Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series
I know we’re late to this particular net party at the ZRC, but in between unpacking boxes we started watching Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series this week.
How does this pertain to Zombies? Well… in the game, Zombies are a major type of Monster card that you can play, “Monster” here having no negative connotation since all of your characters on the field, whether plants, animals, magical people or elemental forces, are all “Monsters”. Some of the best decks that were in play back when we played the game (a few years ago now) were Zombie based. Jenny, the art director, used a Zombie deck in fact (I played with Dragons).
So Yu-Gi-Oh the game is pretty pro-Zombie. In the anime, each character plays a particular way, and Zombie cards are played by a throwaway character in the first season brought to the US, so they don’t get a lot of screentime.
Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged is more or less what it sounds like: a greatly shortened, comedically interpreted form of the series. MST3k meets anime meets Youtube. Very funny. Unfortunately, when it gets to the episode dealing with Zombies, it peddles in some truly outdated Zombie stereotypes, particularly the idea that Zombies, or even people who like Zombies, in this case, are functionally illiterate, brain-obsessed social outcasts, doomed to be trampled upon or used by human malefactors.
See for yourself:
The oddest thing is that the creator of YtAS claims to love Zombies; this is his description of the episode on Youtube:
Zombies make everything better.
Does Citizen Kane have zombies? Well it should.
If you truly love Zombies, Little Kuriboh, you should work harder at integrating them into your work without falling back upon these tired anti-Zombie cliches. We know you have the talent to be funny without them; now the Zombie community needs you to be funny for them as well.
About The Author
You should check out http://www.seriesabridged.com for the latest abridged series