So, I was watching cartoons with my friends on Saturday morning, having nothing else to do, and we all agreed: 4kids' anime dubs are horrible.
For those not familiar, 4kids is a dub company that rose to prominence with Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. They're quite famous for their children's work, as their name implies, but in particular their dub of One Piece is infamous. Oddly, they did pretty well with Shaman King, mostly because they forgot about it at the end. Thankfully, they're too smart to get other anime: I could not deal with a version of Evangelion where "Shawn" (Shinji) and "Carl" (Kaoru) are "just friends", "Carl" is behind the "alien" (angel) attack, the bath scene which so developed Kaoru's character is removed, and "Shawn" just sets "Carl" down as some pop tune (Kids won't identify with Beethoven.) plays.
This is nothing new: George Lucas spoke out against the possibility of taking art and rebranding it as another's cultural values back in 1988. (I think George sleeps at night because he's only using new technology to alter "his babies".) In the 80s, this rebranding, bowdlerizing, removing all cultural context and even blending two or more unrelated series was often blamed on one Carl Macek, who gave us Robotech, which did everything but bowdlerizing; for a long time, the term was "macekre". Funimation and DiC got the bad rep in the 90s. Now it's 4kids. Every generation of anime fans has a different company to bitch about.
So, what does this have to do with New Age? Everything. I can't help but see a lot of similarities in taking certain elements out of cultural context, replacing them with one's own cultural values (i.e., replacing mutual respect and community with self-interest), and so on. It's very similar, only a lot worse. As a result, only my otaku friends seem to get the whole issue with New Age appropriation.
All true fans of Lakota ceremonies do their sweats with subtitles instead of dubbed voices.
