Escaflowne C&C

Escaflowne is the name of the dub of Tenkuu no Escaflowne now airing in the US on FoxKids. Its timeslot is 11am ET on Saturdays (and a rerun of the same episode the next Friday at 4pm ET), but check your local listings as times may vary. The dub is produced by Anime Village/Bandai and as such, shouldn't wander too far astray. These are the same people who gave us the Gundam Wing dub, still airing on Cartoon Network.

Update: Escaflowne is no longer being shown on FoxKids. No word has been given as to whether it will ever resume, but we're not crossing our fingers. Why not? Well, because frankly we don't care. If you want to see the rest of Escaflowne, either dubbed or subbed, just buy yourself the VHS or DVDs. Thanks go out to kwiknet for the heads-up on the cancellation. For a bit more information on the "temporary broadcast hold", see Anime News Network under October 22, 2000. As far as we know, YTV in Canada is still showing episodes.

General Overview

They've given us a new opening sequence, with new music. It's more similar in feel to the Toonami montage openings than the original. The scenes flashed concentrate on Episode 1 and 2, but there are glimpses of virtually all the characters, including those who don't show up until the second half of the series. Episode 2 was editted considerably to try and pick up the slack created by cutting out the first episode, and thus the introduction of characters was rushed. As with CardCaptors, cutting out the first episode(s), the one focussing on the female character, put the focus on Van and Escaflowne, so that Hitomi often seemed as effectual as Merle.

In the first episode, there were 3 different commercial breaks, which further interrupted the flow of the story.

More than half of Yoko Kanno's original background music was replaced. They substituted stuff with a techno sort of beat, which fit well with the new opening, and perhaps with the series as they've hacked it up, but not with the original; this was not an action series so much as a fantasy.

There was a preview for the next episode, which was pretty nice. Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z also have this, though it's been chopped off of Sailor Moon and CardCaptors.

Names are kept to the original, and the pronunciation could be worse. But then, most of this series doesn't take place in Japan; children were never supposed to have trouble remembering the names of characters when they weren't 'foreign'. (How many Transformers, My Little Ponies, Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake characters can children of the 80s name? None of those names were any more difficult to remember than 'Hitomi'.)

The violence has been 'toned down' by the removal of blood from the battle sequences. It remains to be seen what they'll do with the gender-challenged characters, Tarot cards and other controversial issues.