Rarely have Arabic-dubbed cartoons receive all the praise they deserve: More than a simple work of translation from their original Japanese version, they were also a perfect educational vehicle to improve العربيـــــــــــــــة الفُصحَـــــــــى (classical Arabic) for at least two generations of kids and young adults, from Abu Dhabi to Casablanca!

The Arabic Blog will therefore attempt to repair this little injustice by occasionally introducing you to the all-time small screen “big hits” of Arabic animes…

Today’s post will get you acquainted with Rami, the hero of “الهَــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ” (meaning “The Goal Scorer“), also known in the original version as “Ganbare! Kickers.“

When the little boy رَامِــــــــي (Rami) moved to a new city with his family, joining a Football team was on top of his priorities.
He eventually found one called “فَريـــــــق الكَمَــــــــــــــــــال” (literally “the team of Perfection”)… Trouble was, it was a bit of a misnomer, for this team was light years away from perfection: When Rami arrived to their stadium for the first time, he found that they just suffered a crushing defeat: 21 – 0!

Needless to say, the moral was not exactly sky-high at that moment, but Rami decided to join the team nevertheless, and even went to throw a challenge to the best team in town for a friendly game.

Of course, Rami’s new team would lose once again, since one does not turn into a champion بين ليلــــة وضحاها (overnight), even with the gifted Rami as their striker, but they were able to do something they never experienced before: They scored one goal!

Scoring that one goal was a tremendous accomplishment for a team who had reached rock-bottom, and was until then known under the unflattering nickname of “الفريــــــق الفَـــــــاشِــــــــل” (the “failed team.”)
That one goal heralded their new exciting journey towards the top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP7SE-rz93Q

Big thanks to Wesam for making a Karaoke version

الهَــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ (“The Goal Scorer“)

! أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal Scorer!

يلمع مثل النجم الساطــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــع

Glistens like a Shining Star

أهدافــــــــــــــي أحلــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــى الأهداف

My Goals are the Most Sumptuous Goals

وفريقي كالأمل الطالـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــع

And My Team is like the Rising Hope

 أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ 

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal Scorer

 ! أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal Scorer!

مـــــــــــن يتدرب باستـمــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــرار

Whoever Keeps on Training

سوف يهز المرمــــــــــــــــــــــــــــى هـــــــــــــــــــــــــــز

Will Shake the Goal’s Net

مــــــــــن يتسلح بالإصــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــرار

Whoever Arms One’s Self with Perseverance

سوف يحقق أروع فـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــوز

Will Achieve the Most Awesome Victory

سوف يحقق أروع فــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــوز

Will Achieve the Most Awesome Victory

! أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ 

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal Scorer!

!! أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal Scorer!!

اهتف اهتف ياجمهـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــور

Cheer, Cheer, O Spectators

شدوا العزم وشدوا الهمَّــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــة

Set your Will and your Ambitions High

اهتف لفريق منصــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــور

Cheer for a Triumphant Team

يسعى قدما نحو القمـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــة

Always Aiming Towards the Top

يسعى قدما نحو القمــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــة

Always Aiming Towards the Top

نحن فريق عقد العــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــزم

We are a Team which Made a Solemn Oath

ألا يُهــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــزم، ألا يُغلَـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــب

Never to be Defeated, Never to be Vanquished

حتــــــى يصبـــح منذ اليـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــوم

So That It Becomes from Now On

  نجـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــم الكرة ونجــــــــــــــــــم الملعب

The Star of Football and the Star of the Stadium

 نجـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــم الكرة ونجــــــــــــــــــم الملعب

The Star of Football and the Star of the Stadium

! أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ، أَنَـــــــــــا هَــــــــــــــــــــدَّافٌ 

I’m a Goal Scorer, I’m a Goal scorer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhjvGs_59kw
This is how it all started—Intro to الحلقــــــــــة الأولــــــــــــى (the Pilot episode)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Si-yGw-dZo
موسيقــــــــــــــى النهايـــــــــة (Music of the end)