>>56304949Eric himself has stated that he detests censorship; he's said that he grew up with extremely violent cartoons about characters trying to murder each other and he turned out just fine, he's never killed anyone, but the censorship was not 4kids' idea; the TV networks and broadcast stations decided what was and wasn't okay.
what people don't realise is that each 4kids show was censored differently depending on the day, the episode, and series. something like the gun episode in pokemon? never happening because the retard at the network that day was SUPER strict and said no, but the prior episode where guns made a brief appearance? different exec was there that day, didn't care, let it slide.
ultimately 4kids is not responsible for censoring anime a lot, they just bent to the rules of american broadcasting standards at the time, since pokemon, yugioh, etc were licensed as kids shows. in 2024 a company like 4kids would be able to license pokemon on an uncensored streaming site, so those edits wouldn't be made. compare the DIC Sailor Moon dub to the 2014 direct to DVD dub; DIC(and later Cloverway) heavily censored the show, but the ViZmedia dub cut out much of their work, and made a much more faithful dub.
it's funny people associate Eric's dub work with highly censored showed, since he was in the dub for Slayers, along with many other 4kids actors like Veronica Taylor, Rachael Lillis(RIP), and Lisa Ortiz. that dub is just as profane and vulgar as the original japanese version, season 1 episode 4 has a *period joke* that never would have flown on american TV at the time(it's also the only funny period joke bc the punchline is that Gourry is a drooling retard, Lina's period is just the setup for Gourry's idiot question).
ultimately 4kids did what they had to in order to meet broadcasting standards, they bypassed censorship when they had the chance.
they're not the best, but they're not the villains in the "american censorship" story.
