4Kids! Entertainment/YMMV

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  • Acceptable Targets (4Kids themselves, to the point where people pin the blame on them for everything wrong with localized anime. Also see Misblamed)
  • Animation Age Ghetto- many anime fans seem to accuse the company as firm believers in that concept not only because of how they have treated the fans' favorite animes, but also because, well...you can obviously see it in their name, of course!
  • Broken Base
  • Ear Worm: Say what you will about their dubbing work, but I'll be damned if you don't get at least one of their opening themes stuck in your head.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: DAN GREEN!
  • Misblamed: All. The. Time. Under the mention of Blue Popo, which references the edit done in Dragonball Z Kai where the black-face Popo was turned blue for the TV airing. The CW's Standards and Practices department is responsible for that, not 4Kids. Not 4Kids at all. There's also a whole list of "bad dubs" that 4Kids gets blamed for, even though they had no participation in it - pretty much every anime that played on Fox or with another 4Kids show was assumed to be dubbed by 4Kids and thus, all faults were upon them.
    • To this day a startling number of anime fans honestly believe that every R1 distribution company and every English anime dub follows the same reviled practices Bowdlerization, Cut and Paste Translation, etc.) as 4Kids, and this is often used as a justification for supporting piracy rather than official releases. In fact, 4Kids is one of the ONLY anime distributers/dubbers to have done these things on a regular basis, and the vast majority of international releases of anime and manga (particularly those targeted at viewers over the age of 12) contain little no censorship of any sort unless mandated for airing on network television.
      • Streamline Pictures is another notorious example, but at least they tried to give fans what they wanted (and even released some of their anime tapes in a hybrid anamorphic/letterbox format). They just forgot to refrain from cutting and pasting all the time (e.g. when they changed one of Goemon's lines, where he says his Catch Phrase, to "Should've worn his asbestos suit" in The Castleof Cagliostro; the Catch Phrase appears in their dub of another Lupin III movie, though). You could say that a bunch of their dubs fall under So Bad It's Good, including Akira (with its line "Don't make me laugh. Maybe when you've downed your first clown!"). Harmony Gold was a frequent offender in the '80s, releasing Bowdlerized dubs (some of which Streamline later reissued) in addition to the classic that is Robotech. As for FUNimation, their only offense is the Cultural Translation in Case Closed (nothing to do with their fear of getting sued because of the anime's original title, Detective Conan, never mind that Conan is actually a common name in America, e.g. Conan O'Brien).
    • Cardcaptors was not dubbed by 4Kids but by Nelvana (with most of the worst edits not even Nelvana's doing, but Kids WB's) and the original Japanese version of Pokémon is not much Darker and Edgier, among others.
    • 4Kids also had to deal with the network and federal censors, which compared to the modern ones were more strict.
    • Additionally, 4Kids gets a lot of flack for how they remove all visible Japanese in their series and just leave blank space. According to a 4Kids comment on this video, all the Japanese text is already removed from the master copies 4Kids receives.

Red Metallix: Despite how nice it is to have official subs for Sonic X in the US, was it really necessary to remove ALL credits and Japanese words? Looking at Blank stuff is annoying.
4Kids: These were removed from the masters which were delivered to 4Kids.

      • That's something done by TMS, not all production companies.
  • Never Live It Down - Unfortunately, years of truly atrocious dubs and a few convention appearences with executives openly insulting the intelligence of their audience have pretty much ensured that they're probably going to carry their reputation to the grave with them.
  • The Scrappy: Of anime dubbers.
  • So Bad It's Good: Pokémon 's first English dub is the more memorable and well-liked. The dub for Yu-Gi-Oh gives it a late 80's-early 90's feel to an anime series that came out in 2000.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks - Where do I even begin?!
  • They Just Didn't Care: Many fans insist this happens with every series 4Kids touches.
    • Haters' accusations aside, this actually happened with One Piece. 4Kids never actively sought out the show; they had approached Toei with the intention of licensing Ultimate Muscle and Ojamajo Doremi. However, Toei desperately wanted to sell a license for their smash-hit One Piece to anyone who would air it on American TV. So when 4Kids came over to Toei, they wound up receiving One Piece in addition to the two series they were shopping for. They never watched a single episode before agreeing to the deal, and as the masters rolled in, they became increasingly shocked at what they'd gotten themselves into -- Toei's control-freaking over the series couldn't have helped. The result of this was overreaction on 4Kids' part (even more than usual), which led to them taking a hacksaw to the series when a scalpel would have done the trick.
  • Too Good to Last - The Uncut English Dub of Yu-Gi-Oh, definitely, as well as their official subs. Only three volumes [with three episodes per volume] of the uncut dub were released. A fourth volume was allegedly made, but not released.
  • What an Idiot! - You just HAD to hide funds from the makers of your biggest cash cow, didn't you, 4Kids? Say goodbye to your contract... for about nine months.
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