4Kids Entertainment
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 There are many ways of making kid-friendly anime dubs, but the way this company did it wasn't one of them.
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4kids Entertainment was an American licensing company founded in New York in 1970 as Leisure Concepts until it was renamed to "4Kids Entertainment" in 1995 and then to 4Licensing Entertainment in 2012 until the entire company went out of business 5 years later after being sued by TV Tokyo in 2011 and then filed for bankruptcy months later.
It specialized in licensing Japanese anime and mostly changing the source material to appeal to children.
Why It 4Sucked
- As mentioned per above, 4Kids was notorious among the anime community by heavily editing out content in anime, often making them look unrealistic and silly. Not to mention that a lot of these edits left massive plot holes in the stories of anime they dubbed. One Piece was the worst offender of this.
- In addition to the massive edits they put in their dubs, they also removed several "mature" elements from them such as guns, blood, cleavage, alcohol, etc. While this is somewhat understandable considering that the company aimed their shows towards kids and because Japan has looser standards for what is appropiate for kids compared to other countries, the issue is that a lot of these anime weren't even meant to be toned down from the start.
- Easily had some of the worst editing in animation history. Many of their dubs suffer from out-of-place props that were lazily edited onto the shows they came or they straight-up replace something violent with an object that meshes terribly with the scene their in, such as the infamous finger guns in Yu-Gi-Oh! or the infamous Jelly Donut scene in Pokémon where they didn't even bother editing out the rice balls and just randomly call them donuts out of nowhere.
- They even removed content that weren't even inappropriate to children at all, like text on shirts, walls, books, or even signs, and they even changed Luffy's mouth during the scene where he awakens from the barrell he was in back in the first episode of One Piece.
- In early 2011, it was revealed that 4Kids had actually been keeping the English distrubtion rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! without the consent of TV Tokyo, the Japanese company that owns the rights to the franchise, which led to the latter company suing the former company, which then resulted in bankruptcy of 4Kids a month later, forcing them to shut their Saturday-morning block in 2012 and then rebrand as "4Licensing Entertainment" in that same year.
- The 4Kids National Anthem, which was an ad that aired on their block back in the Summer of 2005, was largely criticized by the media due to how poorly sung it was by characters from various shows that aired at the time, and the fact that half of these characters from those shows had different nationalities that were almost anything but American.
- Speaking of 2005, in that year, the company replaced the entire cast of the Sonic The Hedgehog games with the voice actors who voiced the characters in Sonic X without letting their prior voice actors know about the recast beforehand, starting with the critically-panned Shadow The Hedgehog, and the company's voice actors would continue their roles in the rest of the Sonic games until 2010 where the 4Kids cast (with the exception of Mike Pollock, who still voices Eggman to this day) was yet again replaced with different VAs, ones who traditionally voice act in anime by Funimation, Viz Media, etc. and some other video games made in Japan.
- Alfred R. Kahn, who was the CEO of 4Kids prior to his retirement in 2011, defended the company's actions stating that "kids don't read today" and he also claimed that manga is "dying in Japan".
- Some of their dubs' emotional moments feel underwhelming whenever death being censored out is involved.
- Their infamous National Anthem. While Dan Green and Jason Griffith (as Sonic) sounded alright, the rest sounded very annoying.
- There are translation errors now and then.
- They suffered horribly from years of mismanagement, especially surrounding their shady deals regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh! license without informing the creators about it and the controversy surrounding their infamous One Piece dub where they didn't even bother researching the series before acquiring the rights to it goes to show they had a bad reputation in the past. These decisions backfired so dreadfully on the company and played a major role in their eventual bankruptcy on April 6th, 2011, and their complete dissolution on February 7th, 2017.
- Many of the executives and employees refused to take any form of criticism, since they would often blame the changes on the original companies and act like they're completely innocent when it's clearly their fault. In fact, most of the employees act like everything they do is perfectly normal when in reality, it annoys a lot of anime fans with the changes they make to their favourite shows.
- There have been a couple of plot changes that ended up creating plot holes.
- Particularly the plot change of Sonic X where Maria's death was censored to her being captured, which ends up creating a massive plot hole regarding Shadow's goal to destroy the Earth since he was only doing it to avenge Maria's death that was caused by G.U.N soldiers. And since Maria's never shown to be dead in the dub, that completely contradicts Shadow's strong desire to destroy the Earth since that plot change means Maria might still be alive and Shadow would try to look for her rather than destroy the planet since he would be destroying her as well.
- Another infamous example was when "The Legend of Dratini" was banned and rejected from being dubbed by them for the usage of guns. Which of course is the most hypocritical episode banning in animation history because there was an episode involving guns in the episode, "Here Comes the Squirtle Squad". More specifically, it was a scene where Team Rocket was holding up a shop with ice guns holding a seller hostage. In fact, "Here Comes the Squirtle Squad" never got banned for that either. Which leads non-Japanese fans to wonder how Ash got his Tauros in the first place during the first season of the Pokémon anime.
- Most of the humor that all of their dubs had were mostly cringy and annoying, mainly consisting of dated pop culture references and terrible puns that aren't very funny the first time.
- Worst of All, it is very racist company to work with. Example is that they made a sandwich roll down instead of Onigiri, what the, How does a sandwich roll like that? It replace all the things that is Japanese showing they are xenophobic company to work with. The editing also make it seem lazy as some did not even look like donuts.
- In mid-2000s, the whole company had begun collapsing due to losing a variety of IPs to other companies such as Pokémon due to a legal dispute between them and The Pokémon Company, One Piece to Funimation in terms of dubbing rights, Winx Club and almost the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise to Nickelodeon in 2009, and the distribution rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! as mentioned per above.
- This was proven true considering that their TV block had been declining after losing many of their popular shows, leaving them no choice but to rebrand said block a few times and re-air some of the only shows they still had left like Sonic X and they even aired the Funimation-dubbed Dragon Ball Z Kai in order to stay relevant in the English dub market and keep the trend of Saturday morning television alive.
- They seemed to have double standards when allowing mature themes in their products. For instance, they allowed characters to be stabbed or literally ripped apart (albeit off-screen) in Ninja Turtles, and Shadow The Hedgehog, which was the first Sonic game to feature 4Kids voice actors, had a lot of mature elements such as cursing, death, and even suicide, and these two examples go against 4Kids' philosophy of making their products appropriate for American children.
- They are also know to butchering some animes to make them awful or at least mediocre due to the edits or even some bad voice acting, the most notable exemple being One Piece and Ojamajo Doremi (although the former would get another english dub that still continue to air in this very day).
- The network is responsible for the decline in quality of the 2003 Series of TMNT because of executive meddling, they didn't want to keep the series dark, which didn't make fans happy.
- This responsibility shows how scummy the executives at 4Kids are.
- Some of their dubs were left unfinished like the fourth season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Ojamajo Doremi and Winx Club. (Though this is most likely because for the former, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's got announced around this time and for Winx Club, Rainbow S.p.A. revoked their licensing rights after Season 3).
- Even some of their shows that were not dubbed that they aired were bad like Bratz.
Redeeming Qualities
- They had at least good intentions when editing their dubs, even though they were arbitrary, they mostly did it because of regulations of cable television.
- They made many anime well-known in the west, most notably Pokémon, specifically the first 3 generations of the franchise.
- Despite how bad some of them are, their shows had absolute bangers of theme songs such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, Sonic X, and even the pirate rap in One Piece.
- Most of the voice actors who worked at 4Kids like Mike Pollock, Eric Stuart, Veronica Taylor, Dave Willis, Dan Green, Jason Griffith, and many more were talented actors who at least tried to give good performances in the company's dubs, and some of them are still in the voice acting business to this very day.
- Even Sean Schemmel, who used to work at 4Kids and still does at Funimation, was a decent human being during his time at the company.
- They helped to produce the 2003 TMNT series and the Chaotic animated series which were pretty good.
- They were mostly better at distributing western shows like Ninja Turtles and Winx Club than they were at dubbing Japanese anime.
- They did have a few good anime dubs here and there such as Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, Pokémon (to an extent), and Sonic X.
- A lot of the edits they put in their dubs were pretty funny to look at, and can be considered so bad they're good to some.
- At least their logos are creative, colorful and memorable.
Trivia
- Contrary to popular belief the texts in Sonic X were not removed by 4Kids themselves, they were removed by TMS Entertainment for international distribution.
- Due to their extreme edits in their dubs, the company spawned a meme where "age-appropriate" changes were made to various scenes in anime and even western animation on YouTube.
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