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Kenshin5000 wrote:

Not likely, but I'm hoping that they lose enough money within the next year that they drop the One Piece license after 52 eps. They rushed all the way to the Chopper arc. Not only did they cut and splice episodes, but they cut out ENTIRE ARCS (Apis, Laboon, Little Garden).

This is bullshit. A series hasn't been treated this bad since Cardcaptor Sakura. If you go to 4Kids' official forums, it consists mainly of people complaining how they've messed up One Piece and other shows.

But you've got to remember that there are a lot of die-hard One Piece fans at the 4kids message board. Last time I went there, some people were saying "IT'S ZORO NOT ZOLO" to whoever used the term Zolo, and used the term dubbie as an insult to people who watched the dub. They had no regrets for calling people dubbies, and claimed they were simply "educating them".

I wouldnt worry about kiddy anime. Raise your kids right, and you dont have to worry. I grew up on Babylon 5, the X-files, and action movies. Im seriously screwed up now, as you can all tell ^^

The first REAL anime i saw was Princess Mononoke, unedited when i was 9. While thats not EXTREMLY violent or gory, it wouldnt be concidered "kiddie". I think 4kids did well with Pokemon. THAT was good kiddie action. Yu-gi-oh is just a joke though. I would never raise my kid on a half assed plot and flawed morals. Besides, there actually IS a lot of milder stuff out there that ISNT 4kids. Dragon Drive anyone? Angelic Layer? Why isnt that stuff playing?

mm so noone can come up with a better scheme? ah well people make 'educated' responses here then despite not having such insight? maybe, not many tho.

they may suck, but they are the bread and butter of the anime industry, lil kids get their parents to buy them crap no matter how crappy it really is in full.

i say help them sell their crap so we can buy our gold. whether or not we make it less crappy in the process is up for debate, this depends on the facts and figures aligned with personal but popular motives here. c'mon Razz

dare ya to try ya hand at this

Let me try to get in my 2 cents inbetween all the flames.

I like some of Wyvern's commentary, although they aren't really bleeding like fountains, but I digress.

Income getting cut in half is probably not too good, but if you told me that my company was going to make almost $40 Million in 6 months of revenue despite making $45M last year, I don't think I'd be too disappointed.

So they've gone from a good investment to an okay investment. What exactly did they do that was earth-shattering this year? This is just showing that they can't just ride their reliable cash cows anymore. Expect this slope to flatten out, if not go in an upwards direction, sooner than you think.

As an aside, people do know that Viz owns (or are partners with) ShoPro and Shonen Jump, right?

GATSU wrote:

One Piece was never that big in the U.S. in the first place. But it probably cost 4Kids so much money that they couldn't afford Naruto. And Viz's non-subbed songs, dumbed-down dialogue and 3 episode dvds aren't really a viable alternative to FUNimation's releases.

Naruto will have 13 episode uncut box sets with 4 episode edited volumes. Considering that 4Kids give it that, I'll take Viz Naruto any day.

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They did. They called it Shonen Jump's One Piece and advertised it in the magazine.

No, that's not what I meant. There are a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh fans who hate the anime yet like the manga because it's more mature. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar case with One Piece. I've already met some people who haven't seen the Japanese version but hate the dub because they read the manga and know what got changed.

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It's doing as well as it can right now.

No it's not. If it was doing as well as it could, 4Kids would have ruled out the possibility of a 4Kids TV airing entirely, put it on Toonami, and dubbed it with minimal censorship and original music. Honestly, a few silent bits aren't going to turn off the 6-11 audience, and they'd gain more of an older audience by having a mature show instead of Zolo saying stupid crap like "This is a pain in the sash!"

Of course, they did none of that, and that's why it's failing. They thought they could make another Pokemon by giving it a Cardcaptors-esque butcher, and hey, looky here, they were wrong. Whatever success One Piece has ever had, I can assure you, was not a result of giving it a hackjob.

Akukaze wrote:

Wyvern wrote:

hagakure|returns wrote:

Yeah and what will kids 5 to 11 year old will watch?

Hey, you're right! I can't think of a single instance of 5 to 11 year old children watching ANYTHING on television before 4Kids came along. Too bad those Disney and Warner Bros guys hadn't thought to make shows for children; they missed out on a gold mine.

I would like to point out that 4Kids anime is the only anime played on basic cable. What happens to "kiddie" anime when 4Kids goes under? Not everyone in America has cable and can watch Toonami. Will another company, this time one with respect for the original, jump up to bring anime to Fox and WB Kids? I doubt it.

And that isn't a good thing. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but the American anime industry is dropping on all sides. The "consuming boom" is over, but the "producing boom" is not, meaning that a lot of anime companies are facing some financial issues. If 4Kids is gone, what we're left with are the more "hardcore" companies that have always had trouble catering to a wider audience. With shows like Sailor Moon, Yu-Gi-Oh and DBZ pulling in new fans, the market will be faced with even greater problems.

I do not agree with most of the edits made to 4Kids shows, but if they get the job done, I'm willing to live with it. People always b**ch and moan about the lack of uncut DVDs, but there are always uncut DVDs: the original Japanese DVDs. Sure they're three times as expensive as American DVDs, but they do exist, and there are plenty of places to buy them online.

I agree with this. I don't agree with 4Kids editing these shows, but it's better than not seeing them at all.

At the very least, they're marketing them to an audience who will later grow up and watch more anime, thus creating more fans. It's similar to the case of the Saban DBZ dub or DIC's Sailor Moon dub. Sure they wasn't that great, things were edited like crazy in those shows. But it introduced tons of people (including myself) to more anime, and it made me want to see more and when I learned of the edits, I watched the uncut versions.

I don't like 4Kids, but I can live with they're doing. Because there are more anime fans as a result, and maybe someday uncut DVDs will come out. (Hopefully One Piece and Shaman King, don't care about Yu-Gi-Oh.)

............

By the way, Support Fighting Spirit!!

theoriginalbilis wrote:

I don't agree with 4Kids editing these shows, but it's better than not seeing them at all.

Not when they're so drastically changed from the original, they're not. It's like a completely different show that still manages to shaft you because the company wants to focus on that instead of what YOU want.

There are no uncut DVDs and the dub sucks. If this is absolutely necessary to get people to see shows like One Piece, I'd say we were better off with just watching fansubs.

this is my first post because i dont like budding in, but this got my attention

i don't like the way 4kids does things with the dubbing and unediting but i can live with that. My main concern is them or any other company actually licensing the anime to begin with. Look at all of the cool Shaman King video games and action figures that are out there. If 4kids wouldn't have licesened it, they would be non exsitent.

The point here is that the show is in the U.S. Period. I can wait for it to be relased 2 years later uncut or not at all. There are always fansubs. I want to thank 4kids for at least bringing it over.

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i don't like the way 4kids does things with the dubbing and unediting but i can live with that. My main concern is them or any other company actually licensing the anime to begin with. Look at all of the cool Shaman King video games and action figures that are out there. If 4kids wouldn't have licesened it, they would be non exsitent.

The point here is that the show is in the U.S. Period. I can wait for it to be relased 2 years later uncut or not at all. There are always fansubs. I want to thank 4kids for at least bringing it over.

I can understand where you’re coming from but bringing over the merchandise can also be a bad thing. For example the One Piece Grand Battle game coming over is going to be a hacked up version of the last game to come out in Japan with the newer characters removed and edits to match the US version of the anime. The earlier games also now have little chance of making it over.

Not everyone has access to the fansubs either. If I did have access to them I probably would have passed on the dub but it's my only way to see the show at all right now. If they had planned on releasing the uncut DVD's I would have bought them even if they were sub only.

I really, really hope 4Kids takes a lession from Funimation and highers more actors and actresses (and venture out to higher unexclusive ones), and release versions of their titles with quality uncut titles and cut titles with inhancements to attact both audiences (like japanese language track and commentry for uncut and simple games and downloadable pictures for cut).

My my, so many subjects to address...

First, I find it wonderfully ironic that 4Kids is losing money on their strictly edited content, while they made up that loss on their (reluctant) unedited releases. Whatever their execs might say about the kiddies being unable to understand it if not dumbed-down, the numbers don't lie, folks.

On that note, my issue with 4Kids is *not* their business practices- what makes money makes money, and that's what keeps our DVDs so much cheaper than the imports- but rather their philosophy. When the interview was posted some weeks back, what riled me was the assumption that kids are so dumb that they are unable to understand something from another culture. Which is totally false, the only reason kids are apparently stupid is because you expect them to be so, and is an attitude I GREATLY dislike. Expect more, and they'll rise to it. Attitude I take as mod on the Funi forums, and guess what? It works. So there's my reason for disliking 4Kids- it's not what they do so much as their attitude in it.

As far as their *good* points, though, let me make it clear that 4Kids has good voice actors. Seriously, listen to their dubs not judging by the Japanese, or what you know of the story, but purely quality of acting and nothing else. What makes the dubs as a while fail is poor writing and directing thanks to butchering the story. And also miscasting roles. No matter how good the VA is, if they're in a role totally not suited for them, there will be problems. But please, don't bash the actors blindly, because they're not the ones at fault. They act well, they're just being directed poorly.

<<As far as their *good* points, though, let me make it clear that 4Kids has good voice actors. Seriously, listen to their dubs not judging by the Japanese>>

Some of them are well cast, but I will NOT say David Moo does a good job as Sanji. Eric Stuart would have been better suited.

I still think One Piece should have been dubbed in California or Canada, Yuu-Gi-Oh kind of cheesed up my image of the Taj people. I mean we (theoretically speaking) all liked their job with Slayers, heck I loved their work Valkyrie Profile, but uh, even the sharpest knives can get old and rusty.

Yashou:

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Naruto will have 13 episode uncut box sets with 4 episode edited volumes.

So I have to pay for a boxset just to see it uncut and decide if I want to buy more of it. Way to go, Viz. That's so much better than buying individual discs of a 100+ episode series which are marked down, due to tv exposure.

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There are a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh fans who hate the anime yet like the manga because it's more mature.

I think that has more to do with the anime in general than how 4Kids handled it.

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I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar case with One Piece.

Actually, since One Piece and Naruto came out here before their
respective anime shows, there have been more people in Naruto costumes than One Piece cosplayers. OP is just not that appealing here as it is in Japan, and unfortunately, I don't like the manga myself.

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If it was doing as well as it could, 4Kids would have ruled out the possibility of a 4Kids TV airing entirely, put it on Toonami, and dubbed it with minimal censorship and original music.

DBZ was dubbed and edited, and had way better ratings than OP.

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They thought they could make another Pokemon by giving it a Cardcaptors-esque butcher, and hey, looky here, they were wrong.

Card Captors did poorly, because Nelvana and WB tried to make a female show appeal to males, and lost both audiences as a result. 4Kids is trying to get the same audience which watches OP in Japan to watch it here, and it's just not registering like they intended. It's not doing as disappointingly as Case Closed, but it's just not the next Yu Gi Oh for the company. That's why they're already moving on with Doremi.

AC:

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what riled me was the assumption that kids are so dumb that they are unable to understand something from another culture.

I think the 4Kids guy was thinking of one of the company's executives.

MugenKeiji wrote:

Some of them are well cast, but I will NOT say David Moo does a good job as Sanji. Eric Stuart would have been better suited.

See, that doesn't make him a bad voice actor. Simply miscast. My point is, people assume that the VAs are *bad*, when they're really quite good, it's just the translation and the directing that's the problem.

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I think the 4Kids guy was thinking of one of the company's executives.

First, the article in question. Now, let me grab some quotes from it, emphasis added-

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We westernize it so that children in English-speaking countries will understand it, and to us that is very critical. It's a mixture of the westernization, the trying to make the music appeal to kids who are in the United States.

This implies that if they don't westernize it, the children in English-speaking countries won't understand it, which I believe is a falsehood and demeaning.

And then on the costs/editing issue-

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because it's too expensive to do the dubbing and the acquisitions because we rewrite, we re-script, we re-score. So it's very difficult to do that if you don't have any other revenue streams and we have to make sure we get that.

Wow, so doesn't that mean that if they don't rewrite the whole thing, it wouldn't cost them so much money? Huh, who'da thought. The whole *point* I'm making here is, the core of the issue is that these people believe that the kiddies are incapable of relating to something from another culture, and thus they have to carefully change it so that the kiddies can relate. Nevermind that the relatively unchanged stuff on Cartoon Network does great. Because 4Kids says so, the kiddies can't understand something different from their own culture, and therefore everything must be altered to what they're used to, for heaven forbid they actually learn something they didn't know...

And we wonder why things like racism are still a problem. *rolls eyes* Seriously though, kids have GREAT imaginations, why not let them exercise them once in a while?

AC: I was joking.

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