Something that annoys me in the Localization Discourse is the DURR HURR JELLY DONUTS example that always seems to get trotted out. Besides that fact that it's fucking 25 years old by this point, people seem to forget that localizations of childrens' material is as much done for shitty racist parents as well as kids and TV censors.
See, kids aren't stupid, at least not in the way we think. Kids don't instinctively turn away when they see something unfamiliar or weird. They get curious about it.
You only need to look at the massive success of Bluey in North America to see this: the various Australian-isms of the show, both in speech and setting, don't turn kids off of it at all. Quite the contrary, actually, they love seeing that "different" stuff.
(As a side note, did you know that they actually tried to re-dub Peppa Pig with American voice actors for a while because they were worried that kids might react badly to/not understand the British accents? That experiment ended quickly)
Granted, Bluey and Peppa Pig are from countries culturally closer to North America than Japan, but even so, that doesn't change kids' natural curiosity. A character saying "oh, this rice ball is tasty!" doesn't get a reaction of "I don't want to watch this, the characters eat weird stuff!" but instead "what's a rice ball, I want to know!" And, as I'm sure we're all aware, there are plenty of parents out there who lose their goddamn minds when something "foreign" or "suspicious" (read: foreign) is being promoted in the cartoons they want to babysit their kids.
It's why they tried to push Yo-kai Watch, a very Japanese show, as being set in Everytown USA and yokai as "not ghosts, monsters or creatures. YO-KAI are, quite simply, YO-KAI." Nintendo's words, not mine. If you know even the slightest thing about Japanese yokai, you know that's a huge heap of bullshit. Well, see, we have to ensure that some mom in Mississippi doesn't think her son watching the cartoon's going to be lured into the occult by a foreign religion, resulting in her getting her megachurch pastor to start a campaign against it. That's why.
It's a sad reality that children's media in North America is often subjected to the scrutiny and ire of parents who believe that baby dolls are trying to convert their kids to Islam. But is that really the sole fault of the localizers? I do think there should be pushback whenever possible, but, ultimately, a lot of those decisions are out of their hands.
