Dogasu's Backpack Discussion

[Yash]

I think for One Piece they do as Toei did have to approve every single change they did and they were perfectly OK with all of it. If I had to guess the reason for skipping episodes it might be because Dragonball GT had gotten pretty good ratings despite skipping over it's first 16 episodes.

I mean, that can really be said for every anime, can't it? The Japanese license holders always have the power to put certain conditions on what liberties an American production company takes when dubbing one of their shows. Even back in the 60s the only reason the Speed Racer anime kept its iconic theme song was because the rights holders in Japan insisted on it.

In the 4Kids podcast, one of the writers for Shaman King said for that show too they needed to get approval from the Japanese side for just about everything. I'm speaking more to the argument that everything to do with 4Kids' poor dub of One Piece laid at the feet of Toei and acting like 4Kids was some helpless bystander forced to localize and edit the show into oblivion. Grossfeld even put the "4Kids never wanted OP and Toei forced them to license it" rumor to bed when he went on the podcast while admitting it wasn't a good fit for them, so ultimately, it was at least as much on their part as it was on Toei's.

Even with Funimation, Toei had no problem with their much more accurate take on Dragon Ball Z Kai (and to a lesser extent, Dragon Ball) as they did with their much more extensive localization choices on DBZ or GT. I ultimately think they just don't care that much. Maybe you could make the argument that they should - to bring the discussion back to Pokemon, I (and I'm sure Dogasu would agree) would love it if the Japanese parent company stepped in and ensured that all the background music was kept, that the scripts had to stay faithful to the source material, etc. but ultimately the people who could pull those strings are the money men who more often than not couldn't care less. Or if they even would have thoughts on the matter, they probably figure the BGM replacement (because that really seems to be the only major problem with TPCI's dub of Horizons at the moment) has been standard practice for so long that there's no need to rock the boat.

 

[darksteel6]

I mean, that can really be said for every anime, can't it? The Japanese license holders always have the power to put certain conditions on what liberties an American production company takes when dubbing one of their shows. Even back in the 60s the only reason the Speed Racer anime kept its iconic theme song was because the rights holders in Japan insisted on it.

In the 4Kids podcast, one of the writers for Shaman King said for that show too they needed to get approval from the Japanese side for just about everything. I'm speaking more to the argument that everything to do with 4Kids' poor dub of One Piece laid at the feet of Toei and acting like 4Kids was some helpless bystander forced to localize and edit the show into oblivion. Grossfeld even put the "4Kids never wanted OP and Toei forced them to license it" rumor to bed when he went on the podcast while admitting it wasn't a good fit for them, so ultimately, it was at least as much on their part as it was on Toei's.

Even with Funimation, Toei had no problem with their much more accurate take on Dragon Ball Z Kai (and to a lesser extent, Dragon Ball) as they did with their much more extensive localization choices on DBZ or GT. I ultimately think they just don't care that much. Maybe you could make the argument that they should - to bring the discussion back to Pokemon, I (and I'm sure Dogasu would agree) would love it if the Japanese parent company stepped in and ensured that all the background music was kept, that the scripts had to stay faithful to the source material, etc. but ultimately the people who could pull those strings are the money men who more often than not couldn't care less. Or if they even would have thoughts on the matter, they probably figure the BGM replacement (because that really seems to be the only major problem with TPCI's dub of Horizons at the moment) has been standard practice for so long that there's no need to rock the boat.

He didn't exactly put it to bed considering he admitted there was a lot of stuff he didn't know(he was completely unaware of the existence of 4Kids own uncut dubs of Yugioh and Shaman King and someone had to point them out to him)and he never outright said it wasn't true.

 

[PaperSplash]

He didn't exactly put it to bed considering he admitted there was a lot of stuff he didn't know(he was completely unaware of the existence of 4Kids own uncut dubs of Yugioh and Shaman King and someone had to point them out to him)and he never outright said it wasn't true.

People's memories aren't perfect and of course he wouldn't have been privy to every business decision since he just headed the production arm. The "package deal" rumor originated as the self-admitted personal theory of someone who joined later on and wasn't there when they dubbed One Piece. Grossfeld didn't know or remember everything, no, but he's a far more reliable source in that regard, so at this point there's little need to even entertain the notion of that rumor.

 

[darksteel6]

People's memories aren't perfect and of course he wouldn't have been privy to every business decision since he just headed the production arm. The "package deal" rumor originated as the self-admitted personal theory of someone who joined later on and wasn't there when they dubbed One Piece. Grossfeld didn't know or remember everything, no, but he's a far more reliable source in that regard, so at this point there's little need to even entertain the notion of that rumor.

We'll see, perhaps the latest episode can shed some light on that:

Ep 15: Chris Guido

In this episode, Tara Sands and Steve Yurko interview Chris Guido! Chris worked as an editor at 4Kids on Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, One Piece, Viva Piñata, Winx ...

www.youtube.com

 

[snowmint]

I hope we can continue hearing more from the production side

 

[PaperSplash]

Interview with someone who actually wrote many of the 4Kids dub scripts for Yu-Gi-Oh and One Piece, among others. Sheds quite a bit of light on the mentality behind script rewrites and such, and while this particular writer didn't work on Pokémon himself, he acknowledges that it originated and popularized a lot of the same practices at the company. I recommend giving it a full watch but the most interesting bits are at 15:05, 28:30 and 32:30.

Spoiler: Very quick summary of the most Pokémon-relevant parts

He outright states that being faithful to the Japanese originals was not a priority at the time (unsurprisingly), and freely admits that the writers were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted, which he notes was also the case for Pokémon's dub, and its success was attributed to that, so 4Kids wanted the Yu-Gi-Oh and One Piece dubs to follow suit.

 

[darksteel6]

Interview with someone who actually wrote many of the 4Kids dub scripts for Yu-Gi-Oh and One Piece, among others. Sheds quite a bit of light on the mentality behind script rewrites and such, and while this particular writer didn't work on Pokémon himself, he acknowledges that it originated and popularized a lot of the same practices at the company. I recommend giving it a full watch but the most interesting bits are at 15:05, 28:30 and 32:30.

Spoiler: Very quick summary of the most Pokémon-relevant parts

He outright states that being faithful to the Japanese originals was not a priority at the time (unsurprisingly), and freely admits that the writers were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted, which he notes was also the case for Pokémon's dub, and its success was attributed to that, so 4Kids wanted the Yu-Gi-Oh and One Piece dubs to follow suit.

I'm not surprised as they themselves were probably following in the footsteps of the Sailor Moon dub which also wasn't known for being faithful to the original yet it still had a passionate and dedicated fanbase, 4Kids were no doubt hoping to get that same fanbase and more.

 

[PaperSplash]

I'm not surprised as they themselves were probably following in the footsteps of the Sailor Moon dub which also wasn't known for being faithful to the original yet it still had a passionate and dedicated fanbase, 4Kids were no doubt hoping to get that same fanbase and more.

Ironically Norman Grossfeld actually said in his own interview that he thought the Sailor Moon dub was too faithful (crazy, right?) which he believed was why it initially underperformed in the US.

 

[darksteel6]

Ironically Norman Grossfeld actually said in his own interview that he thought the Sailor Moon dub was too faithful (crazy, right?) which he believed was why it initially underperformed in the US.

That's a laugh, it underperformed because in syndication and later on USA Network it was given consistently bad timeslots either really early in the morning or weekday afternoons when kids were in school so of course hardly anybody watched it, he's definitely engaging in some revisionist history there. Once the show aired on Cartoon Network in the late 90s at a time when it's demographic would actually be watching it got really high ratings and that inspired CN to air Dragon Ball Z and lead to Funimation doing their own in-house dub which had even bigger ratings and the rest is history. So the dub of Sailor Moon was in a way kind of responsible for the anime boom in the USA and that certainly had a knock-on effect with Pokemon as well.

 

[Dogasu]

I think it would probably be better to move discussion of these 4Kids related videos over to their own thread. They don't really have anything to do with the website (I've never even brought them up, for example) and having them all in their own dedicated thread will make them a lot easier to find in the future.

 

[electrictype master]

Kinda wondered about this earlier as I was reading the latest update but why do some write-ups/pages that are about Japanese books have links to Amazon or other booksellers? I'd wager that the vast majority of guests who go to the site don't speak Japanese to start with so even if they did order Japanese books like Pokemon Story for example, they wouldn't be able to read it which makes buying it kinda pointless right? Who exactly are the links for then?

 

[Dogasu]

Those links are for the visitors of the site who do read Japanese and want to learn more. The vast majority of the site's visitors probably don't speak Japanese to start with, sure, but there are some who do.

 

[darksteel6]

Gamestop dropped this interesting video talking about the complicated business of Pokemon, it touches on some of the things Dogasu has talked about so thought it was worth sharing here:

 

[darksteel6]

Checked out the new comparison, interesting that 4Kids version was a bit darker and i'm quite surprised that they weren't responsible for having the mayor bathe in a towel LOL. Also never realized how underutilized Muk was until you pointed it out, shame Ash didn't use it outside of leagues except for this one random episode.

I too wish there was more focus on the mystery and less on the mayor as i'm a sucker for the episodes where the main characters come to a new town, discover something strange and have to get to the bottom of the mystery.

 

[PaperSplash]

Strange how that rumor got spread about Team Rocket escaping at the end being added by 4Kids.

 

[Antiyonder]

So the dub is basically going for the first Pokémon version of Trump (Viren in SM), but they don't keep the dialogue of him intentionally attacking two people and a Meowth?

And serious Dogasu. What do you have against James' high tech hole?

 

[Yash]

The first batch of Horizons episodes (1-12) are on US Netflix now. Having watched the first two, can confirm a few edits that were exclusive to the BBC version Dogasu wrote his comparisons based off of:

• the title card for "The Pendant That Starts It All Part 1" has on-screen text now, it isn't just left blank
• Liko and Sprigatito jumping off the roof is intact
• the eyecatchers are intact as of episode 2, the only change is the Japanese logo is replaced with the English one
• the shot of Captain Pikachu running underneath Friede's legs is intact

The first episode's eyecatcher moment is still left blank, the "To Be Continued" text is still gone, and the on-screen text for Captain Pikachu is still gone.

I wonder if some of these are just left blank in the masters TPCI was given - I remember the "To Be Continued" text being missing was sort of an inconsistent edit in XY, and TPCI would often add their own in if it wasn't already there (the Hulu uploads of XY has this). Can't imagine the logic for doing it otherwise, but still. The flashy on-screen text, like with the Z-Moves or Team Rocket's motto being missing has been a thing for a while.

 

[darksteel6]

The first batch of Horizons episodes (1-12) are on US Netflix now. Having watched the first two, can confirm a few edits that were exclusive to the BBC version Dogasu wrote his comparisons based off of:

• the title card for "The Pendant That Starts It All Part 1" has on-screen text now, it isn't just left blank
• Liko and Sprigatito jumping off the roof is intact
• the eyecatchers are intact as of episode 2, the only change is the Japanese logo is replaced with the English one
• the shot of Captain Pikachu running underneath Friede's legs is intact

The first episode's eyecatcher moment is still left blank, the "To Be Continued" text is still gone, and the on-screen text for Captain Pikachu is still gone.

I wonder if some of these are just left blank in the masters TPCI was given - I remember the "To Be Continued" text being missing was sort of an inconsistent edit in XY, and TPCI would often add their own in if it wasn't already there (the Hulu uploads of XY has this). Can't imagine the logic for doing it otherwise, but still. The flashy on-screen text, like with the Z-Moves or Team Rocket's motto being missing has been a thing for a while.

That would make sense if the masters were left that way as that did turn out to be the case with the masters TMS gave 4Kids for Sonic X as there was one episode where Sonic is holding a sign where the text of the sign got radically altered and people assumed it was a 4kids edit but nope, TMS just did that for all the masters it sent out to other countries.

Looks like UK tv censors are still being weird.

 

[Yash]

That would make sense if the masters were left that way as that did turn out to be the case with the masters TMS gave 4Kids for Sonic X as there was one episode where Sonic is holding a sign where the text of the sign got radically altered and people assumed it was a 4kids edit but nope, TMS just did that for all the masters it sent out to other countries.

Looks like UK tv censors are still being weird.

I think the Korean dub - one of the only dubs based directly on the Japanese version rather than the English dub - has some of those same video edits, so that'd be a good way of cross-checking what's done on the production side and what was done by TPCI.

 

[Poke Trey]

So, the UK definitely has been doing their changes, while the netflix version is just the more complete one, even with it's changes too, interesting.