Well, it is sad to see the AnimeCauldron pages go but I really don't know who was keeping them up all this time. Hmm...
I was entertained by GS777 when I read all of those pages a few years ago but like others here I feel his approach to the whole thing was naked immature rage whereas Psaros was tempered by his sense of humor that made him endlessly re-readable, even here in 2018, 21 years later. Didn't always land and you could tell sometimes he was just picking on something as a setup for the joke, but still. DBZOA, nowadays, is tempered by nostalgia for the early - mid 2000s years of anime marketing in America and marketing of the DBZ franchise.
I don't believe at all that fandom would be any calmer or less vitriolic or what have you without those sites and people. Niche, "nerd\geek" (I prefer "cult", the term carries more dignity to me) fandoms like anime & manga, video games, comic books, Star Wars, Sonic etc. all have that subset of people, all have that subset of anger. They are cult audiences who like things for certain reasons. They don't like the suits, the new creative teams, coming in and fudging the whole deal up.
As far as the original DBZUncensored goes, yes it was absolutely necessary, influential and valuable. I don't think DBZOA is a part of Psaros's legacy, DBZOA was something different entirely and came together all after Psaros had gone off to college and shook this stuff from his life for good. The biggest point of his legacy however is that he pricked up FUNi's ears as others have cited. I discovered that site while researching Sonic X when I was a kid, this was about 13 years ago. I found out just how much anime has been censored and edited by American distributors.
Cure Dragon 255 wrote:This should outright disprove that Chris didnt understand that Funimation had to make a lot of these changes to appease executives. I will NEVER say they were genuinely necessary because that's FUCKING BULLSHIT.
And that's not the only time either.
Sure, I disagree that censorship is needed, but its a bone of fairness he does throw for Funimation.
Something important to keep in mind is that DBZ came out over here during an era where there was a big, big panic over violence in media.
In the early 90s two, not one, TWO violence controversies exploded at once: the controversy over violent video games and the controversy over violence on TV. Media circus Senate hearings were held on both issues. The former yielded the ESRB, and Dr. Arthur Pober presented the ESRB's rating system before the Senate in 1994 for their approval. The violence on TV issue saw all the heads of the major networks dragged before the Senate and told to explain all of this violence on TV, many clips from "violent programming" and advertisements for violent shows and movies were shown. Kids programs like Power Rangers were brought up. This was during the era where darker action-oriented kids programming like Power Rangers, Batman: TAS, etc. were coming out. Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, testified and volunteered to work with the TV business to develop a ratings system, and his work is what you see on the screen today. The V-Chip was also a product of this controversy. All of this stuff was presented before Congress and the media before being implemented, presumably for their approval and to show they were "taking action"...before Congress did. The controversy resurfaced in 2000 after Columbine and this time the problem was that the FTC discovered that R-rated films, M-rated games, and the like were being test marketed and advertised to the under-17 set, and that the TV ratings system wasn't working. Once again Senate hearings were held, Valenti tried to defend the MPAA, record label and RIAA presidents testified, etc. It yielded some advertising reforms (like no trailers for R-rated movies before a PG-rated film).
My point with all this is that FUNimation suddenly found themselves with a very violent foreign television program and had to do something to make it marketable to American kids and families and palatable to American children's television heads, who of course were in the thick of it. 4Kids found themselves in the same unfortunate predicament years later with One Piece where they had no understanding of what the content of the show was, just that it was big in Japan. These changes WERE necessary even if we didn't and still don't like them. If FUNi had been swept up into the controversy it would have destroyed them and it would have put down the DBZ franchise in America. Chris understood this and I believe his bones to pick were not so much censorship (except it was so easy to point and laugh at just how censored it was) as dubbing\script quality, and the unavailability of the uncut, uncensored Japanese version on home video. FUNi shortly rectified the situation after they heard the fans. Adult Swim changed the game as well allowing FUNi to license and get on TV a mostly uncensored YuYu Hakusho and Blue Gender. Being on cable also helped DBZ because cable has no FCC content regulations, it's all up to the network. Chris BTW did make some excellent points regarding the censorship, such as how they could have trashed the infamous HFIL episode entirely.
