OK, maybe I should clarify the previous post.

First, I intend to buy the DVDs even if they mess them up badly. That’s the only practical way that I can show my appreciation to the people who created the original series.

Second, I’m not that hard to please. All I really need are two things. One should be a given: that they include the original Japanese soundtrack with Aya Hirano as Haruhi and Tomokazu Sugita as Kyon, along with decent subtitles. The other I’m a little more nervous about: that they include the episodes in the original broadcast order.

Now clearly having the episodes out of chronological order makes more demands on the audience, and even some of the more clueless fans complained about it. It might be tempting for a licensee to put the episodes in chronological order to make them more “accessible”. But that would ruin the dramatic impact: the climax would come at the beginning of the story and the ending would fall flat. So lets hope that they do the right thing and trust the audience to figure it out.

At this point I don’t have much hope for the English dub. Unless they are totally jerking us around in the promotional video, they have hired the girl who played the “Pink Power Ranger” to play Haruhi. I’m not familiar with her previous work, but she doesn’t seem to be one of our nation’s leading comic talents. She was supposed to be in character as Haruhi during the video. This is one of the greatest gonzo characters ever created, and she didn’t even sound like she was trying!

And if that offscreen voice is the actor who is going to play Kyon, he is totally miscast. Kyon should not sound like an earnest all-American boy. He’s cynical and sardonic. He’s 16-going-on-40!

Which may well mean that the people who listen to the dub will not think this is funny at all and will wonder what all the fuss was about. But I guess it is barely possible that Kadokawa and Bandai are just getting into the spirit of the twisted humor of the series, and don’t mean what they said in the video.