato, while Rika/Ruki is a year older.

7. I only have up to 15 subbed on hand so I can't be very specific after this, but the first two Deva don't really imply anything about world domination in the original Japanese. They explain that they are the twelve heavenly soldiers of God and that they've come to punish the traitors who serve the humans.

8. Just figured I'd point this out. Though in the dub, Calumon figures out the whole evolution thing as soon as the Devas show up, in the original Japanese version, he's completely oblivious until right after the D-Reaper is introduced.

there is one minor thing i will point out, i didnt see the dub til it aired on ABC FAMILY channel which was FOX FAMILY before that, but by the time i saw this season, which i enjoyed some parts of but hated the ending and the death of leomon was terrible, but by the time i saw this i was like....this sucks! i wanted my war greymon and my digi destined back i at least if anythign even if it was a toss in a connection to the previous series somehow like these kids were the kids of the digidestined although its hinted at that the teacher in the series itself is Kari all grown up as it is her same voice actress

Promo for this show gives me chills every time. Glad you're using the site I mentioned in my Adventure 01 & 02 comments to good use~!

I love the fact the adults are more engaging in the plot. Especially the ending...YOU ASSHOLES! You gave the tamers a device (red card) that you knew would cripple the digimons to the point that they would be forced back to the digital world which is now an UNSTABLE PLANET. (Referring to the fact at least 51% of it is GONE~!)

Yes! Awesome, I've been looking forward to this since you finished the Adventure 02 retrospective.

This series was always one of my favorite of the digimon versions. I still think the rookie > champion digivolution sequence (before they put on the stupid cgi 3D crap for the ultimate level one) is probably the coolest concept for all the different series they have made.

I remember loving this show. I think one of the reasons was because I never actually got to see much of the original Digimon. In my childish mind of the time I thought of it like a Pokemon type show where it was merged with the real world which is why this seemed so cool to me.

Wow even if I don't like Tamers it never ceases to amaze me how DIC(k) always manages to make the English dub progressively worse with each season! This one in particular has already 2 strikes against it:
1. terrible music, even worse than in the first two seasons (why do they replace the music again?) and terrible puns
2. Calumon NEVER SHUTS THE HELL UP, even when it's mouth is clearly not moving!

Also wasn't the program that opens the rift called Shaggai?

It was Shaggai in the Japanese version, because Konaka looooves his Cthulhu, but changed to Juggernaut in the dub. Anytime there's a name difference, you can assume it was a dub change. The Monster Makers were originally called the Wild Bunch, Rika's name was Ruki, Henry was Li Jianliang, etc etc. XD

Also, DiC had nothing to do with Digimon. That was Saban.

I see, i can't say i approve of the changes here, they seem so pointless...
Sorry, I always confuse the two, especially since DiC(k)s and Saban's tactics in dubbing foreign shows are very similar...

lol it amazed me how much the dubs changed through out digimon series although i stopped watching after season 4 came out i recorded it dubbed up to that point and then sorta lost interst, but it is always amazing to compare the two versions dub vs japanese cut

Ah, at least I got Shaggai through the german dub. I think Rika and Henry were still used, though.

The german dub also got Xiaochun instead of Suzie.

I think the most important thing is that we got in the German dub though is the original music and unaltered dialog which carry a lot of the atmosphere and excitement of Digimon in general. The US version therefore comes off as a completely different show just with the same animation as digimon, thanks to Saban. The practice of replacing music and dialog just for the heck of it was at least for me completely unheard of until I saw what saban did to Sailor Moon and Digimon.
This kind of adaptation may have been appropriate in 1982 but not in the 2000s.
And let's not forget the infamous American dub of Digimon Savers including gems like "Citramon".
The name changes themselves are not really that bad and sometimes are appropriate if they are done competently.

When I Was growing up and watched it on Japanese when it first aired in Japan, I was hook on the first episode and I went to the theaters to watch the Locomon movie. And I HAD to watch the dub version to see what kind of translation errors and lame jokes that dub animes had to offer.

I forgot all this bloody nightmare fuel. Thanks Jesuotaku I'm never going to be able to sleep AGAIN.

Naw I'm kidding, but yeah Tamers isn't particularly my favourite of the series but this is still pretty cool to watch.

TAMERS IS MY FAVORITE SEASON! :D

I remember this show. It was creeeepppy.....

What I never understood, and if you'll excuse the spoilers for those who haven't seen it, was why Jerry got so depressed over Leomon's (apparent) death (boooooo...yeah yeah I know....:p). She didn't know him that long and never really had the chance to get attached to him to a point that would warrant that much pain. Also, if digimon don't really die like in the previous seasons (I'm not really sure, I don't remember one way or the other), why should she be that upset? O.o

For one, in this series Digimon DO die for real. And there's no chance of Leomon coming be back because the person who killed him absorbed his data.

For starters, digimon do die and stay dead in this one, and they pretty much can't come back if their data is absorbed by another digimon, like in Leomon's case.

Imagine seeing a friend being killed and completely disappear in front of your eyes, that would be quite depressing and traumatizing.


Also, Juri did get attached pretty quickly to Leomon even since he first appeared and still wasn't her partner.
She also kinda had a crush on him.

And there's also the fact that her mother died when she was younger, and Leomon's death probably triggered those memories too.

I have been waiting for this for so long.

SO LONG.

Tamers is my favorite Digimon series.