Eat, Pray, Initialize: Why I've Spent 5+ Years Loving "Bad" Media

In 2019, I had started a new phase of my life, and I wanted to take YouTube video creation, research, and script writing more seriously. I had many influences in the review/video essay genre I wanted to mimic and I had topics in my head that I knew that only I could do justice. However, I vastly overestimated the amount of time, money, and connections that I would need to get to the point that I originally envisioned. Even now, I’m writing this as I had to cancel a research project I had spent three months on because it got too big in scope, but every smaller topic was an attempt to get closer to a big project that’s now 5 years old, a retrospective on Initial D (or at least, focusing on its Tokyopop dub).

Now why THIS of all things?

For most of my life, but especially in the past five years, I’ve become something of a “harbinger of failure”. In case you're not familiar with the term, basically people who just have an attachment to media that’s bad or simply unpopular. I never put much stock into it until I realized I’m a hopeless twenty something Sonic fan that’s still using a PlayStation Vita in the year 2024. One of my best friends is the biggest fan of “The Nutshack” that I’ve ever seen.

Many people know me because of the fact that before I started working professionally, me and many of my friends professed our love for 2020’s Magical Girl Friendship Squad, a very short lived cartoon that wasn’t perfect but god damn did it shoot for the stars, and I can greatly respect that. Considering the professional relationships I’ve obtained since then, there’s a non zero chance that letting myself enjoy media regardless of mainstream opinion is how I’m here today, as well as numerous of my professional relationships.

The point is, I’ve never been a person to just write off media as “BAD” and just wipe my hands of it, I’d like to know why it’s apparently bad, see if there’s anything good within, and just know more about it. I wouldn't be so passionate about writing this if I wasn't.

I never would have learned about the existence of Tokyopop’s dub of Initial D if it weren’t for the late Zac Bertschy. I never knew him personally of course, and I know his impact on the broader anime community can’t be overstated. It says a lot that even him posting about a clunky 2000’s dub of an anime like Initial D could have gotten me genuinely interested back when everyone was still actively using Twitter.

I was really starting to get into YouTube and I eventually really wanted to tackle talking about this in the form of a retrospective, but I overexerted myself.  I struggled through college, living life during a pandemic, and trying to gain employment.  I was very lucky to be able to have TOKYOPOP CEO Stu Levy to answer many of my questions via Email, AND even forward them back to me 4 years later after Gmail decided to delete some of my older emails. Now I'm going to make this info publicly available.

In addition, a big motivation is just the idea of how the perception of media can change when we are further and further removed from its initial context. Even when I was in high school, I was starting to not really enjoy the memeification of 4Kids. There are now generations of kids that have NO memory of “Saturday morning cartoons”, let alone the era where most anime was shown on network TV and had to be censored for a child audience. So not only are things from 20 – 25 years ago being judged by modern standards, credit is never given when it’s due… and the jokes just aren’t even funny as they get hyper exaggerated (though I admit this is a personal opinion).

It’s why I commend the work that the 4Kids Flashback podcast is doing to slowly undo a lot of misinformation by getting accounts directly from the source. Steve Yurko, Tara Sands, and a sizable community of enthusiasts and people knowledgeable about anime broadcasts, lost media, and the like, are absolutely a force to be reckoned with.

On the other side of the spectrum, is me and… ME. Sure, within the past couple of years people have posted clips of the Tokyopop dub of Initial D online but it’s always been talked about in fandom spaces like “The Dub Who Shall Not Be Named”, and I don’t think that’s fair to anyone.

First off, for as many people love to joke about the 4kids One Piece dub to this day, there’s a big level of misinformation about it, AND it bordered on being completely lost because nobody thought to properly archive it. THAT only furthers misinformation and it cements the idea that bad media doesn’t need to be archived so people can learn about it themselves, but should be a long in-joke that people laugh at and nothing else.

Secondly, no matter what your taste is, people are nostalgic for “bad” media. There’s going to be people who will drop everything to bump “Step Into the Grand Tour” on their phone, in spite of how disliked Dragon Ball GT was. There’s always going to be people that can sing the One Piece pirate rap word for word (including me).

Initial D’s Tokyopop dub may have been doomed to obscurity due to not getting a TV broadcast in the US, but I refuse to entertain the idea that people who did like it, or who still like it, don’t deserve a platform or a way to revisit their memories of the show.

...I also don’t know if I can ever call this truly bad? Things that mattered 20 years ago don’t matter much now. We have a brand new Initial D manga translation coming out as we speak and the whole series is available online (though not entirely in legal means), also with an accurate translation. Back when Tokyopop’s choices where the only choice fans had, I can understand the frustration. Looking back on it though, listening to aggressively 00s hip hop and punk rock and shortened, Americanized names for Japanese characters voiced by characters I normally associated with the early years of Digimon’s dubs… it’s a treat, I’ll admit.

In preparing for this project I had intended to collect the entire Tokyopop run on DVD and rip them for the Internet Archive. This was before my friend Branch, who runs the Initial D wiki, gave me rips of the entire run for use in a video. I do still plan on collecting the remaining volumes one day, even if some of them were previously factory sealed and I had to open them to rip them. (I think I have all of the Second Stage single DVDs, as well as Extra Stage at the moment.)

After having the weight of a big video project crumble on top of me this month, there’s no way I could fit all of this context into a video and pace it well, but I figure anyone interested could always read the interview I had with Stu Levy later on (this article will be updated to link it when it's available). I will be sourcing this information in the eventual video about Initial D's Tokyopop dub when it exists, but hopefully this will come in handy to anyone else interested in this relic of a dub.

As I get older, I try to let go of the idea that everything has to be objectively good in order to be enjoyed by anyone, and I also will accept that I’ll see others younger than me love media that I despised when I was their age. (For instance, if older millenials are confused why people my age love Sonic 06, I’ll say I’m already there when hearing people enjoy Sonic Forces). It’s ultimately harmless, and I’m long past the idea where bad media needs to be torn apart, rather I enjoy it being disassembled, scavenged, to find the diamonds in the rough. It’s not a radical new idea, but I feel like we’d be a bit happier if more people had this mindset.