So some thoughts:
1. I have to give it to 4kids for adapting Ultimate Muscle, the continuation of a series that only made it's way to the US via a bunch of small toys, and made it so popular that it extended the life of the anime. And the toyline wasn't half bad either.
2. I kind of doubt One Piece would have been popular with a more faithful dub. I love One Piece, it just takes a while to get going and even then it's super different stylistically from Naruto and Bleach, or even DBZ or YYH.
3. For some reason, Amazon Prime Video has Fighting Foodons, so someone is licensing the streaming rights.
4. So where the heck are the streaming rights for Zoids and stuff like SD Gundam Force (I know 4kids didn't do either of these, but who has them?), or even Ultimate Muscle?
4Kids liquidated a lot of their licenses to other companies or let them expire naturally, so who knows.
I think what One Piece needed even more than a better dub was a weekday slot. This is why Funimation picking it up back when Toonami ran Monday through Friday would have been perfect. The pacing is just too slow to keep American viewers engaged on a weekly basis en masse. The same could be said for Dragon Ball Z - I don't think it's any coincidence that show was at its peak popularity in the US when there were five new episodes a week. Something like Freeza's "in five minutes the planet will explode!" being stretched out over ten episodes is far less egregious when it wraps up in two weeks as opposed to nearly three months.
The obvious counterpoint to that is that those shows did well in Japan despite being on a weekly schedule, but that speaks more to the difference in anime/manga fandom between both countries. DBZ, One Piece, Pokémon, Yugioh, etc. have always been marketed in America as the TV series first, with everything else an offshoot of that. Even the Pokémon anime premiered a few weeks before Red and Blue launched in the US, while Yugioh's first episode made it to the airwaves months before the TCG was in stores. In Japan however, the One Piece anime is a marketing tool for the manga, likewise with DBZ. Notice how with Super the pacing is dramatically better than old-school DBZ (not Kai), because Super is anime first, manga second. Japanese viewers probably just aren't as bothered by the sluggish pacing of One Piece, since they know the manga is the real story anyway.
That being said, the show was doing amazingly on Toonami in its first run (with the 4Kids dub). For a good stretch there it was the cornerstone show of the block, until Naruto premiered anyway (and even then it was a firm #2). I don't know if the show's ratings just tapered off by the time Funimation took over (they said the ratings actually improved initially), or if it had more to do with Cartoon Network gradually moving away from anime and Toonami, but in any case the show had a good run for a while. In hindsight, it probably would have been better if 4Kids sent the show straight to Toonami rather than trying it out on Saturday mornings first, where it performed terribly - they certainly would have saved themselves a lot of trouble editing the show to oblivion to meet FCC standards.
You're absolutely right about Ultimate Muscle, it's their finest work.
word, I've heard this from industry insiders on podcast's a decade ago, Toei wanted that worldwide phenomenon effect that pokemon had and editing things around was ok for DBZ too and people were alright with that. god I hate when everybody makes 4kids into the singular scape goat.
It shouldn't be misunderstood, 4Kids was pretty terrible as a production company and their producers (like Al Kahn) were all pretty shady. A lot of their bad dubbing practices came down to money. The only reason Pokémon kept its Japanese score is allegedly due to some contractual issue that mandated it. Dinosaur King (a Pokémon ripoff from Sega whose anime 4Kids also dubbed) had a similar clause, meaning it had some of its music retained in the American version. All the other dubs? 4Kids could collect royalties every time their music was played, and especially when they sold the license to international companies (i.e. any company outside of the US who wanted to dub Yugioh had to go through 4Kids, not Konami or whoever else), which made it a pretty lucrative arrangement. They'd always justify it with comments like "oh, well the American kids don't like the orchestral stuff, they only want techno and rap" and it's like, I guess I don't really have anything to contradict that but I'd also imagine kids don't care that much. Same with DBZ and Faulconer, it's not like the show bombed in every other country where they kept the Kikuchi music - it certainly didn't hurt its success but I question how much it helped.
That being said, they did seem to really want to approach One Piece differently than their other dubs, and it's frustrating that Toei meddled. Their dub actually wasn't too far off from the Japanese version at first (besides music changes and censorship), but it got significantly worse around the time Usopp was introduced and never really improved.
Btw - the Mexican dub of One Piece was based on the 4Kids version, so it uses their script, music, edited footage, etc. but retained the theme song and credits music from the Japanese version, just with Spanish lyrics. I think 4Kids did intend to keep the songs and music in their dub of the show at one point, and then it just didn't happen. Here's their version of We Are - I always preferred it to Funimation's version, honestly:
(that video syncs the music up to the Japanese version, so you don't get to see Sanji's lollipop, but rest assured he had it in 4Kids' version, lol)
