2021 Update (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Scott from TFS.

It’s 2021, and we’ve all made it through a particularly rough year. One that’s left the channel looking a little more barren than we prefer. With a lot of questions, concerns, frustrations, and suggestions from fans, we wanted to take a minute to fill you in on what’s been happening, what’s happening now, and what will be happening in the future, and hopefully clear the air.

First, let’s touch on something that’s been sort of vague these last several years: What is Team Four Star?

There’s been this growing idea that, because of our subscriber count and success of DragonBall Z Abridged, that we’ve managed to become a full on production house, and that our income and talent pool is large enough to produce content of similar quality from scratch on a regular basis.

But the truth is that we’re essentially a 10-person operation, with everyone having varying skillsets (editors, composers, entertainers, to writers, actors, etc.). For us, any major production is going to take a lot of time and effort on our part, as we’ve had to keep our staff count low enough to cover all our expenses. And since the end of DBZA and the move away from Abridged-style content, we’ve also had to refocus our efforts across the board on original projects (including the ShortZ). This was always going to involve a lot of exploration and experimentation, which we were prepared for.

Then COVID-19 happened.

We had a slate of projects that had started production in 2019, looking to be finished and released in 2020. A couple of these projects were Unabridged and AWF, but there were others that we’ve yet to announce. When COVID hit, our office was shut down immediately, several projects were put on hold—or shelved entirely—and our gaming channel took a huge hit as we were unable to record in person, a format we (and our audience) greatly prefer.

Unabridged was the biggest project to be put on hold. We’re aware of its more limited audience, but it was one the most fun, experimental projects we were producing. It was something we all enjoyed working on as a team, and had a lot of potential to grow. So when it had to be put on hiatus due to the pandemic, along with AWF and our other, unannounced projects, it changed up our whole timeline.

By the end of Spring 2020, it was apparent that we probably wouldn’t be able to resume several of our productions until 2021 at the earliest. So, we shifted over to producing a few “quarantine projects.” The one-off videos for Haikyuu and Dr. Stone were experiments with original animation and anime parody, but we’ve also been developing a couple of original, serial projects that are nearing completion. In the meantime, we made sure to stick to the Talkcast Podshow as a way to keep in contact with you guys, and also for our own genuine enjoyment.

Now, as we said with the gaming channel, due to restrictions, we were unable to record in person with one another. This heavily limited our ability to produce new gaming videos that we felt were both up to the quality standard people expected, but moreover… that we actively enjoyed. While we know that part of doing one’s “job” shouldn’t be entirely hinged on one’s enjoyment, it should go without saying that lack of enthusiasm and enjoyment shines through negatively when it comes to that kind of content.

There’s also been a general malaise around gaming content on YouTube, as Twitch is a more effective platform, both for engaging with an audience and making money. As such, we’ve struggled to maintain our focus on our gaming channel, especially as views on those videos had already been slowly decreasing over the past couple years. It was never our intention to entirely abandon the channel, but it was obvious that we needed to rethink how we wanted to approach it. We do have a plan to release more consistent content on that channel, mostly via our mad lads Kirran and Grant, as well as group content we’ve been trying to organize.

But we are entirely aware that the dearth of content over 2020 also came with a lot of silence on our part. That ties into one of the biggest issues we’ve had over the last several years: communication and transparency.

Why? Why has this remained such an issue?

There are a few reasons, but one of the biggest has been our track record of sticking to deadlines and consistently delivering. Time and time again we’ve given you dates for established projects, or even announced new projects, only for things to change nearing release (God knows nobody wants another cock up like with Bojack). We’ve been working to fix these issues for a long time, but with 2020 completely changing up how we run our business, we knew that promising anything in the long term would likely backfire on us. As such, we’ve kept things closer to the vest than we honestly prefer.

Another reason is our ongoing struggle with our image; our “brand”, if you would. DragonBall Z Abridged is still a huge part of our “brand,” and inarguably helped us get where we are today, but it is—for all intents and purposes—over. While we understand that a lot of people think our issues would be solved by returning to DBZA, our reasons for ending the series have only become more valid since we announced we were finished with it. Even if we returned to DBZA, we'd just be kicking the can down the road. We still have to deal with the growing pains of original production, and we choose to deal with them now.

The ShortZ (and an upcoming side project) will continue to provide similar content in the vein of DragonBall related parodies. But, to put it simply, we have no intentions of making another “Abridged” series again. There are too many issues that range from legal to practical that make them utterly untenable for us.

This has meant that we’re having to grow more and more careful about what we announce and when, because we’re trying to figure out what we want to ultimately invest our time into. Again, we’re not some big production company.

The long and short of it is: We are just a bunch of guys making stuff we like on YouTube. Honest to God, that’s what we’ve always been.

I want to tell you that, going into 2021, we’ll have better communication. I want you guys to trust us and stick with us. But, the fact is, it’s been a rough road here, already. A lot of folks aren’t getting what they originally signed up for, we haven’t firmly established our future goals, content has been coming out inconsistently, and the growing pains of creating original content are abundant. Our reticence hasn’t helped with this, either.

But this whole post is a way of trying to reach out, not as a company, but as people who love making content, who just want to talk to you like normal human beings. Because over the last few years, it feels like we haven’t. We’ve tried to wear a corporate mask to help sell this image of us as a professional production studio in the hope of pushing our products, when really we’re just a group of people working on passion projects, and who’ve always been at their best when being frank with you guys.

No deflections, no corporate doublespeak, no bullshit.

Trust us, guys, we fucking hate all of that too.

As for our productions moving forward: firstly, for those of you who come to us for general anime parodies? The biggest source of those will be X in X Minutes, in the same style as the Demon Slayer one I put out last year.

Secondly, over the course of the Spring, you’ll begin to see the projects we started developing after COVID struck. The one we’re really excited about is Magic Time Wizards, an animated production created by Stephan, Kirran, and Grant that has already been shown off on our Patreon. Then, later on the in year, the stuff we had to put on hold should begin to make a return.

Finally, with the changes we’ve made, we have more time to invest in rebuilding the gaming channel. As we said before, Kirran and Grant are already recording stuff for you guys, and we have a few more ideas in the pipeline that make the channel a more unique experience than massive blocks of videos devoted to a single game.

Ultimately, 2020 being a right bag of shit doesn’t excuse the longer, overarching problems we’ve had. A lot of us are legitimately trying to figure out what the direction of our team is, and we do sincerely apologize for the frustration, anger, confusion, and concern we’ve caused in the meantime. We’re not asking for forgiveness, merely an understanding of where our minds and hearts have been.

We look forward to the release of our upcoming projects and hope that we can better communicate with you all, not just about new projects, but about us, who we are, and what we want to do.

Thank you so much for your time, please stay safe, and I hope you’ll stick around for the future.

• Scott “KaiserNeko” Frerichs