Thread: How different would the anime be now if 4Kids still ran the anime and.......

Didn't go bankrupt? Like, voice actors. Dub changes. Yeah, you name it. How would the anime in America be different if 4kids localized the anime from between the Kanto Battle Frontier and BW?

Pros:
- The English Dub would still have the old Ash's voice, which would be great, of course, but people wouldn't pay attention to it, since never even in their minds they would have imagined a different voice for Ash in the first place.
- 4Kids' dub music is better than TPCi's, so the replaced BGM would be more tolerable.
- The openings from 9th to 11th and 13th onwards would be better. The only great TPCi's opening is the 12th.
- The dialogue would sound more natural.
- No fake cold openings, like PUSA-TPCi did at the beginning stages of DP :)

Cons:
- The japanese music would be almost non-existant, given how they replaced increasingly more and more music starting from the 3rd season, reaching their lowest point in their last season, "Advanced Battle", where they kept around 19% of the original soundtrack.
- Rarely there would be moments without music in the episodes.
- 4Kids would keep the same limited cast and repetitive voices, like Lisa Ortiz.
- More censoring to the anime. If 4Kids indeed influenced the series' construction, DP would be less violent (of course it wasn't very violent as a whole, but at times it did have violent scenes or dialogue). And even if OLM written the series exactly like it aired between 2006 and 2010, 4Kids would probably go to great lengths to cover it all. Just editing Dawn's skirt in every episode would probably make them go bankrupt faster xD But they could have also decided to not do it due to the sheer number of frames they would have to edit.
- The company would cut scenes from the original episodes just to fit in more commercials.
- Less faithfulness to the original dialogue. They would probably dumb down Paul's dialogue, but they also may have not. After all they did sometimes do unexpectedly good moves.

Neutral:
- Different voices for every DP's character, of course. I sure would like to know how would they sound in an alternate reality.


So yeah, I think that while some things would turn out better than PUSA/TPCi, the rest would be brought down and the saga would be really ruined in the dub (it already was partially ruined by having less than 50% of the original music). One of the most important points for me is music, if they would replace like 85% or more from the original sountrack, no matter how better their music is, the limited amount of 4Kids' BGM would get even more repetitive than the PUSA/TPCi's, so Sinnoh would feel worse than how it was handled by the current company. I'm not putting TPCi on a pedestal and say they handled it perfectly, just that 4Kids' handling would be worse than them.

Yeah now it's odd to imagine what a 4kids version of Dawn, Paul, Iris and Cilan might sound like.

Originally Posted by ivantuga2

I'm not putting TPCi on a pedestal and say they handled it perfectly, just that 4Kids' handling would be worse than them.

Personally, it've been better if TPCi AND 4kids handled the dubbing and eventually decided to (gradually) use less dub music. It's wishful thinking but then again, BW's dub uses music JPN music than before so who knows? The dialogue and the VAs are what bother me mostly of the dub these days.

I still miss the old voice of ash but overall I think it would probably be worse than now.

Originally Posted by Gliscor'd

Yeah now it's odd to imagine what a 4kids version of Dawn, Paul, Iris and Cilan might sound like.

Cilan might sound the same, since Jason Griffith was casted in a LOT of 4Kids productions. Whether or not he still would've got the role is the issue, I suppose.

I feel like Paul would've been absolutely BUTCHERED in a 4Kids version of DP. Voice and all.

Originally Posted by ivantuga2

- No fake cold openings, like PUSA-TPCi did at the beginning stages of DP :)

Those were done in the Japanese version too. And how are they fake?

The only ones to do fake cold openings were 4Kids. In Japan, they wouldn't have any cold openings at all until the Battle Frontier episode that would eventually become the premier of TPCI's Season 9, but in the U.S., they started all the way back in Season 4. This was done by taking the footage from before the episode's title screen and moving it to in front of the opening theme. I'd have to do more research on the matter before I can say for certain, but I'm thinking the reason 4Kids started to do this was because Kids' WB! was starting to require all its shows to have cold openings by that point and 4Kids had to make these edits to keep Pokemon on the network.

4kids have a little less freedom than cartoon network. BW is already screwed up in alot of places, so having it on 4kids would probably be worse than it is now. Especially with the voices.

I will only say that it may have been frustrating for me having to deal with all the edits and junk. Then again, I enjoyed 4kids regardless of that, but that was before I became aware of the edits. Certain eps of DP may have been chopped to pieces or otherwise banned outright. I'd really hate to know what 4kids would have done to BW, as in the fervor to recapture the first season....ugh, I can't even say it. I can't say this would be a good idea at all, not even to avoid certain issues, although that is the only thing I would be happy if it never happened, purely so that I wouldn't have to deal with it.

Originally Posted by Caseydia

4kids have a little more freedom than cartoon network. BW is already screwed up in alot of places, so having it on 4kids would probably be worse than it is now. Especially with the voices.

Wait you think the 4Kids voices were worse than the TPCi ones? I always thought they were generally better (which is a change, seeing as 4Kids were sh*t in every other department).

I thought 4kids usually did a pretty good job with their voice choices. Although, I don't think the voices now are bad either... 4kids did better music though.

I can imagine 4Kids continuing to get rid of the Tajirian that pops up in this show, which means episodes like the Don Battle four-parter would have been filled with paint edits.

I can sum up the frequency and severity of 4Kids' edits in just two words.

POKEMON CHRONICLES

That is what the Pokemon Dub would eventually turn out to be like had it remained under 4Kids' control.

I think its funny that people thought the old voices had to stay anyway, when most of those characters leave the show soon anyway. Brock's new voice only lasted for 5 years, May's only for 1, and other than Ash and Team Rocket, everyone else from DP and BW were new characters who didn't exist in the 4kids era.

The fact that Misty got a new voice only for the Mastermind special is proof in itself, they essentially have new voices to characters we never see again anyway. Remember all the times we heard the new Misty voice? Oh wait.