If you didn’t know, a while back I announced on my (now @ppeachyy-keen) Tumblr that I was going to start posting reviews of episodes from the 2003 Astro Boy reboot.

I also mentioned that while I was going to watch the dubbed episodes instead of subbed, I was going to watch them in the subbed order, because as far as I knew, the dubbed episodes were out of order.

Or were they???

That’s where this blog post comes in, originally I was going to make this a youtube video, but I’ve realized that I don’t really have all too much time to film, so I wanted to hop onto here and ask a question I’m interested in hearing answers from.

Because while I was making my episode list so I could know what episodes to watch and in what order, I noticed that after episode 32, both the dubbed and the subbed have identical episode orders.

What I find coincidental, is the fact that the s/dub episodes shared the same episode order once the rest of the dubbed episodes aired 3 years after it’s original run in 2004

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It seems like also between the original 04 airing, the show switched networks? It’s also interesting how long the list is, but it does say “English Networks” and not “American Networks” so this list could be combining networks from other countries and not just ones based in the US.

But I’m still left with so many questions, like why did the other half of the episodes air 3 years later? Was there a ratings problem? A problem with any of the networks? Was it the people who made the dub that perhaps pulled the plug? But why??

And why were the original 04 aired dubbed episodes out of order to begin with? Were they trying to push a narrative? My theory on that is maybe they wanted to get the “non-heroic” stuff about Tobio and whatnot out of the way to then jump straight into the action they really wanted to say the show was about?

But if that was the idea, then who’s idea was it, the networks? The people responsible for the dub?

Perhaps maybe if it was a network thing, then maybe the dubbed workers when they tried airing the rest of the episodes, asked for the episodes to be in order? Or the network decided to take it upon themselves to air the episodes in order?

There’s so many questions and theories, and I really wanna know what you buds think: Is there a reason why the second half the dubbed is in the correct episode order, but the first half isn’t? Do you think it has to do with the 3 year gap between air dates? The different networks airing the series?

Let me know!

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