When One Piece Almost Wasn't (Part 3)
KAAAAAHN!! KAAAAAAHN!!!
Back in the day, 4Kids was a powerhouse of media, rated Fortune’s #1 fastest growing company in 2000. 4Kids knew they were acquiring some of the biggest IP’s in Japan at the time: A 3% share in the Pokemon Company, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and One Piece were all fought for vehemently among many other acquisitions. 4Kids had every intention to milk those properties for ad revenue in the good old fashioned way: chopping them into politically correct pieces and chumming them into the water of terrible Saturday Morning anime dubs.
The truth is that 4Kids Entertainment was continuing a proud tradition of terrible dubs and inane edits, a strategy that worked pretty well for shows like Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, Power Rangers, and many other Japanese anime and tokusatsu for years.
When I say pretty well, you have to understand that amateur and inaccurate dubs, butchering story-lines, and complete disregard of cultural relevance was the NORM with anime until very recently.
Once a show was sold, the Japanese company that maintained the rights to it rarely, if ever, checked on what was happening to their intellectual property (IP) overseas. While significant changes to the IP were not technically legal, without anyone Japan-side caring what went on outside of the country, the practice was rampant.
As far as I’m aware, only Saban Entertainment was able to secure legal agreements to change story and create completely new IP from the original Tokusatsu works in 1993, which they utilized to great effect with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and it’s 7 spinoff series’. Since Saban worked very closely with Fox from 1996 to 2001, it wouldn’t surprise me if this close proximity to a company that was given free reign over a foreign IP is what fueled Al Kahn’s cavalier attitude when it came to significantly changing the shows he acquired.
This attitude of reluctant acceptance of any changes made to anime went relatively unchallenged from at least 1967 to 2004 - something I’m sure most people would find impossible to believe thanks to today’s instant-access to animu and regular cross-cultural interaction with Japanese and Western media companies. It still blows my mind that all these animation studios and major production companies are now just available to shout at on various socials. Now I finally understand the weight behind the words “You kids don’t know how good you have it these days.”
GIRUGAMESH walked so Crunchyroll could fly. It wasn’t that long ago that the most significant “main stream” reference to anime I’d ever seen was Cartoon Network’s parody commercials and the Speed Racer parody in Dexter’s Lab:
Sometime after the premier of YA YO YA YO when the K-F crew realized that One Piece was about to befall the same fate as so many other animy that had had their reputations destroyed by 4Kids, FB, GTA, and Dythim embarked on an incredibly bold endeavor: The first mass letter writing campaign to a Japanese media company.
You’ve got to remember, this is well before the days of Twitter and online social media, sometime between 2004-2005. Letter writing campaigns never worked, and were often regarded with derision, even from within the fan bases. K-F’s Japan-based translators and media capture team also made us aware of the fact that any and all letters originating from outside of Japan were regularly tossed or shredded by Japanese media companies without being opened. When you’ve got hundreds, or sometimes THOUSANDS of letters coming in per week, you’ve got to triage, and Japanese companies only really cared about Japanese viewership back then.
In order to get the attention of Toei Animation studios, volunteers at K-F and in the mIRC distro chat wrote letters to volunteer contacts in Japan who then hand-wrote translations and mailed them from within the country to get their foot in the door of Toei’s attention span.
I can’t remember precisely what I ended up writing, but most of the letters focused on simply bringing attention to what was happening to One Piece in the hands of the 4Kids Entertainment. One of the participants even calculated out the exact percentage of the series that had been effectively deleted because of 4Kids’ edits, I just remember that it was over 40%.
4Kids dropped their One Piece license in 2006, but we couldn’t tell if it had been because of our campaign, or sheer coincidence of timing. Either way, we were thrilled that the bleeding was finally stemmed.
It wasn’t until 2011 when the first of many lawsuits against 4Kids Entertainment went live and the depth of shenanigans that had been going on behind the scenes began pouring out spectacularly that we knew some of those “Please just LOOK” messages must’ve gotten through. Ironically, it was Yu-Gi-Oh! that ended up being the loose brick in 4Kids’ foundation of shady foreign licensing practices.
Al Kahn resigned from his position as CEO in January of 2011, barely 2 months later, TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems terminated their licensing agreements and filed a $4 million dollar breach-of-contract lawsuit. Shueisha, Toei, and even The Pokemon Company got involved once 4Kids’ dirty laundry was aired, and within a few months 4Kids Entertainment’s connections in Japan dried up, and they were left holding the bag with a chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing.
While this lawsuit didn’t pan out for TV Tokyo due to the judge siding with 4Kids on some dubious technicalities, Japan now had a very clear image of what had been happening to their IP’s. And though 4Kids was able to retain their licenses for a while longer, and attempted to clean the slate with a rebrand to 4Licensing, the cat was out of the bag. After a slow four years following the rebranding, 4Kids finally closed shop in 2017.
To hear a 2010 interview with Mark Kirk, Senior VP of Digital Media at 4Kids Entertainment claiming that they were new to this stuff, that Al Kahn didn’t know what he was getting into, and claiming that One Piece “nearly ruined 4Kids reputation” is laughable at best, and really hammers home how much these people didn’t get it.
FB and I had departed the fansub scene around 2006 after 4Kids dropped OP, but kept track of the how it was doing over the years. When Funimation picked it up in 2007, we were ecstatic to see a company that seemed to finally give respect to the source material now handling a series we’d put so much time into. If not for Funimation’s wonderful handling of the series, I’m certain it wouldn’t have recovered as spectacularly as it did. Similarly I can say, without even watching the Netflix One Piece adaptation, I can thank it profusely for at least one thing: Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt just how wrong 4Kids Entertainment had been.