 All right, here's your ultimatum. Subscribe to the Ground Line Review for regular One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed, or be offered a nice room in a dungeon for the rest of your days. Choose wisely. Hello and welcome to the Ground Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we are going to be examining a dark, dark chapter in the history of this year's series, one that has not been and is very unlikely to ever be erased from One Piece in the English-speaking world, which is obviously the Four Kids dub. And this isn't going to be like most videos that explore the topic of Four Kids, though I'm much less interested in exactly what Four Kids did and why, because there are a ton of other videos out there who present that topic better than I probably ever could, because it is a rather juicy piece of controversy. We will, of course, cover it briefly for the sake of context, but what I am much more concerned with in this video are the impacts that the Four Kids dub has had on One Piece going forward, both in terms of the actual property itself, as well as its perception in the greater anime and manga fanbase. Because it's easy to look at things as an isolated examination of just how royally this company not only screwed up the show, but also their entire business. However, the ramifications of this dub go on to very much eclipse its initial involvement in One Piece. In fact, I really wish there was a world in which Four Kids was just another bad dub that everyone could forget about, but sadly, we happen to live in the darkest possible timeline. In any case, the story all begins back in the late 1890s, where a man named Jonathan J. Four Kids III decided that he hated absolutely everything and that he would make it his life's mission to make sure that nobody took pleasure from any form of entertainment ever again. And so he founded Four Kids to carry out this multi-generational effort. And from there, we skipped June 4th, 2004, where our Four Kids story, it's a lot of fours, that's probably a bad sign, but this is where our story truly begins, with the company announcing that they had acquired the distribution and merchandising license for One Piece in much of the English-speaking Western world, such as the United States, Canada, the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, and of course, my homeland of Australia. And this is already quite important to note because whenever I bring up issues with Four Kids, many people believe it to be an American-exclusive problem. And oh, how I do, which that was the case, but I absolutely assure you it was not. In fact, my very first personal exposure to One Piece was through the Four Kids dub, airing on Cartoon Network here in the Down Underverse. And what would follow was quite possibly the biggest mess of a dub that this world has ever seen, which not only did all of the standard stuff you'd think, like removing blood, references to smoking and alcohol, anything, absolutely anything, that could be viewed as even a minutely sexual, like I don't know, for example, the breasts of Miss Merry Christmas, apparently they had to be removed, as you can see here. But in any case, that was all to be expected. But I think their utter failure in this respect comes from how they covered all of this censorship up. I mean, many Four Kids dubs are not exactly fondly remembered, but they were generally, I suppose, competent in their censorship efforts. However, with One Piece, there was a blatant disregard for, well, anything and everything. And that is on full display in this, the most famous of images, where I legitimately cannot tell if the quote unquote artist for this piece was feeling not creative at all that day, or feeling far too creative. This piece honestly belongs in a gallery because it just asks so many endless questions like that. Either way though, it was a big, effing mess, and stuff like this was very common all throughout the run of One Piece. Furthermore, the Four Kids dub also went on to well and truly destroy One Piece as best it could by embarking on even bigger quests, like removing entire episodes as well as entire arcs, irrevocably changing the story as we know it, and needing to improvise narrative solutions like, let's say we remove the entirety of Reverse Mountain, but how do we replace the Boon? I don't know, Iceberg, done. And an awful lot of this makes so much sense when you delve into it. In fact, there's a particularly good addition of the A&N cast that interviews a man by the name of Mark Kirk, who was the senior VP of digital media with Four Kids. And while he was not present for the acquisition of One Piece, he did give some pretty amazing insight into how this mess was made when he pointed out that there was very likely no communication whatsoever between the licensing team and the actual production team. So basically, there was a group of people at Four Kids who were responsible for acquiring properties and another separate branch who actually had to dub and pump them out. And furthermore, the licensing branch that acquired One Piece did so as part of a package deal with other shows. And so very little attention was paid to it, and it's pretty safe to say that licensing did zero research on it before they bought it. And so what happened was that this weird little show that nobody had really thought twice about was plonked into the laps of a production team who were then tasked with doing something with it. However, their endeavor was practically doomed to fail from the beginning because the target demographic of Four Kids was young boys between the ages of seven and 11. And One Piece, whilst also hitting that younger demographic in Japan, had a much more broad appeal which was reflected in its material, which as we have said, contained frequent usage of blood, cigarettes, alcohol, guns, cleavage, lots and lots of cleavage, none of which could be shown on television to the Four Kids demographic. But just for some stark contrast here, I would like to bring your attention to this survey conducted in 2011, which gave us a great representation of the age of One Piece fans in Japan. And the results are pretty staggering with 88% of One Piece manga readers being over the age of 19. And not only that, but 32% of them were over the age of 30 and 13% were over the age of 50, which just shows you how insanely generally popular this series is. And I should point out that yes, this was conducted in 2011, 14 years after the manga began serialization. So there is a natural progression of age there because if you started reading in 1997 at the age of say 15 and you're still reading in 2011, then that would make you 29 if maths serves me correctly, which it may not. But even so, there's a Harry Potter factor at play where a whole segment of fans grew up with the series. But then again, these brackets are just so wide that that does not even begin to account for the fan base as a whole. But I also just want to say that according to these statistical, there were more people over the age of 50 reading One Piece than there were people under the age of 19. And just think about that for a second, for a Shonen manga, that is kind of mind blowing to think about. But let's get back to four kids and examine their strategy, which was to target this series to what we now know would have been one of its least enthusiastic natural demographics. One Piece, despite being a Shonen series was hitting hard with young adults and even fully evolved final form adults. So in a way, you could say it was like taking a series along the lines of Game of Thrones and editing it strategically and subtly so that it could be a delightful 20 minute romp for children that could play before and after school. And yes, Game of Thrones is a bit of an extreme example, but my point remains that the poor four kids production team had an impossible task to achieve from the very beginning because what One Piece was did not actually naturally resonate with their target audience. Even if it was to be left completely uncensored and turned into a faithful dub that was somehow allowed on children's television, it would have been very, very unlikely to do well with that market because One Piece was not for them. At the very least, it was structured for the next bracket up being early to middling teens much like how Dragon Ball was handled by Funimation. It would also go on to inherit One Piece. And so I suppose while One Piece did relatively well with four kids, I mean, it wasn't completely abysmal with their target audience. Although it was however, completely overshadowed by the other properties that were actually designed with this audience in mind. And after a mere 104 episodes, four kids pulled the plug on the series because there was no profit coming from One Piece. So much so that half of these episodes were never even released on DVD. And so with that, you would think that, oh, the nightmare is over and we can all move on with our One Piece based lives, but the reality really isn't quite that simple because the effect of this dub sent ripples which you will still see all the way into the future of 2020 or maybe even past that depending on when you're viewing this. But here's my biggest issue. I mentioned before that my first One Piece experience was stumbling upon the four kids dub and I would wager that that would be the large majority of the experiences for people around my age with the series. Which means that you have this entire generation of anime and manga fans to whom this was the value proposition that One Piece presented them with. And quite understandably in the large majority of that generation, the English-speaking West decided to say, hmm, no thanks, I'll take the ninjas instead. And this is devastating because someone or something only has one chance to make a first impression. And the first impression of One Piece for a whole generation was for kids. And overcoming that is a nigh on impossible task because that bias has been seeded and grown interviewing One Piece as this goofy overrated series that really does not deserve its unfathomable popularity in the rest of the world. And I really cannot emphasize just how important a first impression is because any series will only be given a certain window of popularity to capitalize on. Take Attack on Titan for example. When its anime adaptation was released in 2013, it took complete control of the world. And while it doesn't enjoy the same sort of global fad prestige that it once had, it is still renowned as an incredibly solid series in the English-speaking world because it had that one window to make an impression and it certainly did just that. The window for One Piece to make an impression opened and closed with four kids. Destroying any opportunity One Piece had to achieve that sort of widespread recognition that many of its peers were enjoying. Or at the very least, it made it infinitely more difficult and we can actually track this through an objective statistic being sales numbers. So for argument's sake, let's look at 2009. And in Japan, One Piece utterly dominates the manga charts with close to 15 million copies sold that year, followed at great distance by Naruto, having sold close to seven million, and then bleached with roughly 6.5 million. However, if we then look at the New York Times' best-selling manga data of 2009, it is completely dominated by Naruto, which took the crowning number one position for 18 weeks, followed by Bleach, which achieved nine weeks at the top. And where is One Piece? Well, it appears a mere six times on this list and four of those six times have it in 10th place for that particular week. At its highest possible peak, One Piece reaches seventh place for two weeks with volumes 22 and 23 respectively. And what's also very interesting to note is that One Piece is releasing volumes like 22 and 23 while Naruto is releasing volumes in its 40s and even Bleach is publishing volumes in its 20s. And this shows that manga companies had an impetus to speed up and focus production on Naruto and Bleach because they were the series that were making money in the West, whereas One Piece was an afterthought. I mean, yes, it had its audience, but it would pull disappointing sales numbers comparatively. The difference between Japan and in this case specifically America could not be more stark. And the reason why One Piece was an afterthought was because it had not been able to develop a solid fan base at this time. Naruto and Bleach both had very successful English dubs in comparison to that of One Piece, which actually marketed those series to their intended demographics, which landed and it landed hard, translating into delicious cold hard monies, which further translated into more Naruto and Bleach and far less of One Piece. Now at this time, I should mention that One Piece had now been acquired by Funimation and that they had begun their version of the dub, which was more faithful to the series in every possible way and aimed far above the age demographic of seven to 11 year olds. However, Funimation at this point was so far behind the curb because like I said, they had already missed the major window of impression that One Piece had to land with an audience. And not only that, but Funimation also did not commence dubbing the series from the beginning, which I understand why that decision was made, but it left them in an incredibly unenvious position of needing to begin with four kids left off, which plays Funimation at the commencement of the skypeer arc. So not only did Funimation have an uphill battle in terms of getting people to just give One Piece another chance, but it had to do so with a slower and much less new fan-friendly arc to get into. And that is another poor value proposition that due to the circumstance of four kids, further stunted the growth of One Piece in the English-speaking West. And once again, you can see that reflected in US sales as well, with the last edition of the New York Times best-selling manga list being 2016, not even featuring One Piece in the top spot, despite the fact that it was outselling its nearest competitor two to one in Japan. With that said, by this time, One Piece was starting to properly break through. And I think that we in 2020 are finally at a spot that we should have reached about a decade ago in terms of popularity with the series. And some people will try to argue that it never would have happened because the art style and pacing were too cartoony and slowy for One Piece to have ever taken off in the West, but that's just blatantly wrong because we have a slew of other non-English examples where One Piece did quite phenomenally, like Germany and Spain with their dubs respectively. The art style and pacing didn't kill their growth, and furthermore, pacing wasn't even an issue until much later in One Piece, around Marine footage where it became very, very noticeable. Everything within the Four Kids jurisdiction was paced brilliantly outside of Pure Filler, and I really wish that we still had that pacing today, but that's a different discussion. My point is that pacing can never be used as an excuse. But with all of that said, even though I believe One Piece has finally achieved the kind of recognition it deserves, it really does make me wonder how much further we could have gone with a competent dub, like if Funimation had to be in the original dub. I think that One Piece would have dominated the English-speaking realm just as it did everywhere else in the world. But finally, the saddest part in all of this is despite the fact that we can put Four Kids behind us for the most part, they will always live on in the manga, as Zoro's name is still translated as Zolo to this very day. And look, yes, it's just a noun, it's not a big deal, and to be perfectly frank, because it's not a big deal, I think that they should just change it back to Zoro. And you know if they'd done that back when Four Kids had folded, then more than two thirds of the series would be using Zoro right now, instead of being stuck with this awful situation of continuity, where you know 93 volumes in, it's significantly more difficult to make a name change like that at this late stage in the game. But each and every time I read it, it reminds me of the legacy that Four Kids has had on the series that I love most in this world, as well as the irrevocable harm that it has caused One Piece in general. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.