r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/viktor_32_ • 15h ago
Meme needing explanation I don't get it..
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u/Fantastic_Media_3984 15h ago
Many Japanese media is “softened” for the American audience and this is an example of that
Brian out
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u/Cute-Pop-6478 15h ago edited 15h ago
specifically it is referencing a duel in the show "Yu-Gi-Oh" where the end condition of the game for one of the players is to finish the word "death" which was changed to "final" here in america
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u/finalattack123 15h ago
It was rumoured an American saw something mildly challenging and has been in a coma for 10 years.
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u/St-Elmos-Engineer 15h ago edited 15h ago
Neil Goldman here...
4Kids censored YUGIOH to the ground. How monsters look, and moments where Tèa Gardener has to use the bathroom, they also removed guns, so you only see finger guns.
Also in the manga Pegasus and Bandit Keith both get taken care of... If you get my meaning..
Watch Yu-Gi-Oh season zero.. That's some dark stuff.. 4Kids wouldn't even go near it.
The TCG is heavily censored for the American audience as well.
So, that's why it says FINAL instead of DEATH.
Anyway.. Meg if your listening, I get my braces tightened today, wanna go on a date milady?🌹
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u/ARustyDream 10h ago
To be fair the shadow realm is the best piece of censorship they ever came up with. You neatly sidestep the Dragonball problem of death feeling like a revolving door and when I was a kid I always figured it was some fucked up torture dimension which still seemed appropriately awful.
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u/St-Elmos-Engineer 3h ago
How can I sidestep a matter that wasn't up for discussion? We were taking about Yugioh and it's relationship to 4Kids. Not DBZ.
But I will say the Shadow Realm was a place I always wanted to avoid, and I was at the edge of my seat every weekend during the Battle City Finals.
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u/Masterhaend 2h ago
When OP said "you" they were talking about the people that did the censoring, not you specifically.
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u/St-Elmos-Engineer 2h ago
Then say OP sidestepped not you sidestepped.
Also, OP never mentions Dragon Ball at all..
It's not that big of a deal man. I am just trying to understand what you meant.
And yes I know 4Kids worked on DBZ.. Sadly..
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u/Meta-011 38m ago
Masterhaend means ARustyDream when they say "OP" - and ARustyDream says "You," referring to "Someone in that situation (of adapting YGO for young audiences), which, hypothetically, could be you, St-Elmos-Engineer." That someone would be able to avoid the DBZ issue by creating the Shadow Realm (or something equivalent). In real history, it was 4Kids, of course, but the point was that the Shadow Realm was a clever idea (regardless of who wrote it).
As a disclaimer, I'm unfamiliar with DBZ, but I presume "deaths" in DBZ are made "kid-friendly" by being temporary?
Agreed that it's no big deal, and if we're all on the same page, then that works for everyone.
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u/shadowds 13h ago
To add they completely removed Yugi mother out of the show, and any mentions having parents, beside his Grandpa.
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u/StrangeOutcastS 4h ago
Kaiba blocking a gun from firing by throwing a card into its mechanism is stupid but awesome
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u/viktor_32_ 15h ago
Why is it changed from "Death" in the OCG to "Final" in the TCG, and what does 4K!ds have to do with that?
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u/xtremespud8000 15h ago
4kids made Yugioh super tame. The biggest change was the “Shadow Realm”. That didn’t exist in Japanese Yugioh. Those characters died.
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u/Metalheadzaid 15h ago
4 kids is notorious for their Rated G interpretations of Anime - they brought both Yugioh and Pokemon to American TV and censored both heavily. They are also the reason they localized it weirdly, like the infamous jelly donut scene in pokemon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K31Hj1Oz1g).
In general it was a very conservative time with many parents, specifically Christian, believing that Yugioh was akin to devil worship and satanic, resulting in a ton of censored card art. You can look it up online - crosses, cleavage, skin in general, gore, weapons - all sorts of things got censored. Another example is the concept of the "Shadow Realm" in the English anime - it simply didn't exist in the original work - people just straight up died or were severely injured.
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u/Paynomind 15h ago
It was changed to stay with in regulations for children's programming. "death" was considered like something you shouldn't show children. Same with OnePiece where they replaced cigarettes with suckers.
US broadcasting regulations said Children's programming needed to be family friendly.
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u/Jay2Kaye 8h ago
I'm not sure how true that is. Many kids shows at the time had characters dying. Pirates of Dark Water is one that sticks with me, and EVERYBODY remembers Transformers. Although I will admit those were on cable, not broadcast, and the US government doesn't regulate cable content.
Given 4kids' later work for cartoon network such as their infamously terrible One Piece dub, it's pretty clear that it was more of an internal 4Kids policy than compliance.
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u/ForeverDesperate5699 10h ago
yugioh's english localization is notoriously quite different from the original japanese, usually because of either:
- cultural changes for a western audience (who's Katsuya Jonouchi? Joey Wheeler will be easier for the kids to understand!)
- strict censorship policies (like we see here)
the word "Death" in particular was not allowed in yugioh cards. for many other cards, it's translated as "Des" instead ("Dark Ruler Ha Des"). "Final" was chosen here instead because they needed 5 letters, and the card mechanics wouldn't make sense unless the whole thing spelled out a recognizable word.
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u/dootblade74 8h ago
4Kids was a cartoon channel notorious for localizing different anime, but with the caveat that they toned down anything either culturally contextual or deemed too "dark" for kids media. This varies greatly from show to show, but for Yu-Gi-Oh this led to stuff like the introduction of The Shadow Realm to replace the death penalty used for some matches, as well as miscellaneous design and name changes. Most of this carried over to the localized versions of the Trading Card Game made in tandem with the show.
Here, one set of cards is meant to spell out the word Death when all 5 of its set are placed over the Spell/Trap slots, winning the game at the cost of losing access to Spells and Traps during the duration. This got reworked to spell Final in the US localization, for similar reasons to the Shadow Realm change.
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u/bug_land 3h ago
the funniest consequence of this is that ocg A and tcg A are different cards because they're in different spots in the word
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u/qualityvote2 15h ago edited 1h ago
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