Yu☆Gi☆Oh! Hikari no Pyramid

In honor of the recently released Yugioh: Dark Side of Dimensions, Lawlmartz presents the long awaited:

Children's Card Games Saga Part III:
If Monsters Are Real, Does That Mean Card Games Are Real Life?

It's truly been far too long since I last watched Yugioh. Heck, the last installment of the Children's Card Games Saga was back in October, so it's high time to let loose on what was the most kick ass movie of 2004.
Never mind Kill Bill vol. 2, ... Harry Schlocker and the Prisoner of the Theater, Shrek 2, Spiderman 2 (the last watchable one before that series died), The Aviator, or Mean Girls... Yugioh Pyramid of Light RULED the summer of '04.

At least for this 10 year old, it did. I remember going to see this not once, but TWICE- collecting the promotional cards (still have them too), and crying tears of pure joy whenever I heard that wavering Ney and Arghul (ancient reed based Egyptian instruments) melody and orchestral strings on top of the driving industrial techno beat that the English version used as the main theme. It still brings me great nostalgia. I mean, what was cooler than these cartoons about people with insane, physics breaking hairdos playing card games with sick monsters and people getting sent to the shadow realm??

Not much, when you're 10.

Alas, I am 21 now, and as a reviewer, I must remove the rose tinted glasses of childhood and mercilessly bash Yugioh. I mean, review.

As with any good Yugioh story, it begins with a man. A man so driven by obsession that his ego will never allow him to let go of years of being second best to one Yugi Moto. This man is Seto "Rich Homie Mullet" Kaiba. Armed with his combination of a crippling preoccupation of beating a high school kid at a card game and infinite wealth; so much wealth that he builds a physics breaking VTOL jet that has functional legs for landing gear, after his favorite playing card and also constructs YET ANOTHER CITY FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF FIGHTING YUGI!

Kaiba boy, still extremely pissy over losing to Yugi boy in the Battle City arc of Duel Monsters (surprise, an entire city devoted to card games, centered around Yugi boy) strong-arms the fabulous fan favorite snark monster, moe anime obsessed Maximillion Pegasus into giving up his secret weapon to beat Yugi's God Cards.
No it's not his dandy style, red suit, red wine, and vanity.

It's, you guessed it. A heretofore unseen card! (side note: Pegasus really makes the movie though, because his campiness and incredibly sarcastic dialogue is turned up to 11 in this one, savagely mocking Kaiba at every turn and actually being a good sport for once.)

Meanwhile, back at school, everyone wants a piece of Yugi since he's a famous duelist now. So while Tristan and Joey cover, Tea and Yugi go to the one place the gamer geeks would NEVER look for them- a history museum with a very conveniently placed brand new exhibit on ANCIENT EGYPT!

Here's where the story takes a turn for the Scooby Doo, and falls right off. Imagine, if you will, the gang rolls up in the Mystery Machine to this museum that just got a fresh exhibit with mummies, sarcophagi, and all manner of occult and valuable gold artifacts from ancient Egypt. What happens next? Do I even need to say?
You guessed it. As soon as Yugi and Tea and the creepy pervert Grandpa spot the gold sarcophagus and valuable artifact, BOOOOOOOOOOOM! Everyone's knocked out, the mummy has escaped, and stolen the dangerous, priceless artifact! And they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those... oh wait, it's not over yet.

Cue more mummies chasing Yugi, Tristan and Joey inside of the Millennium puzzle pyramid (which would have been PERFECTLY set to the Benny Hill theme), and even the voice actors recognized how much of a Scooby rip this was, with Tristan letting out a "ZOINKS!" in the middle of the chase! With a bit of dumb luck (read: heart of the cards), Yugi manages to stop the mummies by slicing off a piece of a priceless Egyptian tablet, and returns everyone's souls to their bodies.

The fun ends about there, as the next sequences of Yugi and Kaiba dueling, and then Yugi and the resurrected Anubis were on the verge of boring me to tears. Oh how I yearned for the days when there were clever uses of trap cards, monster effects, and not making up rules or completely cheating on every turn... wait, who am I kidding? This is Yugioh! The only rule is to believe in the Heart of the Cards and to draw the Laughing Man symbol from Ghost in the Shell SAC 1st on your hand... and then you win!

Anyway, time to wrap this ramble up.
I give "Yugi-Doo and a Mummy Too" 5 Blue Eyes White Dragons, because this is basically just a Scooby Doo episode turned into a Yugioh movie.

The glorious English dub is... well, glorious, with Dan Green, Eric Stuart, and Darren Dunstan hamming it up and being fabulously campy. Minus a point here for not using Megan Hollingshead as Mai- a woefully missed opportunity indeed. But, Seto "Screw The Rules, I Have Money" Kaiba himself even directed this dub, which makes it all the better.

"Fighting pyramids and creepy floating eyes, wonderful," says Joey.
"Hey, when you hang around with Yugi, this is par for the course! Tristan replies.

After finishing the actual series, I jumped right to Dark Side of Dimensions, kind of (completely) forgetting that there had once been another Yugioh movie, long ago... And boy did watching it again bring back memories. (Mostly of my parents' extremely unimpressed faces as we left the theater.) I think what struck me most... was that I basically got the same thing out of it watching it today as I did watching it over and over again as a kid, back when I didn't have the comprehensive understanding of the show it's based on that I do now. Which is not exactly a compliment, if ... you think about it...

This struck me as the sort of movie that you could watch in place of the series itself. Obviously, you wouldn't get the whole story, but you'd get enough. It does sum up the premise of the series and include all the major points you would have absorbed if you'd been actually watching the series, even just casually: The whole thing being driven by a combination of Yugi's connection to the spirit of an ancient pharaoh and Kaiba's pride. All their ridiculous problems ultimately being solved by winning a card game--or, at least, the monsters from that game coming to life in this case. The huge emphasis on the group's friendship and how it can overcome just about everything. So I mean, it was faithful to the show it was based on, at least, but it really doesn't build on that show in any meaningful way. I could see this movie being created just to try and draw in a new audience of fans-- and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was. There are very few anime movies I can think of that got big, advertised theater releases like this one did. So, critically speaking, it's not as impressive or moving as it could be... but I definitely had nostalgia for it, and was surprised to realize just how much of it I remembered in detail.

Time to take a look at something from the Yugioh franchise. I guess there's no better place to start than with the movie...well OK, the show is a much better place to start, but I haven't finished the show yet. Anyways, on to the review.

Story: The story isn't much more than what you'd expect from your typical episode of the show. There's a duel between two characters and someone possessing something or used to live in the ancient past is somehow involved. It's not terrible, but there is a concept of the story that seems like it would have played a bigger part, but got ... scraped during development. During most of the beginning of the movie after the title sequence, it looks like the movie's going to be about Yugi facing off against a bunch of duelists that believe they can take him down. Then just drops it in order to fully introduce the main antagonist, or at least he tries to be, but I'll get to that a bit more later. As for any final complaints, I could have done without them constantly repeating "It was never to happen and for 5000 years it never did" over and over again at the beginning.

Art: The art for this film is a bit more detailed than the show, but not to any really breath-taking degree. They just used some sharper colors and shades. It's not necessarily bad, I definitely like the art of the show, but I've seen better in other anime movies based off a show.

Sound: The sound is actually pretty good. Before I get more into it, I watch dubs and not subs, so most of what I'm talking about is in the American release of the film. The voice actors do a decent enough job with major props going to Dan Green for the emotion and energy he put into Yami's voice along with Scottie Ray for making Anubis actually sound threatening, until he starts talking about destroying the world with monsters from a children's card game. There's not much you can do about that though, other villains from the show suffer the same issue. The soundtrack is also pretty good with some memorable songs.

Character: This is where I'm a bit mixed on the movie. Yami and Kaiba are great characters and are portrayed well in the movie without loosing what made them who they are from the show. However, everyone else isn't given the same care. Anubis, while sounding threatening, falls under the cliche villain list since all he really wants to do is, what else, take over the world. He also doesn't really do much. Yeah, he shows up at the beginning to place some cards in Pegasus' deck, but then you can pretty much forget that he ever existed until about the last 10-15 minutes of the film. This whole movie could have been about an awesome duel between Kaiba and Yugi/Yami and if you cut out Anubis, that's basically what it is. There's also just some really bad writing going on for Joey and the minor characters that he duels against. Look, Yugioh may be a great series in my eyes, but a Godfather reference isn't going to work here.

Enjoyment: I loved this movie as a child, especially when I saw it in theaters, but now that I'm older, while I still find it more entertaining than other anime films, I'd rather skip over most of the Anubis stuff and get right to the great music and dueling.

It was a decent movie, the start to the end of the story movie was maintained well. Have a lot of mixed opinions about this movie, a lot of parts in the film felt pretty blank. The battle was average, it could have been better. All the characters who appeared in the movie were given enough screen time. And we also saw a special card and it was so good. the villain in this movie was also not good as a character and didn't give justice to his villain part.

In this movie, I mainly liked the end part where that special card is revealed. It ... was fun to see that.