Team Four Star - Creators of a bunch of stuff to make people laugh trying to figure out what to do after a decade of comedically retelling Dragon Ball Z.

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Whatever happened to hbi2k? He did his own abridged series himself (Beserk, Ganz) before being taken on as a writer/voice actor (He voiced Nail and King Cold). Then he either was fired or voluntarily quit either during or after the Cell Saga. I always liked him the best because he always came across as the most down-to-earth out of all of the original cast members and didn't act like he was doing anything more special than just making a light-hearted parody of an old anime. I never got a feel for his politics but he always struck me as a guy who wouldn't tolerate extremism on either side.

Edit: He was last seen on his own YouTube channel three years ago.
So, after they started their patreon, they promoted him to some sort of executive/management role. Things went well, until they quit making the Abridged series and started doing other shit, and then he left. The official story was that he didn't agree with the direction TFS was going, which made it seem like he rightly thought they were being dumb by not doing DBZA any more and wanted to bail from a sinking ship. But him not wanting to go woke and go broke also makes sense.
 
So, after they started their patreon, they promoted him to some sort of executive/management role. Things went well, until they quit making the Abridged series and started doing other shit, and then he left. The official story was that he didn't agree with the direction TFS was going, which made it seem like he rightly thought they were being dumb by not doing DBZA any more and wanted to bail from a sinking ship. But him not wanting to go woke and go broke also makes sense.
I recall he also wanted to do an anime review series with them, on four star bento.
 
And apparently, Something Witty ran out of material that could be described as “legendary trainwreck” levels of bad. After building pretty much all the comedy on that. And then SAOA gets called a 5/10.
Its less that they ran out of material and more the current arc they're doing is by far the most boring shit ever. Like even SAO defenders say how only thing in thr Elfenheim arc is remembered is the "not incest" between Kirito and his sister, who turns out being his cousin, and thats about it. Asuna is dangled like a carrot in hopes that MAYBE somethinh good will happen, but it never does. So, when youre stuck with material this bland, everything ya do will be seen as this 5/10 thing.

Hellsing Abridged change material that was already pretty solid and worked well to just tell a "better" story that is just cringe.
I still cannot wrap my brain why they even picked the Hellsing OVA, when they could have grabbed the TV anime and gotten more juice out of that, cause that series IS a huge mess.
 
When they reference "Popo's eye stare", Toei is referencing themselves. You do know TFS didn't animate DBZ, correct? They didn't invent that shot, they just pointed it out as a joke.
Did the shot itself exist before TFS? As in, the full zoom-in to Popo’s eyes?
 
Its less that they ran out of material and more the current arc they're doing is by far the most boring shit ever. Like even SAO defenders say how only thing in thr Elfenheim arc is remembered is the "not incest" between Kirito and his sister, who turns out being his cousin, and thats about it. Asuna is dangled like a carrot in hopes that MAYBE somethinh good will happen, but it never does. So, when youre stuck with material this bland, everything ya do will be seen as this 5/10 thing.
Well, maybe things will look of for Something Witty Entertainment after this arc, and then they'll be seen as masters of the craft like what happened with Aincrad.

Did the shot itself exist before TFS? As in, the full zoom-in to Popo’s eyes?
The only thing that I can say TFS did with Mr. Popo was make him this super dastardly prick who dropped acid, grew pot, and had a pecking order. Hell, I wonder if things got to the point where people have forgotten the original Mr. Popo character and what he was about because I think a lot of DBZA's best bits involved Mr. Popo.
 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hpszGl2cl_k:1212
They literally play the whole "what pronouns should we use for Gotenks?" Shtick seriously, with Krillin even bringing up that since Gotenks isn't "Non-Binary" it doesn't count.

Then Roshi points out accurately "BACK IN MY DAY A HOLE WAS A HOLE!"

And what is the side slapping and super clever response to this take by Videl you ask?...."You're Gross!".

Throughout this whole sequence all I could think in my head about these fallen from grace failed prog voice actors and writers was "Freaky Alien Genotypes".
Roshi is supposed to seem like a backwards retarded caveman from the dark times before the enlightenment of respecting pronoun choice was invented. I hate Team WokeStar with a passion now.

They were never very funny, minus a few gags. Ironically their funniest bits were "pRoBlEmAtiC", like these "HoMoPhObIc" scenes:

 
I really hope they won't do the Buu Saga, or BoJack. Now all their jokes are safe, bland and overly homosexual, due to Kaiser's fag-boner constantly shoving itself in between the lines of the script.

YGOTAS also became horrible a few years ago, because Martin is a sad depressed faggot who don't wanna nobody, but stil monetizes the shit of his past edgier jokes.

They are very similar to Idubbbz in a way, they got internet fame, drank the lefty koolaid and now they're a shell of their former self.

At least, Team Fore Skin doesn't have to deal with Anisa.
 
Honestly, I'm not sure the Buu saga was ever a good fit for them, even before they got infected with the woke brainworms that ate their sense of humor. I think that DBZ's best ending point was the Cell Saga(excepting Goku's decision to go down to Other World to get some smokes), after that it was absolutely rife with unearned power-ups, retarded fusions out the yin-yang, literally half the cast being at Super Saiyan 3 while they go take a shit. It's little wonder that for the Buu saga they focus so much on the Videl/Gohan interactions, since that's probably the most grounded stuff in the series by far. And then there's the elephant in the room that unlike Vegeta, Cell, or Frieza, you can't really make Majin Buu more silly than he already was in canon. Giving it the TFS spin seems to me a bit like putting a hat on a hat. All that being said, KaiserNeko still sucks massive amounts of cocks, since it seems like every other member of TFS and most of the fanbase would be down. Saying "Hey guys, we need to take 6 months-a year to get the creative juices back" would have been irritating, but it'd be a lot more forgivable than "We didn't like doing Bojack, so we're going to flush it down the toilet and put out 4 mid animations a year. Now subscribe to our Patreon."
 
YGOTAS also became horrible a few years ago, because Martin is a sad depressed faggot who don't wanna nobody, but stil monetizes the shit of his past edgier jokes.
He really should have just skipped a couple seasons and gotten to Bakura. I give him more of a pass because he's basically a one man show and I don't think he's ever disavowed his older stuff. Maybe he has, but he's not as insufferable about it as TFS.

His characters are all starting to sound the same now, too. I guess he's gotten rusty only doing the voices once a year instead of all the time like he used to.
 
Whatever happened to hbi2k? He did his own abridged series himself (Beserk, Ganz) before being taken on as a writer/voice actor (He voiced Nail and King Cold). Then he either was fired or voluntarily quit either during or after the Cell Saga. I always liked him the best because he always came across as the most down-to-earth out of all of the original cast members and didn't act like he was doing anything more special than just making a light-hearted parody of an old anime. I never got a feel for his politics but he always struck me as a guy who wouldn't tolerate extremism on either side.

Edit: He was last seen on his own YouTube channel three years ago.
He has a videogame channel, he's been posting there now for 7 years which is nuts since I thought this dude disappeared off the net.
https://www.youtube.com/@hbi2plays/featured

Found it from an old reddit thread that talks about hbi2k commenting DBZA getting cancelled
They also transcripted hbi2k talking about why he left the company in one of his videos
 
It just kinda hit me that it's a bit rich that by hbi2k's admission, TeamFourstar is a company with a tradional corporate structure and stakes that can be issued, yet up until the very end they were claiming to be non-profit and balking every time Toei tried to take them down. It was one thing back in 2011 or so when they were a loose bunch of retards flying by the seat of their pants and maybe occasionally running a bit of merch if they needed to pay for a new computer, convention money or something like that, but as the years go by and it seems clear that they intend to run this thing as a business and regularly sell merchandise that almost certainly has some of Toei's characters on it. And they first got attacked by Toei back in the days when TFS could in no way be construed as a legitimate rival to them, so they got to coast that goodwill well past when it really made sense to extend it to them.

To be clear in almost all cases like this I'm going to be on the side of the fan creator because copyright law is fucking busted, but of all the copyright trolling I've seen, Toei doing it in TFS' later years is amongst the most understandable. Especially in the later years when they started portraying well-known Dragon Ball characters as absentee fathers, sexual deviants or whatever.
 
It just kinda hit me that it's a bit rich that by hbi2k's admission, TeamFourstar is a company with a tradional corporate structure and stakes that can be issued, yet up until the very end they were claiming to be non-profit and balking every time Toei tried to take them down. It was one thing back in 2011 or so when they were a loose bunch of retards flying by the seat of their pants and maybe occasionally running a bit of merch if they needed to pay for a new computer, convention money or something like that, but as the years go by and it seems clear that they intend to run this thing as a business and regularly sell merchandise that almost certainly has some of Toei's characters on it. And they first got attacked by Toei back in the days when TFS could in no way be construed as a legitimate rival to them, so they got to coast that goodwill well past when it really made sense to extend it to them.

To be clear in almost all cases like this I'm going to be on the side of the fan creator because copyright law is fucking busted, but of all the copyright trolling I've seen, Toei doing it in TFS' later years is amongst the most understandable. Especially in the later years when they started portraying well-known Dragon Ball characters as absentee fathers, sexual deviants or whatever.
I hate the trend of content creators who make up more in a month that 95% of the rest of the country that keep pretending to be the misunderstood little guy. Also looking at their merch store they 100% use others IP with minimal editing. If they did the same to Disney they would have long gone bankrupt.
 
I still cannot wrap my brain why they even picked the Hellsing OVA, when they could have grabbed the TV anime and gotten more juice out of that, cause that series IS a huge mess.
It was only supposed to be a one time thing Taka came up with, but then it became so popular they kept it going.

For years they talked about trying to make an original series, like their own anime, but it ended up not happening. I have to wonder, what would it even be? I assume it'd be a shonen anime of some kind, but how straight would they play it and how much would be a joke. Most likely it'd hit cerberus syndrome within two years and reach CAD levels of stupid drama in an attempt to be deep and thoughtful.

Damn you TFS, you robbed us of Cadbortion II: Electric Boogaloo.
 
It was only supposed to be a one time thing Taka came up with, but then it became so popular they kept it going.

For years they talked about trying to make an original series, like their own anime, but it ended up not happening. I have to wonder, what would it even be? I assume it'd be a shonen anime of some kind, but how straight would they play it and how much would be a joke. Most likely it'd hit cerberus syndrome within two years and reach CAD levels of stupid drama in an attempt to be deep and thoughtful.

Damn you TFS, you robbed us of Cadbortion II: Electric Boogaloo.
I mean, we've seen their range when they did that Time Squad knock off series, with the 1st ep being about murderin Jesus.
 
For years they talked about trying to make an original series, like their own anime, but it ended up not happening.
I wonder if that's one of the reasons they got the license to and dubbed Hells, to prove they could start branching out. But no one talks about it and I don't think they even turned a profit off it, so they must've abandoned a lot of planned projects.
 
Honestly the best thing you could do for the Buu saga to adapt Buu is either somehow make the silly stuff played for horror or just keep him the way he is with no changes.
Keeping Buu the same and have everyone else played straight off of him would have worked.

Honestly, in their Bits they handled Buu fine. As they did the obvious puncglines ir jokes you knew were coming. Honestly it was the getting to those jokes and punchlines that landed flat.
 
Kirbopher announced he was on the One Piece dub.

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And LittleKuriboh is crying about it.

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I think the problem is that 1) Martin is a crybaby bitch and 2) he's not willing to go full scorched earth on Crunchyroll despite saying he's not actively trying to a be a voice actor. It's also funny how he compartmentalizes how many people in the American anime industry support him but he still can't denounce it as a whole. He can't reach the very obvious conclusion that it's an industry full of backstabbers with no morals. There is no community, there's only money.
 
So LittleKuriboh didn't feel comfortable around Kirbopher and that's why he stopped pursuing VA work? When did he even work alongside him, anyway, years ago, if at all? And he held on to this "trauma" for all this time until now? What a baby, sounds more like he's just jealous that someone who did Internet shit like him truly likes his profession and can make a decent living off of it instead of stagnating.
 
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