Incorrect, because Little Kuriboh is a word murderer and the Duel Masters team can actually fucking write.
Let's take this point for point, and I'm gonna intentionally split your post up just to build up to my ultimate point. Feel free to not continue my format if you choose to reply, as it will become gross. Just using this as an easy device to structure my argument because, really, this requires going point for point.
What is really the difference, in form, between something like the Duel Master dub and YGO TAS?
LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
Neither of them have much respect for their storylines, but they advance them anyway
.
Incorrect.
On a basic level, and I'll only use season one here because that's the fairest example and the only one I remember clearly, there were pretty clear places where the storyline was respected in BOTH facet. Because first, we need to define what respect is. I assume you mean a combination of intensely liberal interpretation of how to progress the plot plus a lack of gravity toward its machinations, which would be false on both counts. Off the top of my head? Shobu's entrance into the Temple and the need to finally move past his father's deck and rebuild it to keep with the times is treated with actual gravity. Not to mention, in a brilliant twist (given that Plastic Cow had early inklings to make the show a parody, even before seeing the footage, so as to not be Yu-Gi-Oh!), the entire first episode was played completely straight only for parts two and three to revel in the comedy. The show knew where to apply gravity when needed, in order to contrast the comedy AND, more importantly, to ground the characters in actual personality.
By contrast, YGO: TAS doesn't do that at all and uses the YGO cast as bullshit Family Guyesque ciphers for recycled Adult Swim jokes and meta I CAN DO THIS BECAUSE I'M A MAIN CHARACTER GAH-FUCKIN'-HUR ISN'T POINTING THIS OUT WITTY word sodomy that does not bother with the slightest bit of lubricant. The icing on the cake, and the very episode that finally made me stop, was making the Big Five 4Kids and doing an entire episode shitting on 4Kids because weeaboos are stupid people who hold grudges so THIS IS STILL FUNNY HUH? even if 4Kids had stopped being relevant at that point...but also when it was like "YEAH WE SHIT ALL OVER YOUR JOB AND CHARACTER BUT RIP MADDIE BLAUSTEIN", which suggests a complete inability to understand two core things: what's contextually acceptable when constructing a joke and what's tastefully acceptable in terms of affectionate parody (you can't do "HEY WEEBS, I STILL HATE 4KIDS TOO!" jokes and try to call that a tribute. YOU FUCKING CAN'T. WHY DOES THIS STILL MAKE ME ANGRY? HOW DOES NOBODY NOTICE HE IS GENUINELY A TERRIBLE PERSON? It is brutally tasteless and hollow in its execution.)
Thing is, Duel Masters builds a context. Not even with drama necessarily, but it builds a cast and a world with personalities and characteristics that are the source for jokes. YGO:TAS has hollow ciphers enacting whatever LK finds convenient to joke about at a given time, usually directly stolen from Adult Swim.
Duel Masters is something you have to actually sit down and write, and respects the story it tells with the footage it has by using it for a variety of jokes ranging from character to pop culture (sometimes to great effect, see below). YGO:TAS is if you took a single Family Guy cutaway and aggressively serialized it over 30+ installments.
Not the same.
Both of them are self-aware, pointing out their own contrivances and making fun of flashbacks or internal monologues whenever they get the chance, and drop pop-culture references without warning.
The problem with that comparison is that it refuses to note the one core, critical difference between the two, besides the fact that one was made by actual writers and editors and the other was made by an idiot on the internet who honors dead actresses by shitting in the mouth of their corpses: Duel Masters, as a brand, is not a known quantity.
YGO:TAS knows you're at least peripherally familiar with YGO as a brand. It doesn't have to, or THINKS it doesn't have to, actually build a character and context because by default it assumes you know the story. DBZA does too, which is why you get really stupid jokes like foreshadowing Gohan "becoming the strongest in the universe but he doesn't do crap" or Vegeta going "EWWWW" with GT, because these (and many of YGO:TAS's "jokes") are structured less like punchlines and more like building toward reminding you of an opinion you (statistically!) probably have. And when you REMEMBER THAT THING, you laugh because hey, I remember that thing! Not that KaiserNeko is obligated to defend his and his staff's work, because he's not, but it's why I can't take his defense of "Well, GT Joke, it's a Dragonball parody" seriously. Because it's NOT A JOKE. It's acknowledging a thing you know most people in your audience will agree with and is the lowest form of reference comedy as it only really exists, structurally, to be a thing you endear your audience with. All comedy is emotional manipulation, but that sort of reference comedy is the skeevy kind in that all it does is express an opinion, just express an opinion, that you can share with someone to make them like you. It's much like politics in that regard: you accomplish your goal if you know your supporters agree with you, so you make shallow references because if you like or hate something, someone's more likely to be loosened up and find the rest of your jokes funny. In theory. It's ultimately cheap and lazy, especially in the context of an Abridged because Abridged shows are written by amateurs who think that's the minimum of how to structure a joke.
When I briefly spoke with Andrew Robinson, principle writer and co-story editor of Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters who had also worked on the Duel Masters dub even before that, perhaps making him the closest the American Duel Masters brand has to an auteur (though he credits a lot of Duel Masters's quality to the late Dwayne McDuffie and his wife Charlotte Fullerton, WHICH EXPLAINS A LOT), I was quick to point out how much I ADORED the Greg the Bunny cameo in season 1 of Duel Masters. Because, y'know, that's a pop culture reference done right, where it serves to highlight the absurdity of the context its presented in. Duel Masters was a show that didn't segregate an exposition revelation about the Duel Masters monster realm and the fact that Greg the Bunny is one of the most celebrated Kaijudo masters. He's juxtaposed with this actual exploration of series mythology and both are introduced on their own merits because, again, Duel Masters is not a known quantity, so it has to treat everything in a meaningful, structured context. To Duel Masters, Greg the Bunny being a master of Kaijudo being revealed in tandem with actually going deeper into the mythology of Kaijudo as a concept because it's not mocking your perception of Duel Masters as a brand. It's playing around with the insane lack of boundaries its mythology has.
Abridged mocks mythology. Duel Masters embraces its as it makes it absurd.
Not the same.
I don't see much of a difference between Bandit Keith's "In America" and Duel Master's deliberately-out-of-the-blue Batman jokes other than that the former is a one-trick pony; but even that only says that Bandit Keith could have been better scripted, not that the joke was inherently bad.
BANDIT KEITH IN AMERICA: The same joke, over and over, trying to be a meta take on a character's clashing character design in a largely Japanese setting.
DUEL MASTERS BATMAN JOKES: Circumstantial references to Batman written into the script divorced from the inherent footage and existing as a frame of reference to coalesce the events in place with an audience member's knowledge base.
The fact that you even compare a reference to character design with an "out of the blue Batman" reference, which internal to your own comparison aren't even actually similar because one is intrinsically less random than the other by your own words, when these two things have completely dissimilar structural purposes just on a conceptual basis leaves me to believe my dreams of writing comedy are pointless because nobody actually cares and doing anything beyond dangling keys in front of your audience is frivolous. God is dead and theology is the den of fools and charlatans.
Excuse me while I go drink myself to death.
I'm not meaning to put Duel Masters on a pedestal, but at first glance the only answer to that question is "Duel Masters just did it consistently better.", which in of itself says something however minute to YGO TAS's credit
I may not hate KaiserNeko and his ilk for what they do, but by no means do I, or will I, ever respect it even one iota. Abridged writers regurgitate fandom memes, steal jokes, and make shows that are a sentient meme meant only to, really, create "humor" by throwing recognizable concepts out and calling it parody even when it's done without any meaningful commentary or satirical slant.
By contrast, Duel Masters is a comedy.
