Board 8 > I learned about a funny incident in the Pokemon anime today.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/EP128

In 2007, a video was posted on YouTube, where the scene in which James is heard mumbling while at the grip of his Victreebel's mouth is played backwards. Played normally, his dialogue appears to be gibberish. However, when the scene is played backwards, James clearly says, "Leo Burnett and 4Kids are the devil! Leo Burnett..." Some fans had speculated that Eric Stuart, the then voice actor for Brock and James, may have left the hidden message to poke fun at Burnett's idea of animation commercialism and at the same time mocking 4Kids Entertainment for upsetting the fans who were unsatisfied with the international edits back when the company was responsible for dubbing the Pokmon anime.

In 2011 at Matsuricon, a fan asked Stuart about this quote, which he confirmed was indeed intentional and claimed that it was because he was no longer being paid for his short commercials while working for 4Kids.

In 2016 at Metrocon during a Q&A panel, another fan asked Stuart about that quote, and Stuart expanded more on why he said that quote. He explained that he was being paid a lot more for doing voice work in commercials than on the show itself, and that money he earned instantly covered his health care plan. And when 4Kids decided to hand the cast's voice work over to the advertising company so they wouldn't have to pay the voice actors for commercials anymore, Stuart not only lost a lot of money but also his health care plan, which made him angry and said the quote as a protest joke which the voice director put into the scene, and they ended up getting in trouble for that and had to pay for a new master for the episode with their own money.

In the version streaming on Pokmon TV and on the 2015 DVD set of The Johto Journeys, the backmasked audio is replaced with James screaming.

Amazing how he could sneakily reverse the sound like that back then. I mean, it was easy to do, but getting away with it for six years was another story.

It certainly made a boringly typical episode into something memorable.