Trivia / Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series

• Actor Allusion:
  • In episode 35 when Kaiba's darkside claims to be a ghost, Yami says "Oh yeah? Well, I'm Knuckles the Echidna." That's because Yami IS Knuckles^note or was when the video came out.
  • Happens elsewhere when Yami claims that Kaiba sounds like Brock from Pokémon.
    Yami: "Screw the rules, I'm in love with Nurse Joy!"
  • Another Pokemon allusion: When Mokuba gets "Japanese Puberty", the first thing he says is "Bulbasaur!" That's because Tara Jayne did the first voice for Mokuba and Bulbasaur.
  • Yet another is made in episode 31. The little boy who thinks he's Ash from Pokemon is a reference to the fact Veronica Taylor voiced the same character...and didn't even bother changing the inflection she used for Ash whatsoever.
  • Variation in the redubbed Star Trek: The Next Generation opening spoof teaser in episode 32 - most of the characters get vaguely appropriate Abridged voices mapped to theirs, but Geordi Laforge gets Vocal Dissonance as he has the same voice as Serenity - a reference to them both being blind. And Wesley gets Tristan's voice.
  • In the Episode 38 post credits gag, we see Howl doing Christian Bale's infamous on-set rant.
  • And then in Marik's Evil Council 3, Marik sends Dan Green to get Yugi's Millennium Puzzle.
  • In Episode 47, one of the Big Five, formerly voiced by GanXingba, claims that now that Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged is cancelled, children will have to make do with watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns for anime. When Kaiba points out that Avatar isn't an anime, he responds "It might as well be." GanXingba did Avatar: The Abridged Series, one of the most successful non-anime Abridged Series.
  • Inverted slightly In the Kami-con Season 4 promo video, Seto Kaiba mentions that Eric Stuart will be attending, and mentions only that he played Dr.Z from Dinosaur King and Brock from Pokemon. When prompted by Mokuba he also mentions Bastion from Yu-Gi-Oh GX.
  • During Season 3, Team Four Star voices the Big 5 (4Kids's group of executives responsible for cancelling the show in-universe). During one scene where Yugi and Joey are about to duel all of them, Gansley refers to all of them collectively as "Team Four Star", which Yugi corrects instantly.
• Acting for Two: In the first two seasons, every single character in the show was performed by LittleKuriboh himself, with the exception of two incidental characters (Rebecca Hawkins and Gary Stu, who were both previously voiced by his ex-wife in older videos) and other specials at times. The cast would be expanded upon in Season 3, where some of the supporting characters or villains are played by different actors. LittleKuriboh still plays the entirety of the main cast, none of whom sound even remotely alike to one another.
• Approval of God: Although the subject of many jokes in the series, the staff at 4Kids enjoyed it, and some elements of the series have become Shout Outs. When the series' Western rights changed hands to Konami, it reached the point that the official anime and TAS started cross-promoting each other. Heck, it's to the point where some of the dub dialogue for Yu-Gi-Oh GX sounds like it was written by LittleKuriboh.
• Ascended Fanon: Yami Bakura's name, Florence, was a joke used in Season 1 where he said his parents wanted to call him that. Eventually, Little Kuriboh decided to run with it.
• Colbert Bump:
  • A rather odd example. Prior to LK's abridged series, the franchise had started to slip off the radar. The abridged series ended up breathing new life into the fandom. 4Kids themselves seemed to have acknowledged this, even having Little Kuriboh join their voice actor panels during Conventions.
  • The Abridged Series genre as a whole went from a niche market usually reserved for Recap Episodes to a self-sustaining internet juggernaut.
  • Raise your hands if you heard of the first series anime (AKA Season Zero) before its opening got used for YGOTAS.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Episode 10 is stated to be LK's least favorite episode due to the fact that it was difficult for him to make the dark tones of the original episode comedic, and the fact that it forced him to make cheap references in lieu of actual jokes.
  • Later episodes often have characters lampshade that some of the show's Running Gags (Rex and Weevil being Beavis and Butthead, Kaiba's Nazi henchmen) have not aged well and weren't all that funny in the first place, and now they're being dropped.
  • Following his LittleKuriboh Watches YGO GX series turning him into a Converted Fanboy for Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, LK has expressed that remembering the frequent Take That! jokes he made against Jaden Yuki evokes the same feeling he gets when he votes off the wrong person in Among Us.
• Creator's Favorite: Word of God says that Marik is his favourite character. Marik also has more appearances in side videos than other characters.
• Creator's Pest: While he doesn't outright hate the character, LK has stated that Téa is usually his least favorite, due to her voice being difficult to maintain.
• Disowned Adaptation: The original Japanese producers of the original show did not enjoy this series. LK once recounted a story of what happened when he met some of them at a convention and the translator told them who he was. The results were not pretty.
• Fake American: Martin Billany is actually English. It's fairly easy to tell early on, too. The biggest example is episode 6, "Everybody Hates Mako", where Yugi suddenly has a distinct English accent while he's yelling at Mako for lobbing a freakin' harpoon at him. Naturally, he lampshaded the hell out of that years later in an April Fool's video.
  • An in-universe example is with Bandit Keith, though technically, Canadians are North Americans.
  • Averted with Yami, who tends to speak with a more posh variant of LK's accent despite being Egyptian.
• Incidental Multilingual Wordplay: The fearless Japanese fan that took on the daunting task of translating the abridged series on nicovideo got lucky with "You don't stand a ghost of a chance!". 'Ghost' and 'zero' are pronounced exactly the same in Japanese.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Episodes 1, 9, 69, and 79 are unavailable on LittleKuriboh's channel due to copyright claims and haven't been officially reuploaded to the YouTube channel. The only way to watch these videos is through fan reuploads. The relaunch of Team Fourstar's website also makes LittleKuriboh's content unviewable, as clicking on his link brings up a 404 error.
• Life Imitates Art: The series is cancelled by 4Kids in continuity and then it's taken off of YouTube in real life. This was right after the episode that featured Johnson/JudgeMan losing a trial against Joey, and then it goes back on YouTube just after the last episode defended it. Try not to think about that too hard.
• Lying Creator: LK initially claimed that Processing was not his response to the 2016 US Presidential Election, but between the Meaningful Release Date (The video was uploaded the day after the result was announced), copious amounts of Does This Remind You of Anything?, Joey being on the verge of tears for a good part of the video, and the video not having any jokes or humour to defuse the tension, few believed him. In the next episode of We're Still Here, LK admitted that Processing was indeed about the election, and a sentence in that video's description denying it was removed around that time.
• Missing Trailer Scene:
  • The series intro for Season 4 ends with the scene of Rafael dropping Yami's body onto Joey and Tristan following their first duel. When the moment occurs at the end of the episode here, it's altered so that Yami lands just short of the cliff and instead falls further into the canyon, making a splat sound (conveniently landing on the horse).
  • The intro also shows the moment in the anime where Yugi is thrown away from Yami after the latter plays the Seal of Orichalcos for the first time, which is omitted in the episode here.
• Old Shame:
  • Lampshaded in Rex's dialogue in Episode 73 (where they're more like their canon selves) that LK seems to regret making Rex and Weevil Beavis and Butt-Head. Although they turn back to normal as of Episode 82, they only have once significant appearance in the original series after that.
  • LK feels this way about a lot of the jokes during the earlier years and states he flat out cringes every time he is reminded of them. Likely the reason why as of September 2020, all episodes prior to 63 have a disclaimer in their description.
    Little Kuriboh: NOTE - This video may contain transphobic, homophobic, sexist, or other types of humor or dialogue that no longer represent how I, the creator of this video, wish to present my works. At the time I thought of it as "harmless jokes" but it is clear the damage that has been done by such dismissive and toxic writing on my part. I apologize for it, as there is no real excuse for using it.
  • On a less serious note, LK has expressed regret over the amount of mean spirited Take Thats he's done towards Yu-Gi-Oh! GX over the years after finally sitting down, watching, and actually enjoying the series proper.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Tristan's voice changed in episode 8 (like the 4Kids dub)... only to get it back in episode 9.
  Tristan:[with original voice returned] Hey, what gives? I liked my new voice! People were starting to take me seriously!
  Yami: Sorry, Tristan, but it's much easier to make fun of you this way.
  • The Big Five were initially voiced by LK, but are each by their own voice actor in The Cancelled Series.
  • Jaden first appears in the 2006 Christmas Special with Little Kuriboh doing a half-hearted impression of his dub voice to spout both of his actual catchphrases as part of a ploy to scare Kaiba. The next time he showed up, he was voiced by Shady.
  • Dartz was originally voiced by LittleKuriboh and had a voice not unlike Yami Yugi's; now voiced by Takahata101 with a voice like Coifio.
  • Rebecca Hawkins was originally voiced by LittleKuriboh's now ex-wife Abigale. She was repelaced by ColonelCheru in the second episode of Season 4, only for her to be replaced in her next appearance by Erika Harlacher.
  • Mai was originally voiced by LittleKuriboh until Season 4, where she is voiced by BoobsMcBalrog, coinciding with a change in Mai's voice actress in the original show. This change is lampshaded by Joey in Episode 68.
  • In the 10th Anniversary abridged video, Paradox is voiced by Semisoma1, now TheAzureCrow. LittleKuriboh would end up voicing Paradox when Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time got abridged.
  • After being voiced by Antfish in Season 3, Gozaburo Kaiba’s brief appearance in a flashback for Episode 86 has him voiced by fellow Team Four Star member Scott “KaiserNeko” Frerichs.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The Show Within a Show Yu-Gi-Oh DMX's theme is the real song X Gonna Give It To Ya.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: On August 15th 2023, LittleKuriboh released a document how in 2019 he privately cut ties with the voice of Jaden Yuki (Blake Swift, aka ShadyVox) over political differences and the latter exhibiting abusive behavior towards other people (to the point of even falsely accusing Martin's best friend of rape, and when it turned out Blake was lying, he threw a massive tantrum, causing Martin to block him entirely). This resulted in Blake attempting to engineer a long-term smear campaign which culminated in Blake manipulating an abuse victim into framing Martin for covering up someone else's abuse allegations. Needless to say, if Jaden ever appears in the series in any form ever again, he won't be voiced by Blake.
• Schedule Slip: It's reached memetic levels now to mock the show for a terrible update rate:
  • LK started off by promising one episode a week. It started to slip around Episode 10. Lampshaded in "Cr@psule Monsters 2".
    Joey: One episode every two months isn't so bad!
  • While it did begin early in the series, it really got bad around 2010. To give some perspective: While the series started halfway through 2006, LittleKuriboh was still able to crank out 15 episodes before the end of the year. In 2007 that dropped to 10. It dropped to 7 in 2008. He rebounded a bit in 2009 with 13. In 2010 it plummeted to 5, then 3 in 2011, then 5 in 2012, 2 in 2013, 3 in 2014, to as low as 2 in 2015. However, he has ramped it up in 2016 with 5 episodes.
  • Speaking of Cr@psule Monsters, the gap between episodes two and three was four years.
  • Due to health issues through the year, LK has had to delay Season 5's start from the promised 2019 to January 9th, 2021 (Episode 83's release date). Though, he IS watching the original episodes, as shown on his Twitter account.
• Screwed by the Network: YouTube bots have taken LittleKuriboh's account down for copyright infringement so many times we've stopped bothering to keep count.
  • Lampshaded in episode 61:
    Yami Yugi: By the time you finish watching this episode, our YouTube account will probably be taken down.
  • Two in-universe examples:
    • Melvin succeeded in cancelling the show in Episode 46.
    • Johnson was responsible for the series being taken down twice.
  • Starting in Season 5, Duke Devlin no longer has "Sexy Back" playing when he speaks due to YouTube's ever-restricting DMCA practices.
• Streisand Effect: LittleKuriboh has tried is damndest to kill the "CARDGAMESONMOTORCYCLES!" meme after the infamous video that spawned the damn thing. Three guesses on how that's gone so far.
• What Could Have Been: LK's used to post scrapped ideas or deleted scenes on his Livejournal, which has long since been deleted. Some ideas included:
  • The ship to Duelist Kingdom making a stop on the island from Lost, which was cut because LK's editing skills weren't good enough at the time to make the scene look good, and it took up over half the episode, which would have killed the pacing and left anyone who hadn't seen Lost clueless.
  • A Killer7 reference in Episode 4 was cut for being too obscure a reference.
  • Another deleted scene from Episode 4, of the gang being chased by insects. This was cut because joking about it being pointless didn't change the fact that it was pointless.
  • The Rare Hunters were originally going to be a spoof of Organization XIII.
  • The Mask Steves' voices were originally going to be Scratch and Grounder, instead of the Mooninites. Two characters from LK's Naruto series later became parodies of Scratch and Grounder instead.
  • Ever since becoming a Converted Fanboy for Kamen Rider, he laments that he became a fan after making the Joey vs. Valon duel, because otherwise, he would be making so many references with both duelists donning armor.
• Word of Gay: Inverted with Pegasus. He's straight. Bakura's gaydar was actually pointing to Croquet. On the same note, played straight with Croquet.

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