Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories:  NA

So, I'm a sub guy.  I've spent about twelve years studying Japanese.  Watching anime with English coming out of the speakers feels fundamentally wrong to me, almost painful.

So, understand how weird it is that I'm recommending a dub.  Don't expect this to ever happen again.

Let me provide some background.  Ghost Stories is an early-2000s anime about a group of late elementary schoolers who go to a school right next door to a haunted school.  Naturally, they are constantly attacked, bothered, assaulted and troubled by ghosts.  The original Japanese is something like anime Goosebumps (whoops, I just dated myself, didn't I?).  It manages to be genuinely creepy at a number of points, but overall  is fairly tepid in its content.  It's also very Japanese, a number of the ghosts are traditional Japanese school ghosts (yes, there are traditional Japanese school ghosts).  It was also cut short at 20 episodes, fairly clearly due to waning ideas and weak plotting.

So, when ADV (one of the leading distributors of anime in America in the early 2000s) picked up the rights to it, they looked at it and said "Nobody in America would be interested in this series as written.  Let's mess with it."  The voice actors were given free rein to ad-lib so long as the story remained more or less coherent, and the result was a reference-laden comedy which strongly resembled Abridged series, though it preceded their development by more than a year.

The dub is both humorous and clever, though as the series goes on it becomes more and more obscene, crude, and fourth-wall-busting, even as the series itself declines in quality and the characters/voice actors openly admit they can't figure out what's going on in the final episodes.  Overall, the result is hilarious but somewhat slow, an excellent thing to have on in the background while you're doing something else.

If you want the opportunity to watch 11-year-olds spouting obscenities, references and other such silliness in the context of an anime (which still manages to maintain a coherent story), the ADV Ghost Stories dub is worth a watch.  If you want series that you'll take seriously and enjoy for their story rather than their clever alteration of the original situations, ignore this post.