Part of me wonders if they ever considered naming that guy Satoshi as an in-joke/easter egg.
Wow I thought you were kidding but yeah 4kids liked to add bizarre Easter eggs in their dubs.
I'm a big fan of the their dub of Yugioh and somehow I missed that(probably because it comes from my least favorite season of the entire show and it's easy for me to forget most of what happens in it LOL)despite watching the show all the way through at least twice.
Yooooo I remember that lol
That could be part of it, but I also know there's also a slowly dying but in many ways still enduring mindset that Americans (especially American kids) can't handle more than a few seconds of silence in media or they'll get bored and change the channel or something. Hence the constant droning wall-to-wall music, and it partially explains why so many old dubs of foreign media added extra dialogue and/or sound effects to what were originally bits of silence whenever they could get away with it as well.
Most likely because even when a character is so overtly foreign that their name can't be convincingly Americanized, there's still a desire to (bluntly speaking) dumb their name down for American audiences. They probably want to make the name pronunciations self-evident from an Anglo-American perspective, which means getting rid of the most foreign sounds like the "ky" in "Kyo" and the "sai" in "Saizo" (which could easily be mispronounced as "say", like what happened with "Saiyan" in DBZ). You'd think in the anime's case it could be rectified by simply directing the voice actors to pronounce the names correctly, but that didn't even seem to occur to them. "Koga" could also be a result of the Pokémon localizers mostly eschewing the plant-themed naming convention of most of the human characters (the biggest exception being the professors, of course) in favor of names relating to their type specialty and/or occupation all the way until Kalos. "Koga" is a rather stereotypical ninja name originating from a historical ninja clan (ironically, in Japanese Koga is said to descend from the competing Iga clan) so they may have also thought that it fit better with the English naming conventions they established.
I noticed with SM they've been doing better with the kept names, though with some changes from time to time. With HZ, they've kept most names intact, with only some barely changed like Zirc, Onia, Orla and Ludlow.
Oh yeah I remember her!
There was a similar contract with the video game Sonic CD, to date it's the only Sonic game to get a new soundtrack for the U.S. release(primarily due to many of the original stage themes featuring a lot of samples of actual music artists that would've required Sega of America to go through a ton of legal red tape to get clearance for so it was easier for them to just make completely new themes) and each stage had new themes for the Present, Bad Future and Good Future versions of levels while the Past themes were left intact, I inquired about that on the Sonic sub-reddit and someone on there mentioned that in addition to the past themes being encoded differently(via PCM which would make it more difficult to replace then the other level themes)there was also a stipulation that at least some of the original music had to be kept.
I read that in an interview around a decade ago, unfortunately i'm currently having no luck finding a link to it. I'll definitely keep an eye out though and see if perhaps someone on the Pokemon sub-reddit can find it.
Isn't the horizons dub mostly rescored?
I think they are referring to what a dub composer said about their music from the Japanese side...
Yes. Though they did keep 2 track. The Pokémon center jingle from episode 3 and that opening track from episode 5. So, it definitely screams contractual that they would keep those few tracks. Maybe later on we might hear more or not. Gonna keep an ear out on them.
He didn't; I'm pretty sure he's referring to Norman J. Grossfeld claiming on the Mewtwo movie's commentary track that the "Japanese creators" were "moved to tears themselves" by the scene with the Pokémon crying when they watched a screening of the dub, despite the fact that 4Kids had "redone the music and redone the performance". There's been a bit of a broken telephone effect with how people retell this story, and for all we know it was just a tall tale Mr. Grossfeld made up, but there is a supposed grain of truth to it, at least.
Good luck with that; nowadays they're pretty much as big of a brick wall as it gets. Even during that one Comic-Con panel they did recently (I'm still surprised that even happened) they didn't take any questions.
Then we gotta hope they attend another con soon. I know this community has alot of questions they want answered.
