I watched several more clips and found the Ghost Stories dub to be consistently offensive and outrageous. And no, the irony is not lost on me that the clip that sent me down the virtual rabbit hole featured a demonic rabbit lusting after its racist master. But I was scrolling the comments, as you do when you're half-watching a crack-anime video, and was surprised to discover that this clip came from the official dub for an anime called Ghost Stories, a series I had never heard of before. To this day, I think this is one of the funniest YouTube clips I've seen (which might get my feminist card automatically revoked).

But then I went back to the clip again, and laughed for a full minute. I was sleep deprived and thought I was half-dreaming the ridiculous dialogue, delivered with weirdly passionate conviction by the dub actors. It all started with this (absurdly offensive) clip. But after I lazily watched one Ghost Stories clip, thinking it was just some old rip of an ' Abridged' anime series (fan-created parodies of popular shows like Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh! that took off in the early 2000s), I was baffled to discover that this was, in fact, the officially licensed dub. I stumbled on them, as we're probably all meant to do, during a feverish trip down crackhead anime YouTube, the algorithm rabbit hole that sends you to the weird part of the website after you click on a few too many 'I took an arrow to the knee' meme videos (I have also never played Skyrim).

Why It's Essential Viewing: I think I need to preface this by saying I didn't seek out these clips of the Ghost Stories dub. So when it failed, its studio Animax shipped it over to American dub studio ADV Films, the studio behind classic dubs like Neon Genesis Evangelion, with only three conditions: don't change the character names, don't change the way the ghosts are killed, and don't change the core meaning of each episode. It was a series meant to capitalize on the growing J-horror phenomenon at the time, with films like Ringu and Ju-On, by introducing younger audiences to Japanese ghostly folklore through a kiddish anime show. The Pitch: In 2000, the children's horror anime series Ghost Stories flopped in Japan. (Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they've been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Ghost stories anime