The Art of "The Abridged Series"

Brevity is the soul of wit. And oddity. Brevity and oddity. Brevoddity.

I no longer remember what led me to discover Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, but it’s given me many an hour of amusement.

The Yu-Gi-Oh that most Americans experienced in the early 2000s was a children’s adventure story that, like the earlier Pokémon, had developed from an earlier manga in symbiosis with a branded card game. Also like Pokémon, the story treats the card game as if it’s the most important game ever to exist, if not the most important product of human civilization, full stop. The title character shares his body with an Egyptian pharaoh who developed the game thousands of years ago, giving him no small advantage in the endless tournaments around which the series revolves.

I enjoyed the weird narratives that could emerge from this combination of marketing, Japanese culture, and American adaptation, but the pacing of commercial anime has always been a little slow to hold my attention. (I tend to prefer the original manga, which can be read at my own pace.) So when the fan Martin Billany, better known as LittleKuriboh, came out with Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged in 2006, I was an ideal audience member.

Abridged series weren't simply recut versions of the originals. They were redubbed with added humor aimed at adult, nerdy audiences. Anime was an ideal target for this treatment since it was often awkwardly dubbed already.

A subgenre of abridgments sprung up on the YouTube of the 2000s, a few of which were roughly as popular. The work of Team FourStar, including DragonBall Z Abridged and several other abridgments, now has over 4.3 million YouTube subscribers to Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged’s 882,000.

Those numbers might be understated, though, because both channels had to deal with multiple takedowns during the period of their greatest popularity. Videos or entire channels could disappear overnight, forcing fans to keep hope alive until the creators could repost them someplace else. Like the literal videos I covered last year, the subgenre was an example of remix culture, and remix culture’s relationship with copyright holders is uneasy at best.

Abridged series, as a genre, were a lot more fertile ground than literal videos. Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged has reached 86 episodes and DragonBall Z Abridged topped out at 60, not counting multiple side projects for both series. But the problems with YouTube policies still took a toll. Team FourStar has mostly moved on from the genre that made it famous, and LittleKuriboh has slowed his production to maybe one abridged video a year. Both series came close to their natural grand finales: full treatments of the final arcs of the series that inspired them. But neither one has seemed capable of quite crossing that finish line.

Still, the abridgement's subversive energy will always have a little place in my heart. At some point LittleKuriboh did a few abridgements of Yu-Gi-Oh's “season zero,” an earlier version of the series, not nearly as commercialized, much darker and scarier. (In this version, the pharaoh is interested in games in a more general sense, and all his games tend to be deadly.) The fact that a borderline horror series matured into a cheerful trading card commercial is as ridiculous as anything a fan-made dub could bring to the property.

A big part of satire and parody is just pointing out the silliness that's already there.