For starters, 4Kids rarely butcher anything that falls into the "America-friendly" category. This mainly includes adaptions of video games (eg. Sonic X (which ended up becoming more popular in the US than it was in Japan) and Pokemon), European animation that gets passed on between dubbers (Winx Club) and other stuff. While most people see their One Piece dub as "the archetypal 4Kids dubbed program" due to how horrible it is, not everything they did was butchered (for some time they did "uncut" dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh which sold well on DVD), and the above category was one of them.
Reading TV Tropes' "Pop Culture Urban Legends" page, there is a section making small references to what people thought the Japanese dub was like before it became accessible. I believe that the only accessible ones in this period were the two non-Porygon "banned" episodes, which were banned for slight nudity and firing blanks respectively and people thought the entire JP version was like that. The most common one might be the "Butterfree died in the original version", which is mentioned on the page.
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Reading TV Tropes' "Pop Culture Urban Legends" page, there is a section making small references to what people thought the Japanese dub was like before it became accessible. I believe that the only accessible ones in this period were the two non-Porygon "banned" episodes, which were banned for slight nudity and firing blanks respectively and people thought the entire JP version was like that. The most common one might be the "Butterfree died in the original version", which is mentioned on the page.
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