In which Mint looks at 4Kids while avoiding studying.

Due to the impending exam crisis of December 2010, we did not have a D&D game yesterday, so here's a post about something else instead.

I talked about anime a bit last time, and today I'm going to continue that theme by talking about that company we all shudder to think about when anime is mentioned: 4Kids Entertainment.

4Kids is a New York based production company that was founded in 1970 as Leisure Concepts Inc. and was then changed to 4Kids when it began television production in 1992. Naturally, it is best known for dubbing anime into English, the best known examples being Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Well, I say it's best known for dubbing these programs. What's it's actually known for is doing this sort of thing:



Was this really necessary?

The Edits

Part of what got a lot of anime fans annoyed at 4Kids was the fact that they made a lot of edits that were, at best, unnecessary and at worst, completely nonsensical. This ranged from their apparent hatred of rice balls in Pokemon (they were called everything from doughnuts to popcorn, or edited out to sandwiches), to the erasure of guns in Yu-Gi-Oh, leading to lots of dramatic and really silly pointing scenes (kids like guns!) to what they did to Tokyo Mew Mew and One Piece.

Tokyo Mew Mew is your typical Magical Girl anime involving 13 year-old girls who transform into animal themed soldiers to fight against aliens. It's a show that would translate well into Saturday morning viewing. So 4Kids got hold of it, changed its name to Mew Mew Power, changed all of the characters' names, inserted terrible pop music and made so many pointless edits to both the script and the animation that it's a wonder there was anything left by the end of it.

Mew Mew Power was one of the lesser known dubs that 4Kids produced, whereas their dub of One Piece proved to be the final straw as far as the fans were concerned.

This dub had all of the usual edits done; the theme song changed, violence and anything to do with the word 'death' taken out, guns edited to look more like toys, that sort of thing.

I really don't know what they were thinking here...
 

I suppose edits like those are fair enough for a Saturday morning cartoon, but when you start editing out things that really didn't make all that much difference, it starts getting silly. Any and all signs of cleavage on any woman was edited out, including any body lines that even hinted at it, leading to some odd looking scenes. When they edited out some of the characters cigarettes and cigars, they didn't always bother to replace them, leading to some awkward looking and pointless hand movements, and they sometimes left the smoke in. A lot of background writing was removed from the show, along with any lettering or tattoos the characters had, because kids are dumb or something.

In fact, you know what? VG Cats said it best.

That's all I've got for now. My brain's dying due to protesting so much about studying.