I do mean stuff like removed scenes from international airings, replacing objects like cigarettes or vine with any other objects.
I do mean stuff like removed scenes from international airings, replacing objects like cigarettes or vine with any other objects.
4Kids dubs of anime removing guns and all mentions of death. I recently watched the first season of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters and there’s a scene where I’m pretty sure Bandit Keith was originally threatening Pegasus with a gun. Without the gun, it just looks so ridiculous. And what did 4Kids have against rice balls? Arceus forbid American kids should learn anything about foreign culture, we must pretend these are donuts.
The original U.S. dub of Pokemon was the same re: riceballs. It didn’t make sense in the 90s, and it doesn’t make sense today. The worst thing that can happen is a kid asks their parents if they can try onigiri.
Oh no! Now we either have to tell our kids “no,” or we have to do the research to find somewhere that makes/sells it, or attempt to follow a new recipe ourselves. How will U.S. culture, composed of nationalities from across the globe, ever survive this tremendous upheaval!?
In all seriousness, onigiri is delicious and I wish there were greater demand for it across the U.S. Even in my ethnically-diverse blue state, I only know of one place that makes onigiri, but it’s far and a pain in the ass to travel to.
Weren’t they dubbed as ‘donuts’ or am I having a Berenstain Bears moment?
“Jelly filled donuts are my favorite!”
That they were. I was so confused as a kid, because I was a big fan of donuts but had never seen one with a rectangular hole coming out the side (how would that even work?)
Onigiri is really easy to make yourself if you can get the ingredients. Tuna mayo onigiri is the bomb when you wake up with a hangover.
It’s more about nobody ( that wasn’t already into Asian food) knowing what it was. Even parents. And it not really being easy to look it up in the late 90s
It might have been easier to learn about if shows didn’t censor it out from the start. How are people supposed to talk about something if it’s deliberately removed? It’s like people went, “Americans don’t already know about this food, so let’s make sure they don’t learn about its existence.”
I remember 1997 on The Simpsons, when Marge wanted to open a franchise. One of the options (which her rivals took) sold pita. I was a kid, and this was the first time I had ever heard of pita and tahini. They were simply described as “pocket bread” and “flavor sauce.” The introduction of new foreign food items didn’t upset or confuse the audience.
It’s simply bizarre that riceballs are treated like some particularly incomprehensible thing.
Also, research may have taken longer (and involved trips to the library), but anyone who wanted to learn about something in the 90s still could’ve done it. It wasn’t pre-literate, just pre-internet.
I had the same experience when I watched the Pretzels episode with Fat Tony from the mafia as a kid, but in Spanish. They called them pretzels.
But Pokemon was a show about a fantasy world of made up animals with magic powers. 4Kids felt kids would be able to grasp that, but not rice balls.
Kids could accept a weird yellow mouse that could shoot lightning bolts, they would have accepted some weird food they hadn’t heard of either.
Kids probably would have just assumed it was part of the fantasy setting
It was kind of a missed opportunity to sell onigiri in the west
In the Mexican Spanish dub the Onigiris became sandwiches lmao.
Perhaps my favorite example of this is the 4kids One Piece dub. They couldn’t get rid of the scene where Helmeppo threatens Koby with a gun, so they turned the gun into…well.
Also quick shoutout to lollipop Sanji.
This is my favorite example. They replaced all guns with finger guns, so they were all just pointing at each other menacingly
I’m currently watching the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters. There’s an episode where Yugi and Kaiba are in a double duel and the threat is if they lose they’ll fall through a glass floor to the shadow realm. Somehow I strongly suspect the threat in the Japanese version was they’ll fall to their deaths. The ludicrously replace all threats of death with the shadow realm.
Let’s not forget the time Yugi and a magician were chained to the floor with buzzsaws inching closer each time they lost life points that would “send them to the shadow realm”
Yup, watched that one recently too
4kids one piece broke me lol
In my neck of the woods onigiris were redubbed as “popcorn balls”.
That actually makes more sense than donuts or sandwiches. They look like popcorn balls