4Kids Entertainment. Two words in the Otaku dictionary that boils the blood of anyone who hears it. Bring it up in any club, forum or con and be prepared for a venomous rant from all sides. But why the hatred? After all, 4Kids brought over some of the most popular anime series of the late 90's/Early 00's, and opened the floodgate for the current generation of Otaku. Back in my day it was 'Funimation' that brought a hiss from a fan's lips, so how did Funimation become the most powerful Anime company, while 4Kids became Cain?

Follow up:

The process, from how I see it was actually pretty gradual, all culminating with the mega hatred known as One Piece-gate, building up to the company on the verge of collapse. Originally, 4Kids was an incredibly savvy company, with decent quality dubs that only made relatively minor edits to please the FCC and make them more accessible to an audience, for the most part, unfamiliar with most Japanese culture. Their background music was fitting and their opening credits were catchy and memorable. But along the way they started to make some incredibly stupid moves, and below are a list of all of them.

Editing

As I've said in my previous blog, editing in Children's programming is necessary. After the Columbine shootings in 1999, the FCC put the hammer down on children's programming. Characters were no longer permitted to die, and the words 'death' and 'killed' were banned or changed. Weapons could not look realistic and punches and kicks had to be shown in cutaways (character throws punch, screen changes to something else, character being punched is thrown backwards). Additionally, a parents lobby also got depictions of smoking and alcohol entirely banned as well as new rules about depiction of women. Initially, 4Kids made incredibly tiny changes, of the original Kanto, Orange Island and Johto seasons of Pokemon, only 3 episodes were banned. Also, in the first few episodes riceballs were referred to as 'jelly donuts' but in later episodes they are called riceballs.

Then things started to change. Yugi-Oh, originally a very violent series directed to teen boys, was neutered down to be tame enough for 7 year-olds (having the Y7 rating on US television). This was the first heavy blow against fans. Most of the edits are mocked in Yugi-Oh the Abridged Series, so I don't have to repeat them. With the introduction of the FoxBox (later called 4Kids.TV) the edits got harsher and more ridiculous. Romance was totally edited out, even in romance-based Shoujo series like Tokyo Mew Mew. Riceballs weren't just called something else, there were totally edited out. Logos were changed for no inherent reason, people's skin colors were changed, religious symbols (for better or worse) were removed. By 2007 the camel's back was broken. With so many fans upset over the edits in One Piece, Toei actually revoked 4Kids license and gave it to Funimation.

Voice Actors

Now let me start by saying that most of the voice actors who had worked for 4Kids were good actors, most of whom were already anime veterans when they were hired. Rachael Lillis, Eric Stuart, Lisa Ortiz and Veronica Taylor all continue to work in the industry as anime voice actors and commercial voiceovers, so clearly there is nothing wrong with their work. My problem is I am sick of hearing just them in every show 4Kids has ever released. I like to joke that 4Kids only has a pool of 17 voice actors, but I'm beginning to suspect that it isn't that much of a joke. Everyone knows that in Pokemon, Eric Stuart voiced both Brock and James, but this wasn't intentional. Originally James was voiced by Darren Dustin, the voice of Pegasus, but something happened that he couldn't continue the role, so Eric Stuart ended up voicing both parts. However, in later 4Kids series major voice actors ended up voicing as many as 3 different characters all in the same show, even in the same episode! Lisa Ortiz was the voice of Musa in Winx Club, but she was also the voice of Mitzy, and she did several background characters, which ended up in the laughable Halloween episode when the Winx Girls ended up going to Mitzy's party. The voice actors ended up doing so many roles that they stopped being able to come up with individual characters and started to sound terribly generic. I still don't understand why more actors were never hired.

Distribution

Distribution refers to both airing of a series as well as sale of VHS/DVDs, and 4Kids was terrible about both, but for two different reasons. When it came to releasing tapes and DVDs 4Kids is awful. What they would do is release individual volumes of 2-3 episodes a piece for a little while, and just stop. Then they would do a different set of episodes released, and were in different order than the chronological nature of the shows they held. Then they would release a few seasons of a series in one collection, but never fully put the entire series on DVD in a consise manner, meaning no one can have an entire series without piracy. And often series were never released for sale at all. Even with the constant complaint from fans, 4Kids never released uncut, unedited versions of their properties and the two exceptions to this, Yugi-Oh and Shaman King had their own problems. When 4Kids finally bent to pressure, and released an uncut version of Yugi-Oh and Shaman King, the uncut dubs were okay, but the subtitling was awful, and they were discontinued after the first 3 volumes.

While their DVDs suffered from lack, their on TV properties had the reverse problem: over exposure. Originally, all 4Kids programs were shown on the WB, which was at the time just Pokemon, and then later Yugi-Oh. Then, when Fox Family and Fox Kids folded, 4Kids bought out the time slot with the 'Fox Box' a four hour block of 4 shows, two episodes each: Kirby, Ultimate Muscle, Ultra Man Tiga and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with Ultra Man Tiga being replaced by 'Fighting Foodons' and later Shaman King. Eventually the programming block expanded to 6 hours and renamed '4Kids.TV', and competed with Pokemon and Yugi-Oh on Warner Brothers. Then, for reasons never fully explained, the final season of Yugi-Oh was put on Hiatus for 3 months, and then after the final episode aired it was moved to 4Kids.TV. Soon after the license to Pokemon was given to The Pokemon Company and more and more 4Kids shows ended up on Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers would claim that these shows were 'new' when in fact they had been already airing on Fox for almost a decade. Then when CBS bought out WB and UPN CW4kids was created, and for almost a year the two channels would air the identical programs, including series that been over for years and years. Only two new series were added in the meantime: Yugioh 5Ds and Huntik. Finally the rerun nightmare collapsed on Fox, leaving CW to be the last place left that aired 4Kids owned cartoons. And while they are still in rerun hell, many series that never got a complete run, and licenses were still owned, like the 4th season of Winx Club, Tokyo Mew Mew and YugiOh GX weren't added to the lineup.

Chaotic and the One Piece Fiasco

By 2007 Yugi-Oh, 4Kids money flagship, was over and Pokemon wasn't the work horse it used to be, so 4Kids invested in two things, hoping it would give them money. One was the insanely popular pirate series One Piece and the 4Kids original series, Chaotic. The issue over One Piece is the stuff of internet legend: from the rap-based opening credits to the voice acting to the edits of weapons and Sanji's famous cigarette, fans were beyond enraged. It made the days of Cardcaptors vs Cardcaptor Sakura look like the rookie league. The mess was so huge and so ugly, Toei actually revoked 4Kids license, the first time ever that a company lost the rights to translate a series because of fan protest. Any hopes of 4Kids having another Yugi-Oh or Pokemon on their hands died a violent death. Their next attempt was the original series Chaotic, a series much like Yugi-Oh in the fact that it centers around a card game. Hoping to make money from both the show and sales of the cards, 4Kids invested just about everything they had into it, and lost. Big time.

Chaotic was beyond terrible. As bad as people say Yugi-Oh was, this series was waaaay worse. The animation for the first two seasons were horrible, the monster designs were generic at best, the game made no sense and was impossible to play, the human characters were annoying there was no story and the world was impossible to understand (wait, Chaotic is real, but also a game, so who controls everything...? The Monsters? The company that produces the game? Robots? Who cares I'm gonna turn into a monster now). And people who did play the game played it online for free on 4Kids website, no one bought the real life cards, and despite the bad sales 4Kids kept making new cards and new episodes and have been HEMORRHAGING money since. And because they've spent so much on it, they have only purchased rights to three new series: Yugi-Oh 5Ds, which is currently in airing limbo because of violence issues, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight and Huntik--which I will admit is *not* a bad show. But one show is currently not enough to do anything when the rest of the 8(!) hour time block is nothing but reruns.

So between bad business practices, enraging their fan base and holding the products they do have hostage, my only question is: what's taken them this long to fail?