If you are new to the anime fandom, there is a good chance you have never heard about 4Kids Entertainment, but that doesn’t mean everyone is as lucky. The company’s legacy lives on to this day with older fans, and despite its dissolution years ago, the community cannot let 4Kids’ reputation fade. During its time, the brand made some of the most infamous dubs in anime history, and now, fans are reliving each release to educate newcomers about what they missed back in the day.
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Right now, it seems 4Kids Entertainment has been brought back to life online, and it is all thanks to Twitter users. It seems discourse about the company has started anew. As anime continues to grow globally, all eyes are on the horizon as the industry finds new ways to expand. For those who’ve been in the fandom for decades, it never hurts to revisit where they came from. And once one person brings up 4Kids, well – it doesn’t take much for snowballing to start.
As you can see below, this latest debate about 4Kids isn’t so much about bashing its unpolished dubs as it is breaking down how they happened. If you don’t know, the main issue fans took with the licensor was its dubs. The company’s English dub for One Piece was so cringe that the anime’s reputation stateside has yet to recover. Still, some dubs for Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh found followings on their own.
Obviously, quality control was hard to find with the company’s dubs overall, but the fault wasn’t entirely on itslocalizers. The dubs were a product of internal conflicts between stateside networks and overseas studios. 4Kids had to appease U.S. networks who were worried about anime being too foreign for kids to enjoy while also catering to anime studios who wanted their shows to be as accessible as possible. You can only find such a compromise through trial runs, but sadly, 4Kids never discovered a foolproof way to script anime dubs. And now decades later, netizens new and old are reliving the good, the bad, and the ugly of all things 4Kids.
Did you ever have an issue with 4Kids and its anime dubs back in the day? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB.
