Lukewarm take i get 4kids was really dumb with a lot of their localising decisions and calling riceballs jelly doughnuts or literally painting sub sandwiches over them (yes they dis that) but acting like ANY instance of them not stopping the show to give kids a 5 minute explanation about something japanese is kind of silly. For all their stand out stupidity 4kids were 90% of the time pretty effective localisers who could localise untranslatable jokes really well and never cut out scenes of important or explicit japanese culture. Yeah they called some food something silly but they handled episodes about celebrations that literally do not exist outside of japan with really efficient and unintrustive explanations 'kids day', 'princess day' ect. If you actually went through a list of all the stuff they changed it was only a pretty small portion that was actually bad and thats mostly cos when they did something stupid they set records with their stupidity. Most of the time they were ok translators and ok localisers and even the most 'WE'RE AMERICAN WE PROMISE' throwaway lines they added are worlds more bearable than tpci trying to stay accurate to the original by translating sensei as 'teacher' in situations no native english speaker has ever or will ever call someone teacher
Basically i just want weebs to understand that localisation is not a bad thing cos 4kids did something dumb in the 90's. Localisation is only bad if the people involved are either actively racist or mishandle a message from the original- which happens much less often than they think. Localising happens all the time its not to scrub away a culture its just to make something sound more natural in your language than a straight translation and it only gets to 4kids level on kids stuff anyway which is a comparatively small amount of media. Localising 99% of the time is at best a tool to help people understand a deep cultural thing they're unfamiliar with in simplified and familiar terms and at worst a fun little nod to your own culture with a word switched around. It happens in all media from all over the world guys, not just english translations of non-english works. Weebs really need to let their weird bitterness over 4kids doing something stupid in a handful of episodes go and stop acting like the japanese version of a childrens show about magic talking animals is some super serious ancient text that 4kids was hiding from them out of greed
