Y’see, when Ghost Stories was being localized, the localisers basically had full creative control over it, since it was a very Japanese-centric show with heavy themes of Shintoism and whatnot, the chances of it appealing to a western audience were slim (also Steven Foster moment) so they made a gag dub which is praised as being supposedly “hilarious” and a go to example for Redditors defending localisation changes and English dubs.
Thing is …it’s not that funny, don’t get me wrong, it definitely has its moments (the lip-flap joke in particular is great) but I feel like most of Ghost Stories’ fanbase came from people who watched compilations on YouTube and not y’know, the actual show…
The actual show only has like 2 or 3 good jokes per episode and that novelty-factor quickly dies when you realize that in-between you just have dated pop-culture references from 2005, a bunch of boring shit, generic sex jokes and laughably out of date internet memes which almost loops back around to being ironically funny…almost…
But even then I’m just not a fan of localisation changes from a fundamental level, I’m someone who believes in preserving artistic vision and integrity no matter how lacklustre or subpar it may be.
Not to mention how the localisers basically had to lie about the show being a flop in Japan in order to paint the dub in a good light, it also gave the English-speaking anime community the idea that the original Japanese version is some kind of infamously terrible anime, now I can't say either way since I haven't seen the original Japanese version but I feel that it's un-fair that the original show has such a terrible reputation arbitrarily.
Now there’s an argument that could be made saying that the show is better off being remembered for being terrible than being forgotten and fading into obscurity but personally I think it would’ve been better off having been forgotten rather than having lies spread about it and a mostly unfunny dub that shits all over the artistic vision made by people who probably have Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios.
