April Fools! There is no such thing as the “4kids version” of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The “Review” of it remains after the cut.
First off, this isn’t going to be a traditional review – I’ve looked at Neon Genesis Evangelion already, and there’s not much point in reviewing a dub separately and giving it a proper grade. Similarly, it also seems perfunctory to review it because, well, it’s the 4Kids version of Neon Genesis Evangelion. You know more or less how that’s going to shake out before I even start. Rather, I’m going to look at the differences in what may be the most notorious version of Evangelion and make an attempt to highlight some of the more interesting things that were done to one of anime’s more famous entries, hence why this isn’t running in an ordinary review slot. Consider it a bonus round for the end of Mecha March.
Shockingly, I’ve discovered that a lot of younger fans than myself don’t actually know a lot about the 4Kids Evangelion. This is understandable, as while not exactly “lost” it had a fairly short syndication run before the patience of a royally peeved Studio Gainax ran out and pulled the licensing deal and awarded the show to the studio responsible for the more famous 90’s dub, ADV Films – who, despite being perhaps best known for welding three entirely distinct shows together into “Robotech”, did a much more faithful job. Since 4Kids closed its doors for the last time in 2017, and had been limping since a first bankruptcy in 2011, it’s not surprising that a newer crop of fans might be unfamiliar with one of their more shameful outings.
So, brief and biased fan’s take: 4Kids was a dubbing company that heavily popularized anime in their heyday in the 90’s, but were notorious for their adaptations being… less than faithful. They held to a very “Saturday morning cartoon” ethos where nobody died (or could even say words relating to dying), turned rice balls into jelly donuts, and recut scenes as suited their sometimes bizarre interpretations of the source material. Some of their more famous targets included Pokemon (with, of course, amazing success) and Yu-gi-oh! Of course, the company can’t take all the flak for this – networks would enforce standards for the kind of audiences and time slots that 4Kids angled for, and many of the decisions in both censorship and Americanization weren’t solely made by 4Kids itself. It’s easy to forget, but the 90’s were still a time when animation was seen as being essentially, well, for kids. Now we get adaptations targeted at adults, with an emphasis on being faithful, but back then if you wanted to be marketable you had to hold to the rules both written and unwritten about children’s media in the west, which even for shows originally aimed at kids would be different than the Japanese standards. That doesn’t mean that some of their changes don’t range from laughable to terrible, but there was a reason, and they were more a product of the circumstances than anything else.
So, you may be wondering just who took leave of their senses to greenlight Neon Genesis Evangelion to get that treatment. I can’t say I precisely know, but Evangelion was a titan of a property and 4Kids was probably the biggest name in the business at the time, so that might have something to do with it. Whatever the cause, unintentional hilarity was the result.
So, first off, the names are all different. Actually, it’s kind of funny what names they changed and how. Shinji is still Shinji, but he’s Shinji Idaho now. Rei Ayanami is Rei (or possibly Rey) Adams. Asuka Langley Soryu is Anabel (or Anna, as a nickname I guess) Langley Smith – she keeps the “Langley” even though it’s pretty rarely used. Misato Katsuragi gets what seems like the weirdest name change on paper – she’s Kate Saturn in this, which seems absolutely arbitrary until you realize that the dub almost always refers to her as “Miss Saturn”, clearly intending to keep the changing of lip movements minimal from “Misato”. To me, the most hilarious rename, though, is Gendo Ikari. So, if Shinji is Shinji Idaho, what does that make his father? They actually don’t say Gendo’s first name much in the dub, maybe as few as three times in the whole show, and they absolutely never use his full name in one go – he’s usually “Commander Idaho” or such. However, the couple times they do use his first name? It’s Duncan. They went and made Gendo Ikari into Duncan Idaho. I have no words for how insane this is. Did somebody get a thrill over daring copyright claims by technically never saying it as such? Did they think some little kid out there would have read Dune and pick up on it? Or did some writer on staff just see what had been decided for Shinji’s name and think they were terribly clever? There’s no point – the characters aren’t even remotely related. It’s just there, and now I have to try to make sense of it.
I’ll be referring to the characters by their original names throughout, but if I have to intro somebody I haven’t covered here, I’ll be sure to mention what 4Kids did to them.
Of course, there are also the fairly universal changes you’d expect. The Angels, for instance, are “Aliens” as part of an almost comical attempt to remove the religious symbolism, iconography, and terminology. SEELE is “The Government”, though NERV is still NERV (perhaps because the name sounds neutral and the logo is on a lot of stuff). Nothing bleeds red either – green, white, golden orange, anything to not look like, well, blood.
Honestly, it’s kind of amazing how much they got away with. The side-by-side of a lot of the fight scenes would show that some were edited down, particularly at the killing blow, but the technicolor blood excuse gets the dub a long way when it actually comes to showing some of the fighting that Evangelion is known for. It’s diluted, but more of the original is there than you might expect when you hear “4Kids Evangelion”.
There’s some of that with the plot and characters as well. Remarkably little is honestly dumbed down. It’s sanitized, or course, but a lot of the layers are still there, like how Rei grapples with her worth as a person or how Shinji faces deep alienation from his friends and distant father. On the other hand, Asuka’s crush on Kaji (“Ralph Kane” in the dub) is basically scrubbed out, with her positive regard for him being depicted essentially as a pure affection of a child for her parent figure. Since the read of Misato and Shinji as Misato being Shinji’s surrogate mother is also more pronounced in the dub this does sort of establish family as one of the dub’s more pronounced themes… which isn’t exactly wrong.
Thus, we get through most of the show with it being a disrespectful, watered-down dub, but still recognizably Evangelion. This is, however, ignoring the elephant in the room that is the ending.
The 4Kids version essentially cuts the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion proper, while stretching out Episode 24 into a two-part affair, resulting in a 25 episode final run that never gets to SEELE’s play, Instrumentality, or Shinji ending up a stick figure before landing on a weird blue ball.
Instead, the ending that 4Kids provides hinges on Kaworu Nagisa (Kaine Nelson) and his appearance. His story is very similar to the original version – in this, he’s an Alien agent who has infiltrated the government in order to attack humanity, but he’s fairly nice to Shinji. A lot of the subtext around him, whether you take that subtext as gay or divine, is scrubbed clean, but it’s still clearly a relief to Shinji to have him around since it’s been a while since anyone acted like his friend. Of couse, his evil (well, evil in this version at least) plan comes to light, and Shinji ends up facing off against him in Terminal Dogma (“The Core” according to 4Kids) where the “Great Alien Weapon” is. Episode 24 ends before resolving the climax. Episode 25 of the 4Kids version is basically your typical Humanity On Trial plot, where Kaworu uses Shinji’s memories to try to convince him that mankind isn’t worth saving. As you might expect, this is done mostly by using stock footage from the rest of the show with the voice actors for Shinji and Kaworu talking over it, occasionally cutting back to a close-up of one of the two from the original Episode 24. It’s cheap and lame, but no more so than the original ending of the series, so I guess that was inevitable.
During this phase, 4Kids actually lets Shinji be kind of a badass. Presumably because they were no longer bound to the original portrayal, he rather quickly talks about how he’s come through his issues (when he was distinctly on another decline in the original), what the bonds with his friends mean to him, and that he wants to save humanity for their sakes and his own and not just because he’s doing what his father tells him to in a vain hope of recognition.
Eventually, after Shinji rejects enough of Kaworu’s accusations, Kaworu breaks down and gives the classic “why can’t you understand humans are scum” sort of speech. Shinji offers him mercy, but he tries to awaken the ultimate weapon, screaming that he’s the last and will finish his task, before Shinji presumably finishes him off. I say presumably because, well, this is 4Kids and while they get away with a lot in Evangelion, squashing a humanoid into jelly isn’t something they can show with any amount of green blood. After that, we get an extremely fast proper end where (using recut old animation) Shinji exits into the light of day only to be greeted by everyone (using a crop of the end of episode 26 in the original), with his father declaring that the final Alien has been defeated and Earth is at peace and everybody congratulating Shinji. It absolutely jarring how quick that goes – it’s maybe thirty seconds from our last shot of Kaworu that the series just kind of stops with the absolutely laziest of epilogues.
Now, you may think that this leaves a lot of things unresolved. And, if it was the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion proper, that would be the case, but 4Kids clearly knew that they were going to have to mess with the ending, and cut lots of things earlier. The talks with SEELE (“The Government”) are less cryptic and more “blargh we are displeased bureaucrats” as the theme, though at least one such talk is used to set up that there are a finite number of Aliens. The scene with the real Adam being delivered to Gendo? Cut entirely. Most of the dangling threads were excised from the show to begin with. There are still some weird notes. Asuka and Rei both show up to say “Congratulations” to Shinji seeming just fine, when the show last left them in bad states. There is, of course, no explanation for this. The recut is clever, but it’s far from perfect, and that really shows with how the ending is handled.
On the whole, that’s very much the dub in a nutshell – it’s Evangelion Lite, but it’s still at least related to Evangelion. In some ways, it’s disappointing. You hear “4Kids Evangelion” and you think it will be at least memorably bad, some one-of-a-kind whirlwind of censorship. Instead, it’s forgettably bad, taking a show that thrived on the dark and strange and presenting only the parts of it that can be cleaned up nice for Saturday mornings, but doing so with enough grace that you can kind of see what it’s supposed to be. I guess if you are a huge fan of Evangelion, the kind of person for who it was a formative experience with anime if not with life, you could get pretty offended at that, but for my part? I respect Evangelion, but I don’t have a strong emotional attachment to it, so I can’t really get offended on the show’s behalf when this happens, and instead find myself impressed yet a little lost that it just sort of is what it is.
This brings me back around to the point I made at the start, about how 4Kids was really just a product of their circumstances. Those of us who remember some of their fiasco-tier dubs and ludicrous changes like to treat them like they were malicious, like what they wanted to do was create some new, Americanized material just pillaging the animation of great shows. But that’s not the case. They were pragmatic in their adaptation and hungry for a particular market, which together made them willing to compromise more than they perhaps should. Their way of handling adaptations was greedy and myopic in some ways, but in others I think the people involved really did want to share something they enjoyed, and saw “making it accessible” as the only way to really do that.
So when all is done, it’s hard to hate 4Kids over this, or most of what they did for that matter. In retrospect, Anime probably wouldn’t be as big a deal in the states as it is today without them. It’s a checkered legacy, to be sure, but that’s a fair bit better than black as pitch, so may a flight of aliens rap them to their rest.
As for the Evangelion dub, I can firmly say it’s not worth bothering with. None of the changes are so insane they have to be seen, nor any of the voice performances notably fun and good, ranging from a fairly strong Asuka to a Shinji where I think the ADV version is better since this one’s just totally generic. It’s not bad enough to warrant attention for that and has nothing to recommend it on positive quality either. This is one to leave buried in the past with the company that made it.