Forum - View topicAnswerman - Brave Mew World
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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In the modern world, nothing that can be digitized ever disappears or is locked into a vault somewhere. The producers and licensors know that just as well as you and I do. |
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CrazyCanuck
 Posts: 100 Location: Canada |
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Well, heck, let's jump straight to Godwin.
I'm not sure people actively hate 4kids anymore. I haven't heard any active hate in ages. Similarly most people don't actively hate Hitler. But both must never be forgotten and forever held up as bad examples so that they never happen again. </Godwin> Seriously though, I hear people talk about 4kids like my parents would talk about walking 2 miles to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways. The older otaku remember 4kids and the 'bad old days' the same way. "Look what we suffered through so you could have free same day streaming, you ungrateful whippersnappers. Now get off my lawn!" |
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Lynx Amali
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I actually thought that SK's dub was actually quite enjoyable. It's kind of similar with a lot of my experience with 4Kids dubs, even the Tokyo Mew Mew dub: Fantastic casting choices but questionable scripts and edits. The exception of this being the Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds dub (mainly for the obvious exclusion of the summoning chants and the most generic theme winning the opening contest they had. Need for Speed and Ride to Survive were the better openings, IMO.) |
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Tempest_Wing
Posts: 305 |
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To be fair, anime companies and distributors aren't bending over backwards for fans for shits and giggles. Anime is still niche by comparison to hollywood studios and the like. As such, they have to cator to fans and make them happy as much as they can because they're their only clientele. They don't have millions to fall back on if a couple fans get pissed at them. Also, reputation is a key part in this business. If 4kids has taught the anime business anything, it's that when anime fans develop grudges, they'll hold on to them even after the company is dead and gone. Hell why that's the reason why anime companies are so fast at recalling discs even for the most trivial of things.
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Zuwaiss
Posts: 59 |
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I always thought that one major bone people still have against 4kids relates to One Piece. Many seem to think (and are probably right at it) that one of the reasons why One Piece never caught on like Naruto was because of how 4kids did their best to slaughter it at points with their version.
If OP got the Funi dub from the start, perhaps it would be almost as, if not more, popular than Naruto? We might never know. |
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Divineking
 Posts: 1293 |
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Honestly I don't think OP would have ever caught on here in the same way Naruto and DBZ did even if it had been brought over less butchered in the beginning. Both Naruto and DBZ have a kind of "cool things" look/vibe to them since they're shows about ninjas and non-stop fights which I imagine is a lot more appealing to kids than cartoony looking pirates (before anyone crucifies me I'm a One Piece fan much more than either of those two shows). Aside from the Pirates of the Carribean franchise pirates have never really been a mainstream thing here in the same way stuff like ninjas are. Mind you it might have fared slightly better over all in intially better hands but probably not to that large an extent. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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You're on the right track, but more specifically, I would instead compare the 90's-traumatized fans who think that ANY announced mainstream-dub series, from Disney's Doraemon to Titan on CN, will be "steamrollered 4Kids crap" to WWII survivors who still refuse to let big city opera companies put on Wagner operas because it's "Nazi music". Ie., not so much the shadow of the enemy itself, who is no more, but anything they remotely associate with the enemy, and wish they had him back again to fight the good fight some more. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Macek could be considered inseparable from Harmony Gold, in a way. Sure he did what he thought necessary to bring those shows over, but yeah, I think any hate on him has cooled considerably and now it's just all aimed at current HG. |
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ninjamitsuki
 Posts: 590 Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology) |
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I personally think that if 4kids did one thing right, it was voice acting. Their casting and performances were excellent. The dubs where they did "the least damage" were actually really great dubs. Jelly donuts aside, the 4kids script and voice acting for Pokemon is way better than the current dub, and the Kirby dub was pretty funny. I don't know why, but Redneck King Dedede just works.
Considering they're long gone, I see no reason to be angry at them in 2015, unless you've been wanting an uncut dub of Shaman King or Tokyo Mew Mew. Making fun of them on the other hand... I also still find "what if 4kids got x" jokes to be funny if done well. Casey and Friends still makes me laugh. One interesting thing to note is that I heard during its final years, 4kids was actually negotiating with Funimation and Viz to air kid-friendly shows in their catalog on their blocks with only the bare minimum editing required to meet standards and practices, a la old Toonami. They ended up airing DBZ Kai but then the Konami lawsuit happened and this plan for what I hoped to be a non-Americanized children's anime block featuring a wide variety of series from different licensers fell through. It's kind of dissappoining. That sounded like an excellent idea. A lot of us got into anime from watching Toonami as kids and having a children's anime block with a similar premise sounded like a great way to get another generation/fresh blood into anime. The only anime that are on kids networks now are of the made-to-sell-toys variety, as opposed to the very wide variety of genres we got in the naughties, and most kids aren't patient enough for subtitles. And considering what Regular Show and Adventure Time get away with, the required editing for certain tame shows like DBZ or SGT Frog could be minimal. Not even just kids! I heard Ouran High School Host Club aired on a teenage girl oriented block on Australian TV and did really well. Out of all the kids networks though, Nicktoons seems to be showing the most anime and I'm curious about how they'll play out. Last edited by ninjamitsuki on Fri May 29, 2015 7:50 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Waffitti
 Posts: 55 |
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4Kids were a really weird company. They had the very 80s mindset of "toy sales are the maxim" (discovering that the company's founders were the creators of ThunderCats & G.I. Joe was the least surprising thing) and were the last bastion of Saturday Morning Cartoons when that type had gone obsolete a decade earlier. I wish somebody who worked there would come out and talk with the anime fandom & clear stuff out (for me in particular, whether Japanese licenses did better than Western ones & what was up with the mismanagement suits that bankrupted them).
WRT their localization work - Ultimate Muscle was decent I guess? |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2545 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I'm no major fan of 4Kids, though I do respect their Pokémon & Yu-Gi-Oh! dubs out of respect for helping make me an anime fan, but I will forever defend their Ultimate Muscle dub. It's such a departure compared to the company's usual fare in that it didn't dumb itself down or terribly change the story or downplay some of the more violent aspects, since the original anime already heavily downplayed the original manga's naughty bits. Not only that, but the writing was self-acknowledgingly silly & referential, not to mention filled with tons of innuendo for older audiences to enjoy. Gazelleman wan't re-named Dik Dik Van Dik solely to make a Dick Van Dyke reference, nor to teach kids about what a dik-dik is. Yes, it absolutely childish & lowest-common denominator kind of stuff, but it absolutely worked in the case of Ultimate Muscle. I want to imagine that Al Khan didn't care one bit about Ultimate Muscle, and essentially just told the people in charge of adapting it to do whatever the hell they wanted. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2025 |
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There is no longer any reason to bitch about 4Kids. They're gone, done, and won't touch another anime ever again, ever. Sure we can laugh and roll our eyes at their past mistakes, but nothing more. The only reason people still bitch about them is because they had such a strong reputation a decade ago, it just won't go away. Actually, other than One Piece, their dubs weren't any worse than Saban's, and we never hear that much bitching about them. It's One Piece that forever ruined their reputation, and I remember hearing that some people there acknowledged that getting a show was a mistake, and that they only got it because it came in a package deal, and they didn't watch it beforehand. It was a huge mistake on their part, and that showed in the embarrassing final product. But if you look at their work on Pokemon, Shaman King, Ultimate Muscle, and almost any other show, it wasn't nearly as bad, and their version of TMNT was darker and far more accurate to the original comics than the more cheesy 80s series was. You could argue that Sonic X and Yu-Gi-Oh! were bad dubs too, but I don't think people would be paying as much attention to their faults if One Piece didn't come out. 4Kids HAD to do SOME editing to get their programs on broadcast TV. That's a fact. One Piece was clearly not a show meant for their usual demographic, and if you watch their later episodes when they moved to Cartoon Network/Toonami, they DID start SLIGHTLY improving, by mentioning death, and not editing as much violence. Was it still good? No, but I think it was obvious that they knew the show was not a good fit for their company.
Though Al Kahn always did come across as a dick and there's no question he didn't care for anime in real life. Their dubs were great at casting distinct, memorable voices, even if they overdid it sometimes. They kinda ruined the reputation of the New York voice acting scene for a while as a result, undeservingly so, because it had so many talented people like Veronica Taylor, Dan Green, Rachael Lillis, Wayne Grayson, Eric Stuart, Megan Hollingshead, Scottie Ray, Lisa Ortiz, Marc Diraison, James Carter Cathcart, Maddie Blaustein, and Marc Thompson. The only dub I can think of that has such a strong negative reception is DiC's Sailor Moon. |
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ParaChomp
 Posts: 1018 |
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Why do we talk about 4kids? That is because subconsciously people think scars are awesome so they have to point it out. To boot it's still discussed because the negative impact it left was HUGE! Ruining television shows, horrendous theme songs, and greed that is utilizing a gimmick.
One thing I will thank 4kids for is introducing me to animé but aside from that, everyone's mocking is justified. Necessary? No but it will be there, to many schadenfreude is a delicacy. What really makes me scratch my head are the "If 4kids got..." videos. What's funny about reminding people of the scars they left on the foreign audience. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Well, that's just it: The fans think it'll happen again with some other mainstream dub company. The fans think it'll happen again with any other mainstream dub company. ...THE DUB COMPANIES JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND US, MAN!! 
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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Oh yes, 4Kids's mass-editing of most of their anime shows they had under their domain really did ruin their overall quality by a long shot, and their in-house theme songs weren't anything short of mediocre to terrible. However, while I really despise their severely watered-down English versions, I am mindful that they did this out of necessity; their shows would never have been able to be aired on their block had 4Kids not made the edits. That said, I do understand that the anger towards 4Kids is justifiable; I just think it's about time we moved on.
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