1. Digimon Season 1 English Dub is far superior to the Japanese original. Many people choose Cowboy Bebop as the "Better in English" anime, but... Digimon S1 is night-and-day. Stronger script with better jokes/puns, cooler attack names (English "Pepper Breath" vs the Japanese "Baby Flame"), everything is straight up better in English.
2. Cowboy Bebop is probably the better known example in anime community.
3. Final Fantasy VII -- Perhaps it is more obvious that "Cloud" and "Earth" would have a doomed romantic relationship if we stuck to the original Japanese. But "Earth" was chosen as a name for the Japanese audience because English sounds exotic. To return that feeling of "exoticness", they transliterated it into "Aeris", and suddenly we return back to the original exotic feeling name.
4. Power Rangers -- Okay, I don't know how to think of this one. Power Rangers took the original Japanese stuff and changed it so much, it no longer looked anything like the original Super Sentai.
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Saban Entertainment knew how to do dubs / Americanizations. (Digimon S1, Power Rangers, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dragonball Z '96).
Just because other companies failed where Saban succeeded doesn't mean that "Americanization" is bad. Its that "bad Americanization" is bad.
エアリス (earisu) is not how Japanese speakers would pronounce "Earth". That would be アース (aasu), which sounds quite different. And you may be aware, but "Aeris" is not the preferred rendering today, which is "Aerith".
Don't have an opinion on your examples in general, just wanted to correct a misconception.
I’ve read that for Samurai Pizza Cats, they didn’t have the original scripts, and so made up the dialogue based on the animation. If that’s true, it was brilliant!
The Yellow Ranger was a man in the original Japanese, but a woman in the American version.
Power Rangers is probably the weirdest East/West thing to ever happen, yet still work out. The amount of "translation" that occurred is nearly nil, it was pretty much a wholesale reinvention of the entire plot.
But I want to point out some counter-examples.
1. Digimon Season 1 English Dub is far superior to the Japanese original. Many people choose Cowboy Bebop as the "Better in English" anime, but... Digimon S1 is night-and-day. Stronger script with better jokes/puns, cooler attack names (English "Pepper Breath" vs the Japanese "Baby Flame"), everything is straight up better in English.
2. Cowboy Bebop is probably the better known example in anime community.
3. Final Fantasy VII -- Perhaps it is more obvious that "Cloud" and "Earth" would have a doomed romantic relationship if we stuck to the original Japanese. But "Earth" was chosen as a name for the Japanese audience because English sounds exotic. To return that feeling of "exoticness", they transliterated it into "Aeris", and suddenly we return back to the original exotic feeling name.
4. Power Rangers -- Okay, I don't know how to think of this one. Power Rangers took the original Japanese stuff and changed it so much, it no longer looked anything like the original Super Sentai.
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Saban Entertainment knew how to do dubs / Americanizations. (Digimon S1, Power Rangers, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dragonball Z '96).
Just because other companies failed where Saban succeeded doesn't mean that "Americanization" is bad. Its that "bad Americanization" is bad.