While One Piece’s modern dub is faithfully adapting the anime, its original 4Kids dub ended the series early with an incredibly dark moment.
Although One Piece doesn’t seem likely to end any time soon, its original English dub did feature an ending… and it was incredibly dark. This dub was done by 4Kids Entertainment, the same company that localized series like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. In both of those other shows, the 4Kids dub has been criticized for censorship and One Piece was no exception.
While One Piece may have a cartoonish art style and silly characters, the series can get pretty dark and violent. This clashed with 4Kids’ goal of marketing the show to children, and thus they made a variety of changes both minor and major. Some of the minor changes were more silly than harmful, such as Sanji’s trademark cigarettes being transformed into lollipops. However, some of the major changes completely removed arcs or characters that would be important later on in the series, like One Piece’s whale Laboon. All this combined with One Piece only getting more mature as the series progressed led to 4Kids ending the dub shortly after Alabasta.
4Kids’ Dark One Piece Dub Ending Completely Changed the Story
Of course, crafting a satisfactory ending to One Piece in the middle of its story is no small feat, so 4Kids had to get creative. As there wasn’t really a good way to bring the series to a satisfying happy ending, the dub took a much darker approach. Before the Jaya and Skypiea arcs, the Straw Hats see a ship fall from the sky near them, which foreshadows the existence of sky islands. The dub ends with the Straw Hats seeing this ship falling, seemingly about to crush them before fading to black. Given that this is the final scene in the 4Kids version of One Piece, this seems to imply that the story ends because the Straw Hats are killed by this mysterious falling ship. This is both incredibly unsatisfying as an ending and actually much darker than anything 4Kids had censored out from the original story.
One Piece is a story about chasing dreams no matter how dark things may seem. In order to illustrate this, it often reveals the dark underbelly of society and examines the mechanisms of oppression. But despite this, it never gets bogged down in its darkness, remaining a deeply positive work buoyed by Luffy’s innocence and optimism throughout One Piece. The ending of the 4Kids dub kind of makes it the opposite. In removing the story’s earlier darkness and maturity, it becomes a superficially positive story that ultimately has an incredibly bleak message about how death lies around every corner.
This perversion of One Piece‘s core messages was likely largely unintentional, caused by a need to wrap up the story part way through with some kind of closure no matter what it was. But deliberate or not, the 4Kids dub’s dark ending is still deeply disappointing and ironic. Luckily, now that dub fans have the much more faithful Funimation dub to watch, One Piece fans can look back on 4Kids incredibly bleak ending and laugh instead of lament.
Src: screenrant.com
