darksteel6
Member
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2021
- Messages
- 221
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- 134
He didn't exactly put it to bed considering he admitted there was a lot of stuff he didn't know(he was completely unaware of the existence of 4Kids own uncut dubs of Yugioh and Shaman King and someone had to point them out to him)and he never outright said it wasn't true.I mean, that can really be said for every anime, can't it? The Japanese license holders always have the power to put certain conditions on what liberties an American production company takes when dubbing one of their shows. Even back in the 60s the only reason the Speed Racer anime kept its iconic theme song was because the rights holders in Japan insisted on it.
In the 4Kids podcast, one of the writers for Shaman King said for that show too they needed to get approval from the Japanese side for just about everything. I'm speaking more to the argument that everything to do with 4Kids' poor dub of One Piece laid at the feet of Toei and acting like 4Kids was some helpless bystander forced to localize and edit the show into oblivion. Grossfeld even put the "4Kids never wanted OP and Toei forced them to license it" rumor to bed when he went on the podcast while admitting it wasn't a good fit for them, so ultimately, it was at least as much on their part as it was on Toei's.
Even with Funimation, Toei had no problem with their much more accurate take on Dragon Ball Z Kai (and to a lesser extent, Dragon Ball) as they did with their much more extensive localization choices on DBZ or GT. I ultimately think they just don't care that much. Maybe you could make the argument that they should - to bring the discussion back to Pokemon, I (and I'm sure Dogasu would agree) would love it if the Japanese parent company stepped in and ensured that all the background music was kept, that the scripts had to stay faithful to the source material, etc. but ultimately the people who could pull those strings are the money men who more often than not couldn't care less. Or if they even would have thoughts on the matter, they probably figure the BGM replacement (because that really seems to be the only major problem with TPCI's dub of Horizons at the moment) has been standard practice for so long that there's no need to rock the boat.