4kids Mug

Simply put, 4Kids Entertainment is an excellent example of corporate lapdogs who care nothing about what they produce or how it affects their viewers. Instead, their only real concern is what animes to market next and earn them their undeserving paychecks. Aiming more towards younger audiences, they take japanese animation and Butcher it, until they feel they won't lose any money by being sued for "inappropriate" content. They continually market the animes they aquire to their limits by creating every possible toy, card game, or anything they can sell to little kids. In an attempt to make each anime as profitable as possible, they skip many parts of good anime series and try to get to the most marketable characters, letting the plot only make up a small part of the anime's actual intrest percentage. By moving forward in an anime very quickly, it allows them to cut whole episodes at a time to get to marketable points, such as cute characters or a new toy idea from an item that plays an important role. Unfortunetly, 4Kids does not seem to care much on the plot side of the story, since their cuts of whole episodes tend to make items "apear out of nowhere", which actually were explained during a cut. Important scenes on character development are also not necessary to 4Kids, unless that character is very sellable. Notorious not only for its direct-plot cuts, 4Kids also plays a hand in making sure our youth are completely oblivious to real-life occurances, such as someong being cut can bleed or someone being shot can die. In some of the more fight-prone anime that 4Kids has adapted, all blood has been edited out. (Personally, I don't see why they're teaching our youth that when you are stabbed with a knife, you do not bleed.) Guns are usually either edited out entirely, or airbrushed to look more like Super Soakers and Cork Guns. Any references to religion are also taken out, but this is a bit more understandable. Now there are also problems with the idea of death. This happens in many Animes, including One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh!(which have been licensed by 4Kids), to some pretty important characters, and every child SHOULD know that everyone dies eventually. 4Kids, in their attempt to keep our children pure and innocent, changes all death scenes and leads us onto the idea that the character was "taken away" or "mysteriously disappeared". The most amazing edits I think I've seen from 4Kids would be from the anime One Piece. (I'm using this anime, because it's clearly not a little kids show when viewed in Japanese.) All references to cigarettes and cigars are taken out. One of the main characters, Sanji, is a chain smoker and never is seen without one, so they changed it to a lollipop. Captain Smoker, who is obvious by his name as to be a smoker, carries around 2 cigars in his mouth constantly. Those were edited out completely, and his name was changed to "Chaser", but the main thing that 4Kids missed, was he always has his mouth open from talking with the cigars. Obvious, no? Also, any alcohol is taken out and airbrushed to be a different color. 70, 80 year old men are having a party in a bar and all drinking "Juice", and our children are supposed to believe this? There's also that any references to the Marines, including the english word printed on the boats and hats of the Marines, were all taken out and replaced with "Navy". The absolute, most astonishing edit ever from OP, had to be when they changed the little black boy to be white. In all ways, no matter how you look at it, it's just wrong. Is 4Kids suggesting that all anime characters have to be white? They've said in their defense, I believe, that it had to do with the idea of the little black boy being represented as a slave? Now to me, this really doesn't fit. They've ruined all of the dialogue and plot, so instead of making the boy have better lines and a better part in the scene, they make him white to stop all fingers from pointing at them? All in all, 4Kids is simply a marketing machine who does not care about good anime, unless it sells to kids. They'll do whatever it takes to make money from what remains of good animes, and make sure that our youth are as innocent as possible, never knowing what death or pain is.