Dogasu's Backpack Discussion

[technickal]

I understand what they were going for in "Fire and Ice", but I think it was missing the point of the whole League arc. Viewers enter these episodes, so when you relegate them only to the first and last five minutes of the episode people are going to be justifiably disappointed. Granted, I think the non-battle stuff is fun, but I'd give up a few minutes of it if it meant the actual battles were more substantial.

The cuts of the dubbed version were definitely made at the last minute as given away by the music skips, but I don't think there is an uncut dubbed version of that episode publicly available. If there was, it wouldn't make sense for it to appear on TV, as one of the cuts was blatantly made to appeal to FCC guidelines. It's not on the American DVD either, so the only possibility would be being on one of the non-American releases of the English dub? At least one foreign dub based on the English one has the cuts, though, so I doubt it.

Definitely saw the Porygon episode – in fact, I believe it was my first exposure to the Japanese version of the series. It actually has a really cool plot, so it's unfortunate yet understandable that the seizure fiasco overshadowed it. The way the scene in question was animated makes me not blame Porygon or Pikachu for it, but the former of course had to take the fall, probably because it was in the very title. I agree it shouldn't be shown again, but I do wish OLM would give the little guy and its evolutionary cousins a chance for another reappearance.

 

[Nicolas721]

Porygon coming back would attract a lot of attention, specially from overseas, which would make the incident more popular.

 

[Hidden Mew]

Which probably has more to do with the fact it was early on in the series and nobody had a clue how the show would turn out or be successful.

I really doubt that reasoning. They would have had access to the first few episodes of the series at least. I believe that they licensed the series a few months after it started in Japan, so it's not like the number of Charmander's appearances would be a mystery to them. Even if they somehow didn't know what was going to happen, the notion that a starter Pokemon, let alone arguably the most popular of the original starters, caught by the main character would only show up in one episode is really ridiculous. Even Butterfree and Pidgeotto showed up more than once despite largely fading into the background once Ash got the Kanto starters.

And yet the very next episode...

I forgot whether that episode was set before or after the Porygon episode. Ash leaving Pikachu there would have been really strange, especially when the ending showed that they'd never really want to be separated.

 

[marshiyanmisuta]

I wouldn't be surprised if he just made up the whole Charizard story on the spot, just to say something interesting. VAs do it all the time.

 

[Antiyonder]

I really doubt that reasoning. They would have had access to the first few episodes of the series at least. I believe that they licensed the series a few months after it started in Japan, so it's not like the number of Charmander's appearances would be a mystery to them. Even if they somehow didn't know what was going to happen, the notion that a starter Pokemon, let alone arguably the most popular of the original starters, caught by the main character would only show up in one episode is really ridiculous. Even Butterfree and Pidgeotto showed up more than once despite largely fading into the background once Ash got the Kanto starters.

Plus Charmander's third evolutionary stage was a mascot for the Red Version (Being the one used for the box art and all)

Anyway, I'm going to wait a bit later to comment on Ash's loss, may be not too long before the relevant episode comparison or after. But since I'm posting for the first time, there was a bit concerning the discussion for the 3rd movie I thought was worth noting:

They say all this during the shot where Molly looks up into the sky and sees an Entei-shaped cloud. Which is about three minutes before the movie's end credits even start.

Now 4Kids defends this change by saying that people tend to leave the theater as soon as they can (I mean, they're watching the 4Kids Pokémon dub, can you really blame them?) and that moving this scene to the actual movie itself helps ensure that audiences don't leave the theaters thinking that Molly was left an orphan.

But like, is that a thing that people do? Do people actually get up and leave a movie like five minutes before the end credits even start? I mean if you were one of the parents in the scenario Mr. Grossfeld and Mr. Haigney paint and you tried to leave when the house lights were still down and the movie was obviously still playing then wouldn't your kids loudly complain about you making them leave too early? Whose parents are that big an asshole?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe had been doing Post-Credit scenes since Iron Man in 2008, and at least in showings that I'm present in some people either don't care or still aren't savy to the format, despite this film line being famous for such. So yeah I'd say 4Kids made the right call.

 

[Charmander4]

I really doubt that reasoning. They would have had access to the first few episodes of the series at least. I believe that they licensed the series a few months after it started in Japan, so it's not like the number of Charmander's appearances would be a mystery to them. Even if they somehow didn't know what was going to happen, the notion that a starter Pokemon, let alone arguably the most popular of the original starters, caught by the main character would only show up in one episode is really ridiculous. Even Butterfree and Pidgeotto showed up more than once despite largely fading into the background once Ash got the Kanto starters.



I forgot whether that episode was set before or after the Porygon episode. Ash leaving Pikachu there would have been really strange, especially when the ending showed that they'd never really want to be separated.

It’s the 11th episode of a show that nobody here in the US knew would be the phenomenon it became. They flatly admitted they were still learning a lot of things in interviews during those early episodes.

And at the end of the day it’s what someone said in a commentary that is merely an interesting laugh. It isn’t as if the show was ruined because of it, and his Charmander voice is iconic.

 

[Hidden Mew]

It’s the 11th episode of a show that nobody here in the US knew would be the phenomenon it became. They flatly admitted they were still learning a lot of things in interviews during those early episodes.

And at the end of the day it’s what someone said in a commentary that is merely an interesting laugh. It isn’t as if the show was ruined because of it, and his Charmander voice is iconic.

No one knew that the show would be that successful, but that doesn't really factor into this. Since they were dubbing the series, I assume that they would have some knowledge of the events within the first season, or that a Pokemon caught by the main character would show up more than once. The latter is just basic common sense. I still have a hard time believing that they couldn't possibly know that Charmander would appear in more than one episode. Charmander showed up in the following episode right after its debut for goodness shake.

I'm not saying that the show is ruined because of this. I just find their logic completely ridiculous, unbelievable and the defense for their claim is a pretty big stretch too. There's really no good reason why they would think that Charmander would show up for only one episode.

 

[ii kanji]

I have an unrelated question - is The Legend of Miniryuu still replayed/widely available in Japan?

 

[Gabo2oo]

Wow, to think most people believe 700 is the amount of children that got sent to the hospital...

 

[technickal]

I have an unrelated question - is The Legend of Miniryuu still replayed/widely available in Japan?

I believe the only "banned" episodes in America that affected Japanese re-airings were the Jynx ones.

 

[Charmander4]

The Simpsons in Japan is completely different than the US one so that’s a horrible example to use. Bart and Homer especially are completely different characters. And there is absolutely no proof anyone from 4Kids or the US forced the creators to remove Japanese text.

 

[Yash]

The Simpsons in Japan is completely different than the US one so that’s a horrible example to use. Bart and Homer especially are completely different characters. And there is absolutely no proof anyone from 4Kids or the US forced the creators to remove Japanese text.

I'll give 4Kids some benefit of the doubt here and assume they didn't straight-up go to Pokemon Company in Japan and say "we don't want Japanese text in the show, stop using it," but it's totally plausible the Japanese producers decided to "internationalize" the show on their own after seeing the extent 4Kids would go to erase any lick of Japanese from the series.

That being said, there are examples of 4Kids doing this. It might be an old rumor, but I believe I read Brock was kicked off the show after 4Kids ran some focus group tests and found that he was American viewers' least favorite character, leading to Tracey's introduction.

There's a more concrete example of this with Ultimate Muscle, one of their other anime - they spent the first two seasons erasing the kanji off of every wrestler's head (except Kid Muscle). When the 4Kids-funded third season rolled out, suddenly the head kanji was gone even in the Japanese version, leading the manga to even make fun of this at one point.

 

[Charmander4]

I'll give 4Kids some benefit of the doubt here and assume they didn't straight-up go to Pokemon Company in Japan and say "we don't want Japanese text in the show, stop using it," but it's totally plausible the Japanese producers decided to "internationalize" the show on their own after seeing the extent 4Kids would go to erase any lick of Japanese from the series.

That being said, there are examples of 4Kids doing this. It might be an old rumor, but I believe I read Brock was kicked off the show after 4Kids ran some focus group tests and found that he was American viewers' least favorite character, leading to Tracey's introduction.

There's a more concrete example of this with Ultimate Muscle, one of their other anime - they spent the first two seasons erasing the kanji off of every wrestler's head (except Kid Muscle). When the 4Kids-funded third season rolled out, suddenly the head kanji was gone even in the Japanese version, leading the manga to even make fun of this at one point.

There is absolutely no proof at all Brock was removed due to anything for American audiences. In fact your post is the first I’ve ever heard of this supposed focus group. I have no doubt it’s a false rumor.

4Kids never had a say in what the Japanese writers and animators put together. Them removing Japanese text for a show airing in America was the right call. It isn’t racist like many of the people here want to cry foul. And I’ve seen it many times.

 

[PkmnTrainerV]

There is absolutely no proof at all Brock was removed due to anything for American audiences. In fact your post is the first I’ve ever heard of this supposed focus group. I have no doubt it’s a false rumor.

It’s notable enough that even Bulbapedia mentions it.
Tracey Sketchit - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia

 

[Hidden Mew]

I never heard about the focus group that 4Kids made leading to Brock being replaced theory before, but it was true that Tracey was created because they were afraid that Brock would be seen as racist to American audiences. This most likely was due to the whole Jynx situation where its design did invoke some really racist imagery of African Americans. It most likely wasn't intentional, but I could definitely see why they went back to change Jynx's design afterwards. Once they realized that no one had a problem with Brock's design and he was pretty well liked, they brought him back. I couldn't really see Tracey sticking around past Orange Islands anyway. His goal was to meet Professor Oak and I couldn't see him leaving for Johto once that happened.

As for removing Japanese text, I'm not sure if I'd call that racist, but I don't think that was the right call to make. Just because the show was airing for an American audience doesn't mean that they had to get rid of any sign of Japanese culture. It wouldn't have drastically changed how kids saw the show if the characters were reading Japanese signs. They could have easily just translated the text instead of removing it. 4Kids was pretty inconsistent about this with some of their other shows too. Sometimes they'd remove it completely, sometimes they'd create a poorly drawn image in place of text and sometimes they'd actually translate it. To be fair though, the show probably would have introduced the Pokemon language in place of Japanese text regardless of how 4Kids handled that aspect of the series eventually. It could have been the result of having more of a global audience in mind and trying to use more of the elements of the games for future series too. At least they didn't try to claim that Pokemon takes place in the U.S. like they did with Yu-Gi-Oh! DM. I think that would be closer to being racist than the text issue, if not just really more stupid. It's not like kids couldn't handle a series being set in a different country.

 

[SammyW27]

Getting rid of kanji isn't so much "racist" as it is "nationalist".
(Though that can be pretty bad too)

Though yeah, it's not really so much as OLM/ShoPro or whoever was trying to pander to Americans than that they were trying to appeal to an international audience in general.

The Simpsons in Japan is completely different than the US one so that’s a horrible example to use. Bart and Homer especially are completely different characters.

Really?
Please, give me some examples. I'm really curious now.

 

[Charmander4]

Getting rid of kanji isn't so much "racist" as it is "nationalist".
(Though that can be pretty bad too)

Though yeah, it's not really so much as OLM/ShoPro or whoever was trying to pander to Americans than that they were trying to appeal to an international audience in general.



Really?
Please, give me some examples. I'm really curious now.

Non-English versions of The Simpsons - Wikipedia

This lists some of the country’s. In Japan, Bart is more respectful to Homer since his actual character wouldn’t fit well in Japanese culture.

Many Arabic versions have Homer drinking Duff Soda since alcohol is banned and remove Krusty and his dad since they’re Jewish.

The point I’m making is that Pokémon having changes made for international markets is perfectly normal and has been done before with other shows.

 

[MRStealth64]

The key difference, though, is that the foreign dubbers don't go up to the people who make the Simpsons and tell them to tone down the content because it's too much work to edit it themselves. If you need proof that 4Kids did exactly that, look no farther than the fourth movie, in which they got the Japanese producers to animate entirely new scenes just for the dub.

I've really been finding the latest comparisons quite interesting. I do find it ironic that Zippo was the only one of Hiroshi's pokemon to keep it's original nickname. Looking forward to the last two Kanto episodes!

 

[AtoMan]

I haven't, but there's a weird thing going on in my (non-official) Latin American copy of the episode. The audio weirdly cuts off both times before each cut.

The first time it's the Viridian City theme appearing out of nowhere with no lead-in, so it sounds as if the cut was made after the whole scene was dubbed to English. The second one is Ash going mute mid-sentence, he says "smells goo--", then there's the shot of the restaurant. 4Kids' background music also sounds like it was cut after being inserted in the scene.

Due to this, I'm sure an English version of the full episode should exist, and it was used for foreign dubs, or at least its script. (Perhaps the episode was uncut here, but whoever uploaded it had to cut the audio to fit with the U.S. DVD footage? They don't do reruns here and the only official releases were on VHS, so I can't check.)

It's possible that the Latin American dub audio was resynced to the US DVDRip which would be the most popular copy available on the 'net. Especially with you mentioning the copy being "non-official". For most people finding a different copy would be hard (I think i had to rely on some shady German sites to find an uncut dub video).

I can confirm Polish TV airings (even the Fox Kids/Jetix ones that had additional cuts) had the full scenes intact, except... there was no Viridian City playing. Just subtle crowd noises and a lot of silence.

The cuts of the dubbed version were definitely made at the last minute as given away by the music skips, but I don't think there is an uncut dubbed version of that episode publicly available. If there was, it wouldn't make sense for it to appear on TV, as one of the cuts was blatantly made to appeal to FCC guidelines. It's not on the American DVD either, so the only possibility would be being on one of the non-American releases of the English dub? At least one foreign dub based on the English one has the cuts, though, so I doubt it.

Where is that cut dub from? Maybe it was made later and 4kids (or TPCI, even) mistakenly sent the wrong master.

I know for a fact the episode was available in uncut form on German and Spanish (i think?) DVDs. On top of that, the first German release, handled by WB, had an English audio option as well.

 

[Dogasu]

So my mention of The Simpsons in my comparison, as most of you have correctly noticed, has absolutely nothing to do with how the show was localized in Japan and is instead an attempt to help put the "no more Japanese writing" policy that seems to be going on with Pocket Monsters, in Japan, in a context that might make more sense to the people reading my site. But it seems like my analogy wasn't clear enough for some people so I thought I'd take the time to elaborate.

(I used The Simpsons because that's a show I assume most people are familiar with, though literally any other American show would work just as well.)

The Simpsons is currently in its 29th season. Let's say that Fox approaches the creators of the show and tells them that, for the 30th season onwards, there is to be no more English writing allowed on-screen. It's just a pain in the butt for foreign localizers to have to deal with, y'know? So in order for the show to conform to these new standards, a number of changes will need to be made to all new episodes moving forward.

For starters, that chalkboard gag at the beginning of every episode will probably need to be axed altogether. Famous landmarks like Moe's Tavern, Krusty Burger, the Kwik-E-Mart, and The Android's Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop will all need to be redesigned to remove the English text from the signs they have out front. Maybe replace that text with pictograms, or create an English language cipher that we'll call "Groeningan" or something. Mayor Quimby will need to have his "MAYOR" sash removed, and the word "DUFF" on Duff Man's shirt will need to be erased as well. The title cards for the "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoons will need to either be redesigned or removed altogether. If it becomes absolutely necessary for a character to be reading something then make sure the camera is angled in such a way so that we can't actually see any of the text they're reading; make it so that we can only see the back of the sheet of paper, or place the camera behind the signpost they're referring to. Non-English writing gets to stay.

Oh, and Fox is not willing to shell out the money for the animation studio to make two verisons of every episode (one regular, one international) so all the changes listed above will be made to the original, uncut version of the show that premiers in the United States for an American audience.

Sounds absolutely fucking insane, right?

And yet this is exactly what's been going on with Pocket Monsters since before the turn of the century.