Youtube host Saberspark looks at the rise and fall of children's entertainment company 4kids.
The fall of 4Kids
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As much flack as 4Kids gets, much of it well-deserved, they were a LOT of people's first exposure to anime.
4kids is a paradox. You shouldn't be able to fall when you're at rock bottom during your height. Yet they make the impossible possible, one lollipop cigarette at a time.
After Turtles Forever aired, I never bothred with 4Kids ever again. Their best anime dub was Shaman King, but some of that has not aged well. What I will give them is that they left the show mostly uncensored and even kept the blood. It was part of their undoing, because parents complained about the villain of said show being "too evil" (where the hell were you bitches when Shredder was committing over 1000s of years of genocide?). Hao basically kicked Yoh while he was down on the ground, and was considered going "too far". Their other best show was and still is, TMNT 2003.
Funny enough, a majority of voice actors loved working at 4Kids, because of the big paychecks. None of them regret anything.
Funny enough, a majority of voice actors loved working at 4Kids, because of the big paychecks. None of them regret anything.
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I used to watch Yu-Gi-Oh GX as a kid, and I tried to watch it recently (the dubbed version) for one massive hit of nostalgia.
Unfortunately for me, I learned that the 4th season of the show was never dubbed, because the sequel show came out before they could finish it, and so they moved onto dubbing that instead.
So I was left with that awkward conundrum of watching it in dubbed, then swapping over to subbed for the last season, or watching the entirety of the show in subbed, which would have some localisation differences, as well as missing out on that killer intro
In the end, I couldn't decide, so I never watched it.
Go figure.
Unfortunately for me, I learned that the 4th season of the show was never dubbed, because the sequel show came out before they could finish it, and so they moved onto dubbing that instead.
So I was left with that awkward conundrum of watching it in dubbed, then swapping over to subbed for the last season, or watching the entirety of the show in subbed, which would have some localisation differences, as well as missing out on that killer intro
In the end, I couldn't decide, so I never watched it.
Go figure.
Eh...Bear in mind that they were the ones who brought Pokemon stateside. Yes, its localization...left something to be desired ("Jelly Donuts", anyone?), but let's be honest, on the whole that series's quality was still upwards of passable for its time.
On a more general note, let us not forget that for all their faults 4Kids were early adopters (in the west) of anime, initially at a time when common knowledge over here was that animation only appealed to prepubescent children, and anything that wasn't rated G was immediately bumped all the way up to R-18 and thus only granted a very niche audience and no airtime.
Don't get me wrong, I will happily criticize and wryly mock a lot of the changes they made in an effort to sanitize the productions, to say nothing of their eventual failure to move on from that model. But I do feel it's important to recognize that they got started in a context that very nearly required such approaches. And in spite of all their flaws they still played a key role in showing that anime could be successful overseas.
Edit: Made it clearer when I stopped talking about pokemon and started talking about 4kids
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I was in the west during that time, but not in the US, and we had anime where I was too, but it was uncensored anime, with the original Jp openings, and so on. A lot of shows that I saw growing up never even made it to the US, so it's not as if 4kids was doing anything unique or special, or that it was good at what it did.
Back in the mid 80s and later there was a boom of anime popularity in Greece so after that we would get tons of stuff, some of it were from France who is the second biggest anime consumer in the world (a lot of our dragonball and then later DBZ was from them I belive), and some directly from Japan. We would eventually get some anime from america too, like pokemon for example, but a lot of the murderized stuff like One Piece and Yugioh we got the JP versions of during the time they were being ruined in the US. So yeah, I have no reason to be fond of 4kids, it just was one of the things I looked at and made fun of in my early anime fan days.
Also in one communications class in college we had to write about media censorship so I made a powerpoint presentation about them. Aced that shit! I used as a prop printouts of stills comparing 4kids stuff to the original and people were left slackjawed, including the professor lol.
...Was it the Finger Guns in YuGiOh, the Club Sandwich in Pokemon, or the Lolipop in One Piece that floored them?
Nah this was over a decade ago so there were no popular memes to rely on, though I did use the Sanji lollipop one. What floored em was the impaled Luffy on Crocodile's hook one (it just looked very weird in the 4kids edit) and the team rocket doing heil hitler salutes juxtaposed with them just sitting awkwardly in line. I remember the professor going "there's nazis in pokemon!?" in a bemused way, with a lot of disbelief mixed in. Oh also them whitening Sanji's chef buddies was another point of contention. That one left em more confused, like a "why would they even do this though???" thing.
Whatever else you can say about 4Kids, there is no denying they knew how to make good theme songs. The intros for Yu-Gi-Oh, Shaman King and Mew Mew Power are so memorable. Even the One Piece them has its own odd charm.
I still love the 4Kids edit of a scene from One Piece, where family-friendly censorship ended up all pear-shaped:
The original scene calls for a bandit to put a gun to the head of Red-Haired Shanks. Shanks in turn orders the bandit to be promptly shot, which one of his crew does with a contact shot. Shanks then coldly reminds the bandits: never point a weapon at someone unless you intend to kill.
The edited scene still has the bandit, Shanks, and the orders to shoot. But then the shooter (I wanna say it was Lucky Roux, not sure) claims his gun was firing "blanks" (which even if true, a contact shot would have still been... messy) and the bandit must have 'passed out from fear'.
So that's three terrible Aesops for the price of one good one: scare people with weapons because that certainly ends well, feel free to point weapons wherever you like, and blanks can't hurt anyone! Thanks, 4Kids!
The original scene calls for a bandit to put a gun to the head of Red-Haired Shanks. Shanks in turn orders the bandit to be promptly shot, which one of his crew does with a contact shot. Shanks then coldly reminds the bandits: never point a weapon at someone unless you intend to kill.
The edited scene still has the bandit, Shanks, and the orders to shoot. But then the shooter (I wanna say it was Lucky Roux, not sure) claims his gun was firing "blanks" (which even if true, a contact shot would have still been... messy) and the bandit must have 'passed out from fear'.
So that's three terrible Aesops for the price of one good one: scare people with weapons because that certainly ends well, feel free to point weapons wherever you like, and blanks can't hurt anyone! Thanks, 4Kids!
I gotta admit, I mainly know 4Kids because people have been making fun of their localisations for ages. Here in Germany anime became popular sooner and had localizations that were mostly better. I was, for example, kind of surprised that the original Dragonball series, you know, with the Red Ribbon Army and Tao Bai Bai and whatnot, only aired in America well after DBZ, where it was already a childhood classic for many teenagers here.
Germany had its own wave of censorship which was only after I stopped following tv anime, I think as a reaction to a school shooting here. As far as I know the German dub of Naruto and later episodes of Detective Conan were hit quite hard by it.
But cutting out stuff like alcohol, tobacco or foreign food, of all things, was just never a thing here. I think there was a general attitude that American animation is what you watch as a kid and anime is what you watch as a teenager. And the anime we got was dubbed with the attitude in mind that younger kids aren't really the core demographic for most of it. All that makes me scratch my head at all I know about 4Kids dubs. I guess getting anime in that form is better than not getting it at all, but a lot of their decisions seem patronizing, if not downright disrespectful to both the original creators and the audience.
Germany had its own wave of censorship which was only after I stopped following tv anime, I think as a reaction to a school shooting here. As far as I know the German dub of Naruto and later episodes of Detective Conan were hit quite hard by it.
But cutting out stuff like alcohol, tobacco or foreign food, of all things, was just never a thing here. I think there was a general attitude that American animation is what you watch as a kid and anime is what you watch as a teenager. And the anime we got was dubbed with the attitude in mind that younger kids aren't really the core demographic for most of it. All that makes me scratch my head at all I know about 4Kids dubs. I guess getting anime in that form is better than not getting it at all, but a lot of their decisions seem patronizing, if not downright disrespectful to both the original creators and the audience.
That's because it is. It all dates back to their Pokémon days. The only reason they mostly got away with it then, was because not everyone had Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s, and the show was always targeted towards a young demographic. So whatever censorship that occurred wasn't noticeable at the time. 4Kids had their issues, but it wasn't until a bunch of "moral outrage parents" got bugs up their asses from the last few episodes of Shaman King that 4kids went too hard on future censorship and "localization" of anime. They honestly lasted too long for me. There are some aspects I miss about them, but I am glad they don't exist anymore.
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French localization is weirder. In France too, animes arrived early, and were popular way before reaching the US. But they also arrived in increasingly trashy cheap packages for increasingly trashy cheap shows, managed by people who didn't give a damn about quality, meaning or adequacy. In France, traditionally, cartoons are for toddlers and that's all. Even Tex Avery or Chuck Jones cartoons, which were largely made for ww2 US soldiers, are dumbed down in the voiceovers (nonsensical dialogues, on screen words read out loud in a funny voice even if -like "dynamite"- they are the same word in french, etc). So, japanese cartoons were shown in very childlike programmes, regardless of the blood and dismemberment they could display. The TV executives didn't care, it was all about quantity and financial savings, for stuff they hardly checked anyway. This gave a terribly bad rep to japanese animation, both in form (often the cheapest, worst animation quality) and content (violence for children), and became a whole political issue. In a society that would then split by prejudice, between the shocked, nauseated adults who'd forever despise and snub anime and mangas, and the kids who grew up embracing these animations and would then welcome with open arms the unsuspected world of quality japanese animation (Ghibli and all that stuff).
(And I belong to the prejudiced side. It's hard to overcome my distaste for the manga style after having associated them for so long to the worst of children television.)
Anyway, this distaste was clearly shared by the french dubbing studios, and that's where it gets fun. The dubbers were absolutely revolted by "children" cartoons such as Fist of the North Star, and just hated the dialogues and storylines they were supposed to record. So their way of protesting it was to ad-lib any random bullshit they could instead of the original text. As the tv channels didn't give a damn about what they were broadcasting, the dubbers were completely free to improvize. Meaning that the french version of Fist of The North Star, even though visually gritty, if offset by the humour and wordplays of the voiceovers, which actually made for a lot of its success. And it has become a cult object in its own right. So it was censorship, deliberate, but also humorous and subversive (down-top censorship instead of top-down, in a sense). And the end product, in the eyes of most of the public, is deemed better than the original source.
So, France's historical relation to anime, dubbing, age brackets and censorship is a bit confused.
Ah, Club Dorothée. How nostalgic. Didn't know about the dubbing. Then again, spoke no French and was 6 at the time, so all I saw was awesome bang-zaps and punchicuffs.
I'm guessing these parents didn't watch 4kids's TMNT series. That show could be pretty gruesome for something aimed at kids, especially the dark future episode that features no less than three characters being killed on screen (admittedly in a way that doesn't show blood or gore).
I also wonder if this is why Digimon has the reputation of being Pokemon's grown up counterpart since the first three series (especially Tamers) weren't hit as hard by censorship. They don't even edit Angewomon's outfit to be more modest like 4kids did to certain female characters and monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh.
Pretty much that and a double standard. Fast Forward was pretty much a backup plan to go lighter and softer, in case parents started complaining or noticing.
Yes. Most of the Digimon shows weren't hit too hard by censorship. Tamers actually got the lease amount of it, and it is by far the darkest of the franchise. Fox Kids/ABC Family at least put effort into getting adult/mature things pass the radar. Digimon is still king
over the Pokemon TV series.
Speaking of Digimon, I do not like the original US intro, which lasted for three seasons/series.
Don't get me wrong, I can see why people would like it, but compared to Japanese, and especially Korean intros, it feels lackluster.
I mean here's what US got for three seasons. Until 3 min mark, they used the same digimon intro:
And here's what the Koreans got:
Also Japan:
Like, both Korean and Japanese intros went all in with coming up with new intros for each season. They even had their own ED/outros, and many of my Korean friends remember them fondly of these. I especially like the Korean version of Tamers. I don't know why it took US three seasons to come up with a new intro.
I guess that's something I can give 4kids credits for; Pokemon, Yugioh, Shaman King all had kick-ass intros. Especially for Pokemon as they actually had new intros for each season.
Don't get me wrong, I can see why people would like it, but compared to Japanese, and especially Korean intros, it feels lackluster.
I mean here's what US got for three seasons. Until 3 min mark, they used the same digimon intro:
And here's what the Koreans got:
Also Japan:
Like, both Korean and Japanese intros went all in with coming up with new intros for each season. They even had their own ED/outros, and many of my Korean friends remember them fondly of these. I especially like the Korean version of Tamers. I don't know why it took US three seasons to come up with a new intro.
I guess that's something I can give 4kids credits for; Pokemon, Yugioh, Shaman King all had kick-ass intros. Especially for Pokemon as they actually had new intros for each season.
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