Yash
CHOCOLATE
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2007
- Messages
- 697
- Reaction score
- 312
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.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.
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.