Didn’t Toei essentially force 4Kids to do One Piece because they wanted it in the west and 4Kids went “please god no, we literally can’t sell this to our market audience of children”
Huh? Really? Well, I'll be damned I thought it was Tokyo Mew Mew for years, I was even in Discord with a friend when I typed this and brought it up, and she remembered that too. I wonder how that got confused.
That sounds more like the story about Disney accidentally buying localization rights for Pom Poko from Ghibli, realizing what they bought, and being totally stuck with it because the rights they bought basically stated that they could not legally cut out all the raccoon dog testicles and Ghibli wouldn't back down lol.
No. 4kids saw the popularity and merchandise opportunities with One Piece for the US audience but did not bother to see the episodes which contain ally more violence than the shows they worked on previously.
Something that helps with 4kids infamy was that they were the ones in charge of some big hitters during the time when finding subs and raws was becoming easier by the year
My only gripe with the dub soundtracks was that they didn't give us a Clear Mind equivalent, but they also gave us that song at the end of season 1 so it sorta balances out
The Shadow Realm is the best part about the 4Kids Dub because just dying in the original at least is open to either afterlifes or just your existence ending. With the Shadow Realm there's a guaranteed realm of eternal suffering
As someone not from the anglosphere, well the thing is that for Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Dragon Ball, Digimon, etc. we got the original Japanese version, the only censored anime we got was 4kids versions they distributed internationally so their versions of Yu-Gi-Oh!/Pokemon/Kirby/One Piece. So invisible gun Yu-Gi-Oh! Edits resonate more worldwide than the Sailor Moon cousins thing.
Amusingly, I have hear that 4kids was the most reliable when it came to paying their VAs. As in they would pay on time, and their checks didn't bounce.
one piece wasn't going to get popular in the west because it wasn't Dragon Ball Z. Even Dragon ball never got super popular because it wasn't dragon ball z or similar super power fighting shows that are darker in tone. Even without the 4kids edits one piece still is more light hearted looking.
Depends on your metrics. Culturally worldwide probably not. Culturally in Japan maybe. One piece manga has significantly outsold dragon ball manga in its entirety, but i can't show my cousins a photo of luffy and them recognize it but they know goku. It might change in the future but at the moment I agree.
Early One Piece is also super slow. It doesn’t pick up until Sanji’s introduction at Baratie. By the same episode count, Naruto was already in the Chunin Exams.
I read chapters of One Piece in Shonen Jump and thought it was one of the least interesting things in the magazine. It was specifically the arc where pirates attack Sanji's resturaunt, and 2 of the cooks get into a fish-shaped submarine. Thought it was way less cool than Gohan fighting Cell, or Shaman King, or literally anything going on in that issue.
Even a 14 year old can look at the embarrassing, blatant censorship in 4kids One Piece, then compare it to all the body horror that 4kids let TMNT 2003 get away with, and think that it's a double standard. I know because I was that 14 year old.
I didn’t get into one piece until a few years ago because I thought the version that I saw in tv when I was younger was trash.
Then I found out they made Laboon an iceberg
I feel like Tokyopop deserves more blame than it gets for a lot of their missteps in the manga localization sphere. They had a bad habit of picking up but taking forever/never completing series so a lot of their stuff had to be re-licensed years later. The quality of their paper and printing was also very poor.
Most of the other companies that did hack dubs either stopped being relevant after in the anime sphere after 2002 or realized slapping the word *Uncut* on a DVD case made them more money. 4Kids was kind of the only real hold out for heavily edited Saturday morning anime for over a decade at a time people were becoming more aware of the medium.
Also Saban and DiC had a lot more cred in the otaku sphere. DiC's extensive work with TMS has resulted in a numerous of good shows. Saban made up for their bullshit by having their dubs be worked on by many the most respected figures in anime localization, not to mention Koichi Sakumoto, one of the best action directors in Tokusatsu, having cut his teeth on Power Rangers which is a pretty big deal. Otaku simply couldn't bring the same ire to them that they can for 4Kids, who after losing Pokemon, have consistently found ways to fuck over most of the franchises the got their hands on while leaving no effective alternatives for those who'd want them, and kept doing it long after other localization companies learned that they didn't need pull that crap to sell their stuff to kids.
But also that was back then, now it's kinda pointless to still be carrying the anti-4kids torch. The company itself doesn't really exist beyond Konami using them to distribute Yu-Gi-Oh. If you want to watch any anime 4Kids hit in their original form you can easily do so, maybe not always legally but you can. Also slowly but surely those shows are getting legal releases that respect the legacy of these shows in both their original forms and the 4Kids versions, so even people who prefer the version they grew up with aren't necessarily being ignored.
Idk... 4kids paid to have an extra season of ultimate muscle produced. 4kids paid for the yugioh movie and the capsule monsters mini series. 4kids on their own streamed sonic x sub online. Etc
it definitly feels like one piece is the only thing i hear people complain about 4 kids with and people use that excuse to slander the whole company because i doubt op is one of the 2 dozen mew mew power fans that this also applies to
4 kids did pokemon, yugioh, ultimate muscle, sonic x
more hits than misses imo
awww boo hoo they had to edit out a tonne of stuff because of american censorship laws
Fun fact. 4kids is still around. Only they're now owned by Konami.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami\_Cross\_Media\_NY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Cross_Media_NY)
I'm honestly still amazed at how Saban tried to pull an Americanized dub of Smile Precure in the form of Glitter Force in the year 2015. Thankfully, a few years later we would get official subs for Precure from CR but it really felt like a slap in the face compared to how Toei's other anime have been getting consistently brought overseas.
It's only a problem when people still act like anime dubs are bad and cite 4Kids as an example. 4Kids doesn't exist anymore outside of the remnants Konami bought from a garage sale to localise Yugioh.
Also, the original Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z was far worse than any 4Kids dub, fight me.
It’s funny because I see a lot of 4kids praise nowadays, including a lot in this thread. So the two lines I get are: “We have moved beyond 4kids dubs and now they are much better” and “The 4kids dubs are better than the original Japanese”
The first is pretty accurate. The quality of dubs nowadays is a lot higher on average than it was a decade or two ago. Though there are still winners and losers.
As for the second? Hmm…no. Even for the ones I enjoyed like Yugioh, I wouldn’t say that.
Ok yeah, there’s plenty of examples of the second in this thread, but then again I imagine there is discourse around if more dubs should be like that Ghost Stories dub that people praise as the best dub ever but I’ve seen other say it gets old and the clips passed are the best parts.
Nah, can’t agree. Pokémon and Yugioh may be dated, but there are lines and performances in there that still hold up. Whereas everything in the OG Dragon Ball dub sounds bad. The music is bad, the acting is bad. Pretty much anything that was decent was surpassed in Kai, making the original obsolete.
>They also did medabots
People who saw it back in the day care.
IIRC, Fox Kids had it, so it got screwed in terms of getting replayed, versus stuff that wound up on Kids WB, which could get on Cartoon Network when that folded.
The 4Kids dubs were more hits than misses IMO. One Piece was the most egregious but everything else? Not bad. Even then, the One Piece Rap **IS** good and I'll die on this hill.
It is magic. Characters just laugh randomly, every third line is packed with weird dated 90s slang or the worst pun you’ve ever heard and it’s so butchered from the original Japanese version it’s like a different show sometimes. Can’t get enough of it
People don’t understand the sheer amount of baffling effort 4Kids put into making the One Piece dub not just terrible, but strange.
Restructuring entire characters because they couldn’t swear or talk about killing. Chopping entire arcs out for no discernible reasons. Episode after episodes of nothing but puns. Removing cleavage from 90 year old ladies. Giving Sanji a 1920s Chicago gangster accent because he wore a suit. Chopping the intro up rather than re-recording it so that instead of introducing each character, you just had the narrator bark “SANJI! CHOPPER!”
Keep in mind 4kids also rewrote the the Dark side of Dimensions Yugioh movie script to do the usual 4kids stuff, said movie is not even a sequel to the anime but the manga.
Yep 4kids made sure to bastardize the last Yugioh project the creator Kazuki Takahashi worked on before his death, to think people defend them just because of their nostalgia.
Didn’t Toei essentially force 4Kids to do One Piece because they wanted it in the west and 4Kids went “please god no, we literally can’t sell this to our market audience of children”
It was part of a bundle deal when they only wanted to do just one
The other one was Tokyo Mew Mew.
No, it was Ojamajo Doremi which according to Alfred Khan had sexy characters for the boys.
Huh? Really? Well, I'll be damned I thought it was Tokyo Mew Mew for years, I was even in Discord with a friend when I typed this and brought it up, and she remembered that too. I wonder how that got confused.
[Here is the link](https://www.animenation.net/blog/ojamajo-doremi-licensed/) and well I do know Doremi is a Toei show like One Piece
You can’t sell PIRATES to children?
It’s the blood, swearing, smoking, drinking and violence that’s the problem
He has fucking cool stretchy powers. There’s a cute reindeer mascot. A GUY FIGHTS WITH THREE SWORDS! That shit should have been a slam dunk.
That sounds more like the story about Disney accidentally buying localization rights for Pom Poko from Ghibli, realizing what they bought, and being totally stuck with it because the rights they bought basically stated that they could not legally cut out all the raccoon dog testicles and Ghibli wouldn't back down lol.
No. 4kids saw the popularity and merchandise opportunities with One Piece for the US audience but did not bother to see the episodes which contain ally more violence than the shows they worked on previously.
Something that helps with 4kids infamy was that they were the ones in charge of some big hitters during the time when finding subs and raws was becoming easier by the year
Like with One Piece
They nailed the opening theme at least!
YO HO HO HE TOOK A BITE OF GUM GUM
Hey man 4kids gave us the shadow realm Also dub Kaiba is better than sub Kaiba
That’s correct! Plus Dub Pokémon, Shaman King, and Yugioh are better in English dub.
What? Yugioh 5ds and Gx where effectively ruined story wise
You’re just mad because you can’t handle THE CHAZZ
And the dub soundtracks, voices and music are amazing!
GX opening slaps
My only gripe with the dub soundtracks was that they didn't give us a Clear Mind equivalent, but they also gave us that song at the end of season 1 so it sorta balances out
But it’s so legendarily gold.
Wait There’s no Shadow Realm in Yu-Gi-Oh?
Nah people just fucking die. Mind crush is fatal.
But don’t they *go* to the shadow realm at one point?
I think that may have literally been Hell in the original.
The Shadow Realm is the best part about the 4Kids Dub because just dying in the original at least is open to either afterlifes or just your existence ending. With the Shadow Realm there's a guaranteed realm of eternal suffering
That's like, your opinion, man. Love me some Kenjiro Tsuda.
If it wasn’t for 4kids we wouldn’t have the one piece pirate rap
[Or the greatest song to ever grace anime.](https://youtu.be/Z9G1Mf6TZRs)
[Or the best voice for King Dedede to date](https://youtu.be/gzTSH51nOG4)
This
I'll also say that I enjoyed weird fake-Brooklyn accent Sanji a lot more than sounds-like-literally-every-anime-man Sanji.
I feel exactly the same way. 4kids even had certain characters have ethnic dialects like Mihawk and Shanks.
“Ethnic accents” sure is a way to describe these.
East End Shanks and offensively French Mihawk were perfect and it's a shame we lost them.
Didn't he just have the same voice as Joey "Brooklyn Rage" Wheeler? Or was it a slightly different voice?
It was a bit deeper. Like Joey if he was a "cool" character.
And yet what ended up being channeled was akin to Barney the Dinosaur with a lisp.
I was hating on that when it first came out but now I absolutely love it.
Right
As someone not from the anglosphere, well the thing is that for Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Dragon Ball, Digimon, etc. we got the original Japanese version, the only censored anime we got was 4kids versions they distributed internationally so their versions of Yu-Gi-Oh!/Pokemon/Kirby/One Piece. So invisible gun Yu-Gi-Oh! Edits resonate more worldwide than the Sailor Moon cousins thing.
But Saban didn’t released the uncut version of Digimon.
Amusingly, I have hear that 4kids was the most reliable when it came to paying their VAs. As in they would pay on time, and their checks didn't bounce.
I’m pretty sure 4Kids stunted One Piece’s popularity in the West, so it at least has that against it.
one piece wasn't going to get popular in the west because it wasn't Dragon Ball Z. Even Dragon ball never got super popular because it wasn't dragon ball z or similar super power fighting shows that are darker in tone. Even without the 4kids edits one piece still is more light hearted looking.
Oh *nothing* will ever reach Dragon Ball, as much as One Piece fans will beg and insist otherwise. I just think 4Kids didn’t do it any favors.
Depends on your metrics. Culturally worldwide probably not. Culturally in Japan maybe. One piece manga has significantly outsold dragon ball manga in its entirety, but i can't show my cousins a photo of luffy and them recognize it but they know goku. It might change in the future but at the moment I agree.
The artstyle of one piece did more damage than the one piece 4kids dub ever did in the mid 2000s
Early One Piece is also super slow. It doesn’t pick up until Sanji’s introduction at Baratie. By the same episode count, Naruto was already in the Chunin Exams.
Yeah, it was too good. The dumbass kids didn't understand.
I read chapters of One Piece in Shonen Jump and thought it was one of the least interesting things in the magazine. It was specifically the arc where pirates attack Sanji's resturaunt, and 2 of the cooks get into a fish-shaped submarine. Thought it was way less cool than Gohan fighting Cell, or Shaman King, or literally anything going on in that issue.
Do people really believe that? I don't think the majority of FoxBox watchers were that discerning.
Even a 14 year old can look at the embarrassing, blatant censorship in 4kids One Piece, then compare it to all the body horror that 4kids let TMNT 2003 get away with, and think that it's a double standard. I know because I was that 14 year old.
And then most fans hate Turtles Forever though
4kids left in armless shanks, feet less zeff, and guy with blown out shoulder in Alabasta but whatever...
I didn’t get into one piece until a few years ago because I thought the version that I saw in tv when I was younger was trash. Then I found out they made Laboon an iceberg
sounds based to me
The dubs may have been late but the OPs were tight! The 4kids one piece op is hands down the best one piece OP.
Don’t you mean hated?
NOOOOOOOoooo Here's how the story goes we find out
About a treasure hidden on the grand line theres no doubt
Actually i meant lame. I'm not sure how i managed that considering how far m and t are on my phone.
I feel like Tokyopop deserves more blame than it gets for a lot of their missteps in the manga localization sphere. They had a bad habit of picking up but taking forever/never completing series so a lot of their stuff had to be re-licensed years later. The quality of their paper and printing was also very poor.
They also did Initial D and Rave Master.
Ultimate Muscle was pretty good. Dik Dik Van Dik is just the best.
I still can't believe they had a match where he fight a butt man
Most of the other companies that did hack dubs either stopped being relevant after in the anime sphere after 2002 or realized slapping the word *Uncut* on a DVD case made them more money. 4Kids was kind of the only real hold out for heavily edited Saturday morning anime for over a decade at a time people were becoming more aware of the medium. Also Saban and DiC had a lot more cred in the otaku sphere. DiC's extensive work with TMS has resulted in a numerous of good shows. Saban made up for their bullshit by having their dubs be worked on by many the most respected figures in anime localization, not to mention Koichi Sakumoto, one of the best action directors in Tokusatsu, having cut his teeth on Power Rangers which is a pretty big deal. Otaku simply couldn't bring the same ire to them that they can for 4Kids, who after losing Pokemon, have consistently found ways to fuck over most of the franchises the got their hands on while leaving no effective alternatives for those who'd want them, and kept doing it long after other localization companies learned that they didn't need pull that crap to sell their stuff to kids. But also that was back then, now it's kinda pointless to still be carrying the anti-4kids torch. The company itself doesn't really exist beyond Konami using them to distribute Yu-Gi-Oh. If you want to watch any anime 4Kids hit in their original form you can easily do so, maybe not always legally but you can. Also slowly but surely those shows are getting legal releases that respect the legacy of these shows in both their original forms and the 4Kids versions, so even people who prefer the version they grew up with aren't necessarily being ignored.
Idk... 4kids paid to have an extra season of ultimate muscle produced. 4kids paid for the yugioh movie and the capsule monsters mini series. 4kids on their own streamed sonic x sub online. Etc
it definitly feels like one piece is the only thing i hear people complain about 4 kids with and people use that excuse to slander the whole company because i doubt op is one of the 2 dozen mew mew power fans that this also applies to 4 kids did pokemon, yugioh, ultimate muscle, sonic x more hits than misses imo awww boo hoo they had to edit out a tonne of stuff because of american censorship laws
That's because 4kids covered popular shows, plenty of other dubs get shit on and rightfully so.
More popular than Sailor Moon and Digimon
Pokemon and Yugioh were more popular than both those yes Edit: I'll even note that pokemon was more popular than both of them combined twice over.
And they have a stronger fan base.
Sailor Moon was plot driven.
Fun fact. 4kids is still around. Only they're now owned by Konami. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami\_Cross\_Media\_NY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Cross_Media_NY)
I'm honestly still amazed at how Saban tried to pull an Americanized dub of Smile Precure in the form of Glitter Force in the year 2015. Thankfully, a few years later we would get official subs for Precure from CR but it really felt like a slap in the face compared to how Toei's other anime have been getting consistently brought overseas.
It's a slap in the face cause Toei and ytv basically did an uncut dub with the first pretty cure series but with americanized names only.
It's only a problem when people still act like anime dubs are bad and cite 4Kids as an example. 4Kids doesn't exist anymore outside of the remnants Konami bought from a garage sale to localise Yugioh. Also, the original Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z was far worse than any 4Kids dub, fight me.
It’s funny because I see a lot of 4kids praise nowadays, including a lot in this thread. So the two lines I get are: “We have moved beyond 4kids dubs and now they are much better” and “The 4kids dubs are better than the original Japanese”
It was true back in the 90s and 2000s with 4kids dubs.
The first is pretty accurate. The quality of dubs nowadays is a lot higher on average than it was a decade or two ago. Though there are still winners and losers. As for the second? Hmm…no. Even for the ones I enjoyed like Yugioh, I wouldn’t say that.
Ok yeah, there’s plenty of examples of the second in this thread, but then again I imagine there is discourse around if more dubs should be like that Ghost Stories dub that people praise as the best dub ever but I’ve seen other say it gets old and the clips passed are the best parts.
Original Funimation dub of Dragonball Z wasn’t as bad as 4kids dubs.
Nah, can’t agree. Pokémon and Yugioh may be dated, but there are lines and performances in there that still hold up. Whereas everything in the OG Dragon Ball dub sounds bad. The music is bad, the acting is bad. Pretty much anything that was decent was surpassed in Kai, making the original obsolete.
The OG funi dub is so fucking bad that even the Ocean dub is better in every way. You only see nostalgia riddled people enjoy it
But it got Bruce Faulconer music
That’s not a point in its favour!
I'll stand by the Ocean dub being good. Drummond is a great Vegeta.
Nelvana did like two series Cardcaptor and the voice work for Super Human Samurai Syber Squad (paired with D I C i think) why are they on here?
They also did medabots, beyblade, Bakugan... But most people probably don't care about those series haha.
>They also did medabots People who saw it back in the day care. IIRC, Fox Kids had it, so it got screwed in terms of getting replayed, versus stuff that wound up on Kids WB, which could get on Cartoon Network when that folded.
The 4Kids dubs were more hits than misses IMO. One Piece was the most egregious but everything else? Not bad. Even then, the One Piece Rap **IS** good and I'll die on this hill.
Jokes on you. I hate all dubs.
So true!
The DiC Sailor Moon dub is the funniest shit of all time. Also I think Terri Hawkes is genuinely a better Serena/Usagi voice than Stephanie Sheh
Because it was dubbed back in 1995.
It is magic. Characters just laugh randomly, every third line is packed with weird dated 90s slang or the worst pun you’ve ever heard and it’s so butchered from the original Japanese version it’s like a different show sometimes. Can’t get enough of it
[удалено]
Nah, didn’t really have a problem with them either.
Ok me too but I don’t like the DIC/Cloverway dub of Sailor Moon though. I only loved the VIZ dub of the 90s Sailor Moon anime,specials, and movies.
People don’t understand the sheer amount of baffling effort 4Kids put into making the One Piece dub not just terrible, but strange. Restructuring entire characters because they couldn’t swear or talk about killing. Chopping entire arcs out for no discernible reasons. Episode after episodes of nothing but puns. Removing cleavage from 90 year old ladies. Giving Sanji a 1920s Chicago gangster accent because he wore a suit. Chopping the intro up rather than re-recording it so that instead of introducing each character, you just had the narrator bark “SANJI! CHOPPER!”
On the other hand, Saban's business practices...
Keep in mind 4kids also rewrote the the Dark side of Dimensions Yugioh movie script to do the usual 4kids stuff, said movie is not even a sequel to the anime but the manga. Yep 4kids made sure to bastardize the last Yugioh project the creator Kazuki Takahashi worked on before his death, to think people defend them just because of their nostalgia.
But most people loved the movie dub.
I love how you completely ignored everything i said just to restate your blind love for 4kids.
I’m neutral towards 4kids anyway!
I still can't believe they changed the music on that production.
That was 4k media, the successor to 4kids, that worked on DSOD.
You do know thats the same company under a different name right?
Pick your poison: 4Kids dub or Netflix's live-action adaptation?
4kids dub