Tomozaurus - Yu-Gi-Oh!

Still on Volume 1, today we're looking at Tomozaurus, with a za instead of an sa because that's the kana the Japanese went with. Since I'm not Japanese, I have no idea whether this is a screw up or not. It is possible though, since the one monster type they accidentally named Undeat. Here's the card.

"Welcome to Jurassic Park!"

Yes, the art for this card is a dinosaur biting another dinosaur in the neck! How awesome is that! Of course, I'm unclear which one is supposed to be the monster we're summoning. Is it the brown guy sinking into the other's flesh, or is it the green one getting torn to shreds. The lousy stats make me think the latter, but the card's flavor text (flavor only present on normal monsters for some reason) talks about the dinosaur attacking its own kind. Meaning, both of these guys are a Tomozaurus.

On a side note, while not released in the TCG, it does appear in several of the many Yu-Gi-Oh! games that made it to the US. But children are extremely sensitive and shouldn't be exposed to the image of blood. Yes, the violence may have been an issue to, but the TCG has a weird thing where you can't show blood, to the point that they recolor it to make it look like some other liquid. Rather than have a dinosaur squirt green fluid though, they decided to just darken the region around it, resulting in this.

Prehistoric hickey.

Curtain of the Dark Ones - Yu-Gi-Oh!

Continuing our venture into Volume 1, and the cards that never were printed here or reprinted in Japan, we have this gem. One of the things that still appeals to me about Yu-Gi-Oh! is how bizarre it utterly is. Previous entry, you could attack someone with an eyeball. Now, you can attack them with a curtain with arms.

Aaah, curtains. My only weakness.

Translated, the card is Curtain of Black Demonic Being. Why a black demonic being would have a red curtain is beyond me, and why he would have a curtain with arms is even further beyond. Because you can't have demons in a children's card game, the English version is Curtain of the Dark Ones.

While The Drdek had no impact beyond its single OCG appearance, Curtain of the Dark Ones actually has relevance to the anime and to a few other cards. In the Virtual World arc (essentially the characters are trapped in the Matrix and must fight their way out by playing card games) one of the villains (Johnson, aka Chikuzen Ooka) summons this guy and fuses it with the Mystical Elf to summon Kamionwizard, or as I prefer to call it, Chaos Wizard! In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Elf + Curtain = Dark Wizard. Still, several style points subtracted since Johnson was going with a courtroom motif. What any of this has to do with courtrooms is also beyond my comprehension.

But yeah, Mystical Elf, Chaos Wizard, both actual cards. Of the two, only Mystical Elf made it to the US, while the wizard was left to sulk at one-shot status. It's alright though, his stats kind of suck. How bad? Wizard loses to Magician King. The power of rock and roll is enough to defeat a wizard in the Yu-Gi-Oh-verse. Bet you won't hear that said in Magic the Gathering!

Another thing of note comes from the video game Duelists of the Roses, where Yu-Gi-Oh! plays fast and loose with British history. All of the cards got 3D renders for optional battle sequences. Curtain's appearance, let's face it, is kind of lame. So the programmers created an original appearance for it. While it's pretty stagnant and kind of boxy, in my opinion it is much cooler than the original. Behold!

"I can stare into your soul!"

The Drdek - Yu-Gi-Oh!

This card comes all the way back from the old days of Yu-Gi-Oh!, all the way back from Volume 1, the first expansion in Japan. Since then, to date, it has never been reprinted in the OCG, and is one of the few cards never been printed in the TCG because, well, it's bad. Yu-Gi-Oh! is not a very well-balanced game.

Tremble in fear of the, um, eyeball plant.

The original Japanese name, when translated, is Death Foot. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either, if anything it looks like the eyeball is attached to a demon hand, but whatever.

While never printed in the TCG and never appearing in any of the four animes (if I'm wrong and you find it, please update Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia) the card still has an English name, having appeared in several video games released in the US. They couldn't call it Death Foot, because you are not allowed to say death in the TCG. What will overly sensitive and easily insulted parents say if we include the word death in a children's card game, a game that involves monsters destroying each other! If they had it their way the Graveyard would be renamed the Better Place. Like these parents, I am overly sensitive to stupid name changes. For crying out loud, you weren't allowed to say the word black for several expansions, hence the Red-Eyes B. Dragon.

The English name though makes even less sense, The Drdek. How do you even pronounce that? Turns out the name is a likely homage to Matthew Drdek, one of the translators at 4 Kids who worked on the English localizations of the Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Why they felt compelled to name a disembodied eyeball after him though is beyond me.