Dogasu's Backpack Discussion

[snowmint]

I hesitate to call 4Kids a "bad company", because I think there were a lot of good (if sometimes misguided) people working for or under them. I can't really say the same for the management side, though; Alfred Kahn in particular made a lot of questionable statements over the years, to say the least.

Al Khan says in recent interviews that it was his company, 4kids that brought the show over and convinced Nintendo to do it, otherwise it was going to stay in Japan forever.

 

[snowmint]

Chronicles was pretty damn good IMO, One Piece was bad but that was less their fault and more Toei's for forcing them to dub it in the first place, even if someone else had dubbed it, there was pretty no chance of a dub of that show meant for daytime TV to be any good.(due to strict FCC standards)

The one piece dub if any kind should've never hit Saturday morning broadcast standards, that was an impossible task to do. Toonami or bust.

 

[Yash]

What always killed me about 4Kids was, much like TPCI, they proved themselves capable on quite a few occasions of “doing it right.” Even the original Pokémon dub in its really early days was often held up in the online anime fandom (at least among those who cared about this sort of thing) as a gold standard for anime dubs on American TV. Obviously it still had a lot of problems but compared to something like Saban-era Dragon Ball Z, or DiC-era Sailor Moon, it’s pretty easy to see why.

Like I don’t know why their dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh, Sonic X, One Piece etc. are considerably worse than Pokémon’s both in terms of censorship/localization and overall production value, but they clearly are (like Dogasu said, One Piece is especially bad, setting aside any fanboy gripes of mine). You’d think they’d just try and do what worked for Pokémon, but maybe Nintendo kept them on a tighter leash.

Also disagree hard that 4Kids was the secret to Pokémon’s success. Funimation could have dubbed it from the beginning and it would have done just as well. The anime being a hit had more to do with Nintendo’s marketing blitz, and later WB rescuing it from syndication than anything else.

 

[snowmint]

I say when the yugioh dub became super popular, that's when 4kids double downed on that type of dubbing method.

 

[Insanish Danish]

Just my two cents, but I think you can certainly like the 4Kids dub without defending what they did wrong - I can't speak for other shows they dubbed because I haven't watched any of them, but I love the 4Kids Pokemon dub in the sense that I thought it was genuinely funny and enjoyable, and the voice acting was pretty good for the most part (also the nostalgia factor); however I hate the company for its determination to hide as much of the show's very obvious Japanese language and culture as possible.

 

[Yash]

Just my two cents, but I think you can certainly like the 4Kids dub without defending what they did wrong - I can't speak for other shows they dubbed because I haven't watched any of them, but I love the 4Kids Pokemon dub in the sense that I thought it was genuinely funny and enjoyable, and the voice acting was pretty good for the most part (also the nostalgia factor); however I hate the company for its determination to hide as much of the show's very obvious Japanese language and culture as possible.

I have a lot of warm and fuzzies for the 4Kids dub of Pokémon myself, even knowing everything that was changed and that it was usually for the worse. I’d certainly never begrudge anyone for liking some of their dubs. The One Piece dub, and especially in comparison to the (much better) Funimation dub, is probably where I draw the line between “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “you wot m8”

Ironically, it feels like their OP dub is seeing somewhat of a resurgence itself - Erica Schroeder was cast in the Funimation dub and has been promoting herself as “the original Luffy” and doing Cameo videos in-character and such, while Shawn Conrad, who wrote the rap opening, has been engaging with the OP fan base on his YouTube channel, including writing a remix of the rap which adds bars for the new characters.

Shawn also said recently that he was paid essentially peanuts by the 4Kids execs for writing the rap as they didn’t feel he deserved credit for the song as they were the ones who asked him to write a rap theme, which kind of brings me to my biggest point about 4Kids. Even if you like their shows or dubs or whatever, what brought them down fundamentally was being a greedy, underhanded company that often swindled talent and the original rights holders out of what they were owed. The lawsuit over Yugioh was probably the biggest factor in bankrupting them, and it stemmed from cheating the licensees out of a cut of the merchandise profits they were promised. Setting aside the quality of their content, they got what was coming to them.

 

[Dogasu]

Al Khan says in recent interviews that it was his company, 4kids that brought the show over and convinced Nintendo to do it, otherwise it was going to stay in Japan forever.

If he did say that (do you have a link?) then the man's delusional. Pocket Monsters wasn't just this really popular TV show in Japan; it was a multimedia behemoth the likes of which nobody had ever seen before . It is impossible to overstate just how big of a juggernaut it was in its home country.

There is absolutely no universe in which somebody doesn't bring Pokémon over to the West.

 

[Hidden Mew]

Chronicles was pretty damn good IMO, One Piece was bad but that was less their fault and more Toei's for forcing them to dub it in the first place, even if someone else had dubbed it, there was pretty no chance of a dub of that show meant for daytime TV to be any good.(due to strict FCC standards)

No one was forcing 4Kids to dub One Piece. If I recall correctly, they picked up the series without actually being aware of what One Piece was actually like. This was after they already had hits like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, so 4Kids getting the license probably seemed like a good idea for Toei, but they weren't forcing them to dub it. The One Piece dub being that bad was definitely on 4Kids and no one else.

Al Khan says in recent interviews that it was his company, 4kids that brought the show over and convinced Nintendo to do it, otherwise it was going to stay in Japan forever.

If he actually does make this claim in interviews, I wouldn't take it as anything more that Al Khan trying to make 4Kids look like a bigger deal than it actually was in regards to Pokemon's success. 4Kids was not the only option the anime had to be localized in the west. Just the idea sounds so ridiculous when the success of the games and the anime in Japan guaranteed that a dub would be made. The idea that Nintendo had to be convinced to get a dub of the anime just sounds so fake to me. Any company could have licensed and dubbed Pokemon and it still most likely would have been a hit. I have nostalgic fondness for the 4Kids dub, but I think that treating it as such an irreplaceable element of Pokemon's initial popularity is overselling it to say the least.

 

[darksteel6]

You have absolutely no way of knowing that. None of us do.



I didn't say 4Kids didn't have any good people working with them. I said that 4Kids was a bad company.

Sometimes, good people work for bad companies.



You have not provided any evidence of this (a link to some random dude's blog doesn't count), and Yash did a really good job of explaining why the timelines for that theory don't even work out in the first place.



FUNimation did just that in 2007 -- release a dub that complied to TV-Y7 FV guidelines that then aired on American TV -- and the results were fantastic.

The thing that made the 4Kids One Piece dub so, so terrible wasn't the edits that had to be made to get the show TV-Y7 friendly. Things like Sanji's smoking, guns, blood, etc. were "problems" that would have had to be dealt with regardless of who was dubbing the show.

But it was actually the things that had absolutely nothing to do with the network censors that made their version of the show so unwatchable. The voice acting was absolutely atrocious; out of the entire cast I think Zolo was the only one who sounded remotely like an actual human. The story was a confusing mess because of the way 4Kids wrote it, with characters saying things in one episode that would then get contradicted in a later one (i.e. how Nami got the "Grand Line Fever"). The show couldn't go more than 30 seconds without someone blurting out an eye-rollingly bad joke about toilets or boogers or decaf coffee or Peter Piper or whatever the hell else 4Kids thought kids would find "funny." The editing was so choppy -- as in, a pan shot that was 7 seconds in the original would get trimmed down to 3 seconds, for example -- that it often felt like you were watching the show at 1.5 speed. The show's music was less a soundtrack as it was a collection of random two-second jingles that played back to back to back to back.

Even if you judge the show based simply on its own merits -- not as an adaptation of a pre-existing Japanese show, but as its own, standalone product -- it was still a terrible production. You can't blame any of that on the FCC.

and you have no way of not knowing that, so I guess that puts us at a stalemate.

I thought Funimation's dub of One Piece aired on Toonami late at night and was intended for adults? I never heard anything about it airing during the daytime and being aimed at kids. If that's the case then my mistake. But even so my point about the FCC and network TV still stands as Funimation's dub aired on cable TV which has much less stringent standards for animated shows as they don't have to deal with the FCC, so they could get away with things that they'd never be allowed to do on network TV, so even if someone else made the dub for One Piece for it's airings on network TV, I have a hard time envisioning a universe where it doesn't suck.

I'll agree the voice-acting was bad, but to me that only credence to the theory that 4Kids never wanted to dub it to begin with.

I didn't say the FCC was entirely to blame, but a lot of the edits that the 4Kids dub of One Piece routinely gets mocked for like changing juice into alcohol and changing assault guns into water guns are things that 4Kids had no choice but to do to comply with the FCC.

Again 4Kids are not a "Bad company" just because they sometimes make changes to Pokemon that you don't like, that's just asinine.

 

[darksteel6]

If he did say that (do you have a link?) then the man's delusional. Pocket Monsters wasn't just this really popular TV show in Japan; it was a multimedia behemoth the likes of which nobody had ever seen before . It is impossible to overstate just how big of a juggernaut it was in its home country.

There is absolutely no universe in which somebody doesn't bring Pokémon over to the West.

I don't think he's delusional at all, sure another company would've brought the show over here later, but if 4Kids didn't do it first, there's the entirely likely possibility that the show could've met the same fate as One Piece of being nowhere near as popular in the west is it overseas, or worse the fate of Saint Seiya where it goes through multiple English dubs, none of which cover the entire series until literal decades later, or worse yet the fate of Detective Conan where the English dub just completely stops after only a few years and we never get another one.

 

[Yash]

When Funimation took over the One Piece license, it was airing Saturday nights on Toonami - but this was while Toonami was still geared as a kid-friendly block, and was more evening than late night (the block ended at 11pm EST, always generally the marker when basic cable is allowed to get more risqué). It went dormant for a few years and was brought back as essentially a rebranding of Adult Swim’s anime/action content, which might be what you’re thinking of (OP has since aired again on Toonami completely uncut).

Funi’s dub aired in the same time slot as 4Kids’ and had to adhere to a lot of the same content edits (violence was toned down, Sanji’s cigarette was removed instead of being turned into a lollipop, all the God/Heaven/angel stuff in Skypiea was changed), as well as inheriting most of 4Kids’ name changes, including (bizarrely) some that 4Kids had apparently made for future episodes but had never gotten around to. All that aside though, it had much better and more accurate scripting, retained the full Japanese OST with English versions of the vocal songs, better voice casting and direction, pretty much everything you’d want out of a dub. And while they had to still make some edits for consistency’s sake (Zoro’s wanted poster still read “ZOLO”), all of the weird, seemingly random 4Kidsisms went away (like text being erased, or the emphasis marks that would show up over characters’ heads when they were surprised/upset, it was weird). It was pretty night and day going from the 4Kids dub one week to the Funimation dub the next.

I do think it’s possible that an earlier Funimation dub might have made stronger localization choices just given the era and Funi’s track record at the time (their original test pilot has a male voice for Luffy for example), but I’ll never agree with anyone who suggests Toei would have forced them to hack it up as much as 4Kids did. It is by far 4Kids’ worst dub, but you can’t look at their track record of dubbing/localizing anime and tell me their version of OP wasn’t just business as usual for them.

 

[darksteel6]

Just my two cents, but I think you can certainly like the 4Kids dub without defending what they did wrong - I can't speak for other shows they dubbed because I haven't watched any of them, but I love the 4Kids Pokemon dub in the sense that I thought it was genuinely funny and enjoyable, and the voice acting was pretty good for the most part (also the nostalgia factor); however I hate the company for its determination to hide as much of the show's very obvious Japanese language and culture as possible.

I think it's silly to "hate" 4Kids like that, the way some people talk about 4Kids you'd think they gleefully murdered puppies or something like that. I don't think the show was trying to "hide" anything, it was just a case of having to change the show to appeal to a broader audience, fact is there's a lot of jokes on the show that just wouldn't make sense if you translated them word-for-word, so they had to be changed, and there's a lot of culturally specific that would make no sense to a western audience, sometimes trying to be too faithful of an adaptation can be your undoing(the Warcraft movie being prime example of that, if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of WoW you won't have a damn clue what's going on in the film).

Are there some things 4Kids could've done better in the show? Sure of course, but to me hating them just comes off as childish and immature IMO, disagreeing with them is fine. To me hating a company should be reserved for companies like Activision and Ubisoft that did FAR worse things like covering up sexual assault and doing nothing to fix the problem, somehow a company that makes change to an anime that some people don't like just simply does not compare, so I simply don't have it in me to "Hate" a company just for dubbing a show in a manner some people don't like.

 

[darksteel6]

When Funimation took over the One Piece license, it was airing Saturday nights on Toonami - but this was while Toonami was still geared as a kid-friendly block, and was more evening than late night (the block ended at 11pm EST, always generally the marker when basic cable is allowed to get more risqué). It went dormant for a few years and was brought back as essentially a rebranding of Adult Swim’s anime/action content, which might be what you’re thinking of (OP has since aired again on Toonami completely uncut).

Funi’s dub aired in the same time slot as 4Kids’ and had to adhere to a lot of the same content edits (violence was toned down, Sanji’s cigarette was removed instead of being turned into a lollipop, all the God/Heaven/angel stuff in Skypiea was changed), as well as inheriting most of 4Kids’ name changes, including (bizarrely) some that 4Kids had apparently made for future episodes but had never gotten around to. All that aside though, it had much better and more accurate scripting, retained the full Japanese OST with English versions of the vocal songs, better voice casting and direction, pretty much everything you’d want out of a dub. And while they had to still make some edits for consistency’s sake (Zoro’s wanted poster still read “ZOLO”), all of the weird, seemingly random 4Kidsisms went away (like text being erased, or the emphasis marks that would show up over characters’ heads when they were surprised/upset, it was weird). It was pretty night and day going from the 4Kids dub one week to the Funimation dub the next.

I do think it’s possible that an earlier Funimation dub might have made stronger localization choices just given the era and Funi’s track record at the time (their original test pilot has a male voice for Luffy for example), but I’ll never agree with anyone who suggests Toei would have forced them to hack it up as much as 4Kids did. It is by far 4Kids’ worst dub, but you can’t look at their track record of dubbing/localizing anime and tell me their version of OP wasn’t just business as usual for them.

4Kids other dubs were nowhere near as bad as One Piece, so for me yes I can look at their track record and say it wasn't "business as usual", something about their dub about One Piece always felt "off" to me in a way none of their other dubs did.

 

[darksteel6]

I have a lot of warm and fuzzies for the 4Kids dub of Pokémon myself, even knowing everything that was changed and that it was usually for the worse. I’d certainly never begrudge anyone for liking some of their dubs. The One Piece dub, and especially in comparison to the (much better) Funimation dub, is probably where I draw the line between “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “you wot m8”

Ironically, it feels like their OP dub is seeing somewhat of a resurgence itself - Erica Schroeder was cast in the Funimation dub and has been promoting herself as “the original Luffy” and doing Cameo videos in-character and such, while Shawn Conrad, who wrote the rap opening, has been engaging with the OP fan base on his YouTube channel, including writing a remix of the rap which adds bars for the new characters.

Shawn also said recently that he was paid essentially peanuts by the 4Kids execs for writing the rap as they didn’t feel he deserved credit for the song as they were the ones who asked him to write a rap theme, which kind of brings me to my biggest point about 4Kids. Even if you like their shows or dubs or whatever, what brought them down fundamentally was being a greedy, underhanded company that often swindled talent and the original rights holders out of what they were owed. The lawsuit over Yugioh was probably the biggest factor in bankrupting them, and it stemmed from cheating the licensees out of a cut of the merchandise profits they were promised. Setting aside the quality of their content, they got what was coming to them.

From what i've heard about that lawsuit, it sounded kinda bogus to me. But since i'm definitely not a law expert I can't be 100% certain on that. Definitely don't agree that they "got what was coming to them" though.

4Kids actually did record an English version of "We Are" that was shown off at conventions, not sure why that never got used(maybe Toei insisted on them doing their own original song, like how the creators of Samurai Pizza Cats wanted every country's dub of it to be very different from the original show and have their own unique feel):We Are

 

[darksteel6]

No one was forcing 4Kids to dub One Piece. If I recall correctly, they picked up the series without actually being aware of what One Piece was actually like. This was after they already had hits like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, so 4Kids getting the license probably seemed like a good idea for Toei, but they weren't forcing them to dub it. The One Piece dub being that bad was definitely on 4Kids and no one else.


If he actually does make this claim in interviews, I wouldn't take it as anything more that Al Khan trying to make 4Kids look like a bigger deal than it actually was in regards to Pokemon's success. 4Kids was not the only option the anime had to be localized in the west. Just the idea sounds so ridiculous when the success of the games and the anime in Japan guaranteed that a dub would be made. The idea that Nintendo had to be convinced to get a dub of the anime just sounds so fake to me. Any company could have licensed and dubbed Pokemon and it still most likely would have been a hit. I have nostalgic fondness for the 4Kids dub, but I think that treating it as such an irreplaceable element of Pokemon's initial popularity is overselling it to say the least.

With Nintendo you never know, with some of the absolutely boneheaded decisions they made in the 90s(the Virtual Boy, using cartridges instead of CDs for the N64, basically being responsible for the creation of the Playstation due to backing out on their deal with Sony at the last minute, etc)I can totally believe that they had to be convinced to allow a dub of Pokemon. Nintendo frequently looks gift horses in the mouth and spits in their faces(as evidenced by how pitiful their virtual console lineup is for the Switch and was for their previous two consoles, they could be raking it in if they had way more retro games on offer instead of the meager selection they have.) So them needing 4Kids to beg them to allow a dub sounds very much in-character for Nintendo.

It was also on the FCC having ultra-strict requirements for saturday morning cartoons, all of those ridiculous edits that 4Kids got routinely mocked for(poison suction cups, turning juice into alcohol, censoring Bellemire's death, turning realistic guns into water guns, etc) were things they had to do in order for the show to be allowed to air at all on network TV.

 

[Yash]

4Kids other dubs were nowhere near as bad as One Piece, so for me yes I can look at their track record and say it wasn't "business as usual", something about their dub about One Piece always felt "off" to me in a way none of their other dubs did.

I think OP is only worse in terms of production value - it seemed to have a very fast turnaround from when 4Kids first announced they had it (around May 2004 or so?) to when it premiered (September). But all of the localization and censorship choices? Just look at Yugioh, Sonic X, Tokyo Mew Mew, it’s all there. Name changes, mistranslations, pointless story changes, “humor” relying heavily on lame puns, OST being replaced with wall-to-wall, finicky synth music (and a lot of their shows shared music libraries, too, even dub music from Pokémon shows up in their other productions), bizarre edits that don’t really make any sense (the text erasure - both Japanese and English - is the big one here), skipping around episodes and splicing some for commercial reasons (OP they wanted to get to Chopper sooner, Yugioh had episodes merged and covered up with blatant plugs for the show’s soundtrack, Mew Mew had a totally different first episode that had to be retconned away).

I think One Piece feels worse because its Japanese version is more violent than a lot of 4Kids’ other shows, but its 4Kidsification is totally consistent with their history as a studio. A good example of this is Shaman King, which for whatever reason got off considerably lighter than their other series (blood, death, smoking etc. all kept) and is often considered one of their better dubs as a result, but still has a lot of the name/music/dialogue changes I mentioned earlier.

 

[darksteel6]

I think OP is only worse in terms of production value - it seemed to have a very fast turnaround from when 4Kids first announced they had it (around May 2004 or so?) to when it premiered (September). But all of the localization and censorship choices? Just look at Yugioh, Sonic X, Tokyo Mew Mew, it’s all there. Name changes, mistranslations, pointless story changes, “humor” relying heavily on lame puns, OST being replaced with wall-to-wall, finicky synth music (and a lot of their shows shared music libraries, too, even dub music from Pokémon shows up in their other productions), bizarre edits that don’t really make any sense (the text erasure - both Japanese and English - is the big one here), skipping around episodes and splicing some for commercial reasons (OP they wanted to get to Chopper sooner, Yugioh had episodes merged and covered up with blatant plugs for the show’s soundtrack, Mew Mew had a totally different first episode that had to be retconned away).

I think One Piece feels worse because its Japanese version is more violent than a lot of 4Kids’ other shows, but its 4Kidsification is totally consistent with their history as a studio. A good example of this is Shaman King, which for whatever reason got off considerably lighter than their other series (blood, death, smoking etc. all kept) and is often considered one of their better dubs as a result, but still has a lot of the name/music/dialogue changes I mentioned earlier.

Yugioh and Sonic X were damn good dubs in my eyes, the former especially. The dub actually did some things better then the original IMO(for example in the original Marik's plan makes zero sense, he wants to kill the Pharoah and steal his Millennium Puzzle to use it, but even if he did kill Yugi, he still wouldn't be able to use the item himself, the dub making it so that he has to first defeat him in a duel in order to use the item makes way more sense. Also it makes way more sense for Yugi to be doing badly in his duel against Mai due to him being afraid of Yami after he almost killed Kaiba as opposed to him just being cocky and not taking Mai seriously for no real reason, also it made zero sense how in the original Noah had no clue that Gozaburo was still alive until he revealed himself, it made far more sense for Gozaburo to have been pulling his strings the entire time) so I liked most of the story changes or was indifferent to them. The censorship was again a thing that was necessary due to strict FCC regulations, so while yes the invisible guns look silly, that was unfortunately a necessary evil in order for the show to be allowed to air at all on daytime network TV. Honestly some of the changes actually make the dub more nightmare inducing, like how the Shadow Realm works, somehow being trapped in an endless void ala the Phantom Zone for eternity sounds way more terrifying then just outright being killed.

I thought the dub had really damn awesome music that wasn't "finicky" at all, I watched every episode of the uncut dub and I honestly found the original music pretty underwhelming(Yugi's first transformation into Yami does not sound nearly as epic as in the original)I especially love this piece of music:Timaeus

The text erasure is weird i'll grant you that, but it doesn't really bother me, I just view it as an odd curiosity, certainly nothing to write angry letters over.

I agree that Yugioh having episodes merged was a weird idea(though at least for the Panik episode we got a cool song out of it, that was actually the first episode of the show I ever watched as a kid and it definitely got me hooked big time), but to be fair that only happened to two episodes and that was only for the TV airings, on DVD and on streaming Yugi's duels with Weevil and Panik are both properly split into two episodes like they should be. Also unlike with Pokemon there were no episodes of Yugioh that got completely skipped over(5Ds had a few skipped, though one of them was a lame-ass clip show episode, so I can't say I was too bummed about that one not getting the dub treatment)

Personally I thought the puns were funny as hell and not lame at all, comedy is ultimately subjective and i'm a sucker for pun-based humor so it didn't bother me in the least, but I can totally see why others wouldn't find it funny.

Haven't seen any episodes of Tokyo Mew Mew so I can't comment on that one too much, but from the clips i've watched it definitely does not seem anywhere near as awful as their dub of OP. I'll have to check out their dub for myself.

Their dub of Shaman King actually got a lot of complaints from parents as a result of them being more faithful to the original, so that would explain why they usually toned down the more violent aspects(well besides the FCC breathing down their necks), because they didn't want to get constantly harassed by angry parents.


Their Pokemon music shows up in other shows? Huh, i've honestly never noticed that before, which of their other shows did it show up in?

 

[Hidden Mew]

I don't think he's delusional at all, sure another company would've brought the show over here later, but if 4Kids didn't do it first, there's the entirely likely possibility that the show could've met the same fate as One Piece of being nowhere near as popular in the west is it overseas, or worse the fate of Saint Seiya where it goes through multiple English dubs, none of which cover the entire series until literal decades later, or worse yet the fate of Detective Conan where the English dub just completely stops after only a few years and we never get another one.

I think that's a huge assumption to make here. I guess I can't say it's impossible given it's a hypothetical situation where neither of us can really prov anything. However, given how huge Pokemon was when it first started, it just comes off as highly unlikely that 4Kids was the only reason the anime became popular here. That just comes off as overselling the role 4Kids had when the anime would have most likely became a hit regardless of who was dubbing it at the time.

I think it's silly to "hate" 4Kids like that, the way some people talk about 4Kids you'd think they gleefully murdered puppies or something like that. I don't think the show was trying to "hide" anything, it was just a case of having to change the show to appeal to a broader audience, fact is there's a lot of jokes on the show that just wouldn't make sense if you translated them word-for-word, so they had to be changed, and there's a lot of culturally specific that would make no sense to a western audience, sometimes trying to be too faithful of an adaptation can be your undoing(the Warcraft movie being prime example of that, if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of WoW you won't have a damn clue what's going on in the film).

Are there some things 4Kids could've done better in the show? Sure of course, but to me hating them just comes off as childish and immature IMO, disagreeing with them is fine. To me hating a company should be reserved for companies like Activision and Ubisoft that did FAR worse things like covering up sexual assault and doing nothing to fix the problem, somehow a company that makes change to an anime that some people don't like just simply does not compare, so I simply don't have it in me to "Hate" a company just for dubbing a show in a manner some people don't like.

While companies actively hurting people like Activision and Ubisoft are clearly awful, I don't think that companies like that negates the problems that 4Kids had. It's one thing to make changes for elements that wouldn't translate well into a different language. It's another matter to effectively make the dubs different shows altogether. Not to mention trying to downplay, if not erase, traces of Japanese culture doesn't come off particularly good. I don't think that 4Kids was an evil company for making changes to their anime. I just think that their dubs have plenty of problems, even if I still enjoy at least their Pokemon dub, and the complaints people have brought up here have been pretty understandable.

With Nintendo you never know, with some of the absolutely boneheaded decisions they made in the 90s(the Virtual Boy, using cartridges instead of CDs for the N64, basically being responsible for the creation of the Playstation due to backing out on their deal with Sony at the last minute, etc)I can totally believe that they had to be convinced to allow a dub of Pokemon. Nintendo frequently looks gift horses in the mouth and spits in their faces(as evidenced by how pitiful their virtual console lineup is for the Switch and was for their previous two consoles, they could be raking it in if they had way more retro games on offer instead of the meager selection they have.) So them needing 4Kids to beg them to allow a dub sounds very much in-character for Nintendo.

It was also on the FCC having ultra-strict requirements for saturday morning cartoons, all of those ridiculous edits that 4Kids got routinely mocked for(poison suction cups, turning juice into alcohol, censoring Bellemire's death, turning realistic guns into water guns, etc) were things they had to do in order for the show to be allowed to air at all on network TV.

Again, it's hard to really be that certain when this still a hypothetical situation, especially when I've never hear of Nintendo needing to be convinced that the Pokemon anime needed to be dubbed, let alone by 4Kids. As for the FCC, I don't think that would excuse all of their edits for One Piece. They obviously would need to tone down the violence to get it on the air for broadcast TV, but given how inconsistent some of their edits have been across their different dubs, I don't think that all the blame could or should be put on FCC standards. It certainly wouldn't handwave away the bad dialogue and voice acting.

I agree that Yugioh having episodes merged was a weird idea(though at least for the Panik episode we got a cool song out of it, that was actually the first episode of the show I ever watched as a kid and it definitely got me hooked big time), but to be fair that only happened to two episodes and that was only for the TV airings, on DVD and on streaming Yugi's duels with Weevil and Panik are both properly split into two episodes like they should be. Also unlike with Pokemon there were no episodes of Yugioh that got completely skipped over(5Ds had a few skipped, though one of them was a lame-ass clip show episode, so I can't say I was too bummed about that one not getting the dub treatment)

Both GX and 5D's have incomplete dubs. They skipped the last episode of season three and all of season four of GX. They skipped a few episodes right in the middle of the WRGP arc for 5D's, mostly episodes that were setting up things for the last arc, and then the last arc altogether. Despite how I think the dub itself unwatchable now, the non-ending for the GX dub still gets me upset. They could have easily ended dub with the season three finale clip show to have some semblance of closure. They at least tried to create an ending for the 5D's dub to give that series closure.

 

[darksteel6]

Some complaints are understandable, but others just come off as pointless and silly nitpicking to me(I.E. who cares if some of Blaine's riddles were changed? Not me, honestly the ones in the dub made more sense to me). Also the Pokemon anime itself stopped having Japanese text in it, so that aspect became a moot point anyways, and I don't know if that was due to 4Kids pressuring the creators, they could've easily told 4Kids to go screw themselves. I think they changed the text thing just to make it easier for all countries to dub their shows.

Yeah i'm aware of GX and 5DS, I was referring to the original Yugioh Duel Monsters show before.

I was bummed that we didn't get season 4 of GX dubbed at first, but then I heard that a lot of fans of the original show didn't like season 4 very much(and I heard it got cut short due to Judai's VA demanding a raise and the company not wanting to give it to him), and honestly I had to agree with them, it was OK but it felt very disposable for the most part, aside from the final duel with Yugi it was kind of an underwhelming season. i thought the dub of GX was really good, I loved when they went whole-hog in season 3 with seemingly taking inspiration from Yugioh the Abridged Series and getting more self-referential.

I liked the missing episodes in 5Ds, but i could kind of understand why 4Kids didn't dub them, as they got pretty dark and violent even for the standards of that show(and the Team Taiyo episodes did feel kinda like filler). The way 5Ds ended up in the dub did feel like an actual ending, as it's certainly set up like one in the original before the reveal that there's another bigger villain to fight.

 

[Hidden Mew]

Some complaints are understandable, but others just come off as pointless and silly nitpicking to me(I.E. who cares if some of Blaine's riddles were changed? Not me, honestly the ones in the dub made more sense to me). Also the Pokemon anime itself stopped having Japanese text in it, so that aspect became a moot point anyways, and I don't know if that was due to 4Kids pressuring the creators, they could've easily told 4Kids to go screw themselves. I think they changed the text thing just to make it easier for all countries to dub their shows.

Most of the complaints I've seen on 4Kids dubs over the years have been pretty valid. There are some nitpicks for sure, but generally speaking, I think people being upset over how they handled their dubs is pretty understandable. Even their text edits were pretty inconsistent. I wasn't referring to just the Japanese text, but any sign of Japanese culture like how they handled rice balls or made it so that Yu-Gi-Oh! DM was set in America instead of Japan.

Yeah i'm aware of GX and 5DS, I was referring to the original Yugioh Duel Monsters show before.

Well you did bring up 5D's, so it wasn't quite clear to me if you were focused on just one series or all of the Yu-Gi-Oh! 4Kids dubs.

I was bummed that we didn't get season 4 of GX dubbed at first, but then I heard that a lot of fans of the original show didn't like season 4 very much(and I heard it got cut short due to Judai's VA demanding a raise and the company not wanting to give it to him), and honestly I had to agree with them, it was OK but it felt very disposable for the most part, aside from the final duel with Yugi it was kind of an underwhelming season. i thought the dub of GX was really good, I loved when they went whole-hog in season 3 with seemingly taking inspiration from Yugioh the Abridged Series and getting more self-referential.

Whatever you heard about Judai's voice actor was a baseless rumor. There isn't any evidence to suggest that he demanded a raise and not getting one lead to GX's shorter fourth season. I remember hearing about an interview with Chronos/Chrowler's voice actor where he said that Konami basically had Synchro monsters ready to go, so they cut GX's last season short.

I liked the missing episodes in 5Ds, but i could kind of understand why 4Kids didn't dub them, as they got pretty dark and violent even for the standards of that show(and the Team Taiyo episodes did feel kinda like filler). The way 5Ds ended up in the dub did feel like an actual ending, as it's certainly set up like one in the original before the reveal that there's another bigger villain to fight.

They weren't really any darker than what they already covered in the Dark Signer arc, so I doubt that was an issue, especially when they would have just down them down considerably like always anyway. The 5D's dub ending felt more like a sudden stop than an ending to me, but I'd still give them credit for at least attempting to give fans some kind of closure with that ending.