4Kids to End Its Fox Programming Block in December

[lubczyk]

Originally Posted by bayoab

This has more to do with the death of kids TV overall and the death of traditional TV branding than some company merely hacking and slashing shows. Kids don't care if a show is edited or not. Kids don't care at all about if it is uncut. Kids TV as it existed in the 80s, 90s and early 00s is dead and never coming back, and it is going to hurt anime horribly since it was a staple of those blocks.

Any conjecture on why that is? It seems we've gone from Bugs Bunny to totally mindless ADHD shows like SpongeBob Squareparts. On the other hand, we have good kids' shows like Avatar and even Justice League has stayed pretty much the same.

It's not like there are less kids, maybe a shift in habits?

There are still kids around that want to watch cartoons, so I don't see what's changed since the 1990s in terms of kids' preferences.

I have seen, however; that the only channel with decent Children's programming remaining is the Disney Channel. Fox, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon have almost exclusively drek and therefore are not very suitable for children.

[wingdarkness]

It’s just not the way it used to be…Back in the day when many of us 25+ crowds were kids (Hell, even 20 + crowds to some degree), network TV Saturday Mornings was the $hit…It was saturated with more than enuff different genres and different types of animated styles to satisfy a need…However with the progress and evolution of television in general the competition for kids’ brain-cells aren’t worth it to networks anymore…How can a once a week Sat-Morning cartoon compete with 10 24-hr-a-day kids’-networks in a society where more than half of the population (even those below poverty) have cable or dish? Back when lots of us were kids you had 3 networks and Nickelodeon—That was it! Then to make matters worst you have executives (like those in 4kids) with no real business model beyond CN’s Dragonball Z years (hell even CN is still stuck on chasing that late 90’s dream that made them a ratings champ—which ultimatley killed Toonami) or the exploitation of card game//monster game titles…

No expansion of genres, executives that just don’t get it, and television evolution is all responsible for killing what used to be the greatest $hit ever as kids…Waking up at like 6 am, grabbing a bowl of cereal and watching dope cartoons on network TV…Nowadays kids can wake up at noon, watch cartoons on up to 8-10 networks (if they haven’t DVR’d or DVD collected it already)…So who needs 4kids, which most kids over 7 can tell is weak as hell? Recently I was babysitting my mom’s boyfriends’ 9 year old and he was trashing One Piece as one of the stoopidest things he had ever seen…He saw thru the B$ and I showed him the real eps and he was impressed…Kids aren’t as dumb as 4kids would have you believe, if you show them the decent, unedited real stuff with Japanese influences they’ll get that it’s cool, yet doesn’t have to be American (Just how I understood friken humanoid ThunderCats that fought caped-mummies were cool without giving a thought about how that translated to America or American values)…


It’s kinda sad because about the time of Cowboy Bebop’s airing (when US anime was really blooming) I honestly thought within the next 5 years there would perhaps be a mainstream anime series airing on network television (High quality $hit like a Gankutsuou or GITSSAC, i.e., etc.)…Obviously I didn’t foresee the bubble bursting like it did (bittornado and the like being a contributing problem, but that’s another debate)…I guess I was just too naïve to think the business side of anime would be smarter than just watering down every kinda-like DBZ show and saturating the airwaves with it to the point of nausea…Nevertheless if you got that dish in the backyard, crappy anime and cartoons are still just a click away (If not some hidden gems)…Not like the good ‘ol days though…I imagine 4kids will live hidden on some network in some 3 months free package anyways, so they won’t flatline just yet…

[Radiosity]

Originally Posted by wingdarkness

Waking up at like 6 am, grabbing a bowl of cereal and watching dope cartoons on network TV

You, my friend, get cookies for reminding me of how awesome Saturday mornings used to be when I was a kid I live in the UK, so we had even less channels than you guys, but the channels we did have (BB1, BB2, ITV, Channel 4) were saturated with awesome stuff pretty much all the time throughout Saturday morning. Great days

[kk2extreme]

i watch gundam in the morning when i was a kid and digimon in the afternoon

[Rinji]

I watched Pokemon for a while... but right when they started doing the "Hoot Hoot" Thing, I stopped cold. In fact, when Charmander turned into Charizard, that's when I stopped. After that it was PURELY Dragon Ball Z. An anime that was afflicted to Yesterday's 4kids, Saban.

[wingdarkness]

Originally Posted by Rinji

I watched Pokemon for a while... but right when they started doing the "Hoot Hoot" Thing, I stopped cold. In fact, when Charmander turned into Charizard, that's when I stopped. After that it was PURELY Dragon Ball Z. An anime that was afflicted to Yesterday's 4kids, Saban.

Hey don’t di$$ Saban...Saban was never overtly concerned with Americanizing shows to the point of retardation…Saban (along with DIC) had a $hitload of great old school cartoons…And ofcourse the crown jewel Power Rangers is still going strong (My 4 year old nephew lives by the 3 P’s: Popsicles, Power-Rangers, and Pooing…Aside from that nothing else exists to him^^)…Saban atleast understood how to evolve and stretch it’s market with having new PR shows every few seasons (I even saw Johnny Yong Bosh still cheezin’ it up at like age 33 on 1 ep - ROTFL)

Now there are a few whammies on Saban’s list, but as a whole 4kids couldn’t compete with Saban to save their already non-existent souls…Hell even Spiderman Unlimited from a few years back pwns anything 4kids ever did…Not even a fair comparison in the least…If you add the DIC shows Saban did work for since the 80’s (Like He-man, Voltron, and Inspector Gadget) it’s laffable to compare the 2…

[radioIzzy]

Not much of a difference now to me seeing as Saturday morning cartoons aren't what they used to be back when I was 10, which was only seven years ago.

I do miss Power Rangers. But 4kids is just terrible. The new shows they have going are not what they used to be.
With their introduction of One Piece, I totally got the wrong impression of that show; since I didn't watch the original One Piece. I totally regret watching the 4kid's One Piece version first.

Times are changing, but I wonder what will replace the saturday morning shows with 4kids moving.

[asaqe]

Originally Posted by wingdarkness

Hey don’t di$$ Saban...Saban was never overtly concerned with Americanizing shows to the point of retardation…Saban (along with DIC) had a $hitload of great old school cartoons…And ofcourse the crown jewel Power Rangers is still going strong (My 4 year old nephew lives by the 3 P’s: Popsicles, Power-Rangers, and Pooing…Aside from that nothing else exists to him^^)…Saban atleast understood how to evolve and stretch it’s market with having new PR shows every few seasons (I even saw Johnny Yong Bosh still cheezin’ it up at like age 33 on 1 ep - ROTFL)

Now there are a few whammies on Saban’s list, but as a whole 4kids couldn’t compete with Saban to save their already non-existent souls…Hell even Spiderman Unlimited from a few years back pwns anything 4kids ever did…Not even a fair comparison in the least…If you add the DIC shows Saban did work for since the 80’s (Like He-man, Voltron, and Inspector Gadget) it’s laffable to compare the 2…

I have to admit that Saban did solidify the Female Yellow Ranger a lot better then Japan did, so far for most of this decade the yellow ranger was a girl most of the time.

[Rinji]

Originally Posted by wingdarkness

Hey don’t di$$ Saban...Saban was never overtly concerned with Americanizing shows to the point of retardation…Saban (along with DIC) had a $hitload of great old school cartoons…And ofcourse the crown jewel Power Rangers is still going strong (My 4 year old nephew lives by the 3 P’s: Popsicles, Power-Rangers, and Pooing…Aside from that nothing else exists to him^^)…Saban atleast understood how to evolve and stretch it’s market with having new PR shows every few seasons (I even saw Johnny Yong Bosh still cheezin’ it up at like age 33 on 1 ep - ROTFL)

They still SLICED and DICED Dragon Ball Z down and got rid of a WHOLE LOT of scenes from it, as well as dulling down the violence to 0 all the time. So yeah, they are along the same lines of 4Kids.

[wingdarkness]

Originally Posted by Rinji

They still SLICED and DICED Dragon Ball Z down and got rid of a WHOLE LOT of scenes from it, as well as dulling down the violence to 0 all the time. So yeah, they are along the same lines of 4Kids.

Are you talking about when Pioneer owned DBZ or when Funimation owned it? In either case while there were a bunch of edits for violence (which you will see on almost any anime that is brought to US air because of FCC concerns), there was NEVER an overly conscious effort to totally rape the story to morso Americanize it like what happened with nearly every 4kids show in existence...Tell me of these whole lot of scenes that were never shown on cartoon network? I consider my knowledge of DBZ second to none and what I remember was countless edits that had to be made for violence concerns (Sometimes just cosmetics), but I can't remember the story being sliced and diced to the retarded level of 4kids (not even close)...Now when Pioneer owned it they would do stuff like change Krillen saying riceballs to cheeseburgers or something, but I still feel like Pioneer's version of DBZ was better than Funimation until Funi got there act together near the end...

Furthermore the only episodes of anime CN never showed during DBZ's run was an episode of Outlaw Star where the characters went to a nude-spa world, and the episode of Cowboy Bebop about blowing up buildings that wasn't aired because it happened right after 9/11 terrorist attack...So to say Saban (who only helped to distribute the show thru Pioneer--64 eps in total from a show that had over 300 IIRC) is along the same lines as a company that scrapped entire arcs in One Piece for virtually no apparent reason, that's just jumping the gun...If seeing a piece of cloth covering Gohan's naked a$$ after he went Ape-mode is the same as editing every gun in OP to be a sooper-soaker then maybe a pi$$ed off Power Ranger needs to kick down your door and "hiii-yaa" your a$$ up a bit...