B/W Dub Keeps Original BGM, Revives ‘Who’s that Pokemon?’

The first two episodes of Black & White premiered on Cartoon Network this past Saturday and surprised quite a few fans! Perhaps the most remarkable revelation was that all of the original background music was used in both episodes. No music was deleted (spare the very end of one piece that originally overflowed into the first episode’s eyecatch), nor was any of it replaced by terrible TPCi-made synthesizer music. Perhaps TPCi now has the rights to use all of the music since Best Wishes only uses new music and music from Arceus and the Jewel of Life. Or perhaps it was always their decision to replace the music and, going along with their new objective of presenting Pokemon as close to the original as possible, they finally changed their minds – who knows? Either way, we now have the original background music for the first time in the dub’s history, allowing the show to be presented as it was meant to be!

But that’s not the only surprise! Fans of the original 4Kids dub were surely shocked when the “Who’s that Pokemon” eyecatch reappeared for the first time in years! The first episode, In the Shadow of Zekrom, featured Pidove while the second episode, Iris and Axew, featured Oshawott. The only odd thing about the segments is that the Pokemon’s voices are not heard after the artwork is revealed. You can watch both eyecatches below in the first video.

The intro to the dub is also below; it is basically a cut-up version of the original Best Wishes intro. My only complaint about it is that the Unova Pokemon at the end are completely obscured by the show’s logo – they should have delayed the logo by 2 or 3 seconds so we could see all of them in their CGI glory!