When One Piece Almost Wasn't (Part 2)
All According to Nakama...
While a couple of you long time fans may be aware, I’m certain the majority of subscribers here have no idea that I used to be one of Kaizoku-Fansubs editors, and saw first-hand, nay, lived the drama and disaster of One Piece’s legal acquisition by 4Kids back in the early 2000’s.
First, let me set the context for any young’n’s here:
Did you know only a few short years ago, online manga and anime resources like Funimation or Crunchyroll didn’t exist? That’s right, if you wanted anime that wasn’t being distributed outside of Japan, you needed to have a very well connected international friend with a VHS converter, a toaster, and a ton of free time. I used the raw mangos to teach myself Japanese and continued reading the raw chapter releases this way well into 2006.
Luckily for fans of One Piece back in 2000, FB and GTA founded Kaizoku-Fansubs (K-F) along with Dythim, bringing high-quality fansubbing to IRC and torrent like no one had ever seen before, nor since. The quality was so intrinsic that even the font FB made for K-F fansubs keeps showing up where I least expect it.
K-F were even the first to bring serious attention to the flexibility of the Japanese language in the context of dubbing and subtitling. There are a fair amount of words and concepts that aren’t a reliable 1-to-1 English translation, なかまbeing a big one within One Piece. Here’s the original announcement:
Kaizoku-Fansubs has decided to make some changes to our translation and portrayal of the series...
The story of One Piece is set in a world completely different from our own, a unique world containing its own oddities, special words, and characterizations.
We feel that certain key words or terms lose their meaning once they are translated, and by leaving them in Japanese rather than English, it helps the viewer to become more involved in the world and in a sense, in One Piece's own personal and special language.
Therefore, in the future, we will leave the following things in Japanese and add a translation note during their first appearances:
-All special moves and attacks
-Certain terms phrases and nicknames that are difficult to translate or that have a special or sentimental meaning to either the series itself or its hardcore fans
-HonorificsK-F's goal is to provide the highest quality and most accurate translation of One Piece. We want to create new fans of the series as well as please hardcore fans. We feel that by keeping a few things in their native Japanese, it helps you as a viewer get a true feel for the series, and also enables you to learn a little Japanese yourself, as well.
Of course, nuance has never been a strong point for the internet, so as this was aped by other fansubbing groups over the years, it led to the birth of one of my favorite linguist memes:
Ready to age like you just picked the wrong grail? Behold this Windows XP screencap of the One Piece episode 178 script I was given to edit for K-F back in 2004, just around when the Skypeia arc was going strong in the anime. At the time, I had no idea that all I needed to do was set Notepad to “Word Wrap”.
Originally K-F was mulling over the idea of ceasing its sub operations after 4Kids Entertainment’s acquisition of One Piece, mostly due to the fact that the CEO, Al Kahn, had been very vocal about maintaining the original spirit of the work and striving for authenticity in the English presentation of the show.
We were all prepared to hang up our subtitling hats, and I still remember waking up early, excited to catch the premier of 4Kids dubbed One Piece after years of reading the manga and watching the series in Japanese, only to be greeted with an ear-splitting YA YO YA YOOOO!!
He really did an about face on his whole “authenticity” and “respecting the content” in this 2005 interview:
Though when you’re talking about an era wherein distribution and dubbing companies thought this sounded better than Koji Wada’s smash hit Butter-Fly, the disconnect is not that surprising.
First and foremost, 4Kids did not simply “decide to edit OP into a more child-oriented series until they had an opportunity to legally drop the license,” as was alleged by Mark Kirk. They were dragged into one of the very first instances of a Japanese media company suing their foreign business partners, and it kicked off a cascade that eventually led to 4Kids’ demise… Which I will have to get into next time!
Where's part 1?