YMMV / Club Dorothée

• Fair for Its Day: On a meta level. The localization teams for the animes often shamelessly engaged in practices that would be considered grossly unethical by modern standards (and that Japanese anime companies would not allow today), including things akin to Gag Dub, Dub Name Change and other changes to make the works appear more "French", glaring inconsistencies, huge amounts of censorship, rewritten openings, trying to rewrite the anime canons in magazines, etc... At the time, however, the show appeared pretty bold just for localizing anime that were more sensitive on a cultural level than those which were localized before (the Western literature-based World Masterpiece Theater series for instance, which many didn't even realize was Japanese animation); while there were financial reasons behind the move (those animes were usually less expensive and/or nobody wanted to localize them before) in the end, it all paid off, and for all its flaws, the show is considered one of the reasons the anime fandom is so strong in France to this day. It should be noted that Dorothée herself always claimed respect for Japan's culture and that she managed to build a bridge between France and Japan in some symbolic way at the time (invitations to events, etc...), practically embodying The Japanese Invasion in France back then.
• Fandom Rivalry: Among French nostalgics of The '90s, there's a divide between those who think the Club Dorothée was the better kids show and those who think Les Minikeums was. Of note, most of those who watched the Club Dorothée were born in the late 1970s-early 1980s (sometimes called "Xennials") while those who watched Les Minikeums were born in the mid-to-late 1980s and very early 1990s (full-on Millennials). For instance, Fred Molas, a Xennial, is a big Club Dorothée fan (up to making many a Shout-Out to it in his YouTube videos) and only did a video about Les Minikeums because of popular demand (and made no secret that he doesn't like it).
• Gateway Series: The show was credited for massively introducing France to anime series by broadcasting some classics plus lesser known ones in similar genres. Sure, the series were censored in many places and the dubs and alternate songs were mostly awful by modern standards, but French audiences were hooked and never stopped asking for more, long after the show's end.
• Hype Backlash: The show's huge success and its hosts' music and tours were increasingly seen as "purely commercial" and even accused of "making children stupider" (despite the show having some edutainment parts, and the TF1 channel having become much worse since in this regard). And the violence of some successful anime series was used by some moral guardians to condemn anime and manga as a whole, despite many a Western culture-based World Masterpiece Theater series airing at the same time in the same show (and on France 3).
• Macekre: French Anime purists who watched the show back in the day are split in two: those who thank the show and look fondly at it for massively bringing the Anime culture in France even with censorship, Inconsistent Dub and supremely cheesy songs by the Club Dorothée crew... and those who have trouble living it down because of said changes.
• Narm Charm: The dubs of the anime series that were broadcast in the show in general, and some of the French opening songs by the show's crew. For many French viewers who later got to see original versions with subtitles (or better dubs), they're pretty bad, but still entertaining and fun to hear. Case in point, the French voice of Vegeta, Éric Legrand, is still a big deal whenever he shows up at fan conventions, and there was quite the outpouring of grief after host and singer Ariane Carletti passed away on September 3, 2019.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The show was hit hard by public controversies, specially stemming from parents associations, in The '90s. The most infamous one was about violence in animes that young kids got to watch aplenty, with (chiefly) Fist of the North Star, Saint Seiya, City Hunter and Dragon Ball Z having fingers pointed at them. The Cultural Posturing and xenophobia-tainted rants of politicians such as Ségolène Royal and polemicists like Éric Zemmour about these Japanese forms of entertainment have also remained infamous.
• So Bad, It's Good: Probably the best way to look at the songs of Bernard Minet and the show's in-house band Les Musclés in addition to the theme songs by Minet. See for yourself.
• Vindicated by History: When the show ended, a number of moral guardians who loathed animes and mangas (solely based on the violence of a few series) rejoiced, thinking France was done with these "silly" Japanese things. Some youth magazines even described the newer imported American cartoons as "better quality than Dorothée's anime". Then animes (through dedicated TV channels and DVD) and mangas came back with a vengeance at the Turn of the Millennium, and nowadays France is the #1 importer and consumer of them in Europe.

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