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Answerman - Do Edited-For-Television Versions Of Anime Get Preserved?


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wonderwomanhero





PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 5:57 pm Reply with quote
I remember the one Sailor Moon S episode featuring Mimette and some villain was censored cause the monster of the day had starfish over her breasts....or didn't? I can't exactly remember but it was censored when aired. Not sure if it shows on the DVD edit.

All this is taking me back to the days when vh-1 aired Showgirls with the horrible digitally painted underwear and bras.
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Exalted Incarnate



Joined: 21 Sep 2015
Posts: 283
Location: In the memory of time...
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:02 pm Reply with quote
I'm fine with censored anime, but I hate it when my favorite action scenes are censored to make it seem less brutal, and when the blood and gore is taken out it really gets me annoyed Mad
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FLCLGainax





PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:15 pm Reply with quote
Cartoon Network seems to hold on to atleast some of their old Toonami edits. The episode of Outlaw Star which aired as part of the April Fools' day stunt on Adult Swim in 2012 had the same paint and language edits.

I still have recordings of Cowboy Bebop from the first Adult Swim runs.
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doubleO7



Joined: 17 Jul 2009
Posts: 1068
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:33 pm Reply with quote
FWIW, Adult Swim/Cartoon Network does still seem have at least some of their old broadcast tapes in their vault. If I'm remembering right, some of the shows that aired for the April Fools 2012 broadcast had the same Y7 edits as the original broadcast (Gundam Wing and Outlaw Star off the top of my head. DBZ was also an old tape, but it was the "uncut" version they started airing in the mid-2000's), while others had new, uncut tapes supplied (Blue Sub and Yu Yu). There doesn't seem to be much of a pattern for what they held on to and why, but they did have access to some of them, but had to get new tapes for others.

As other users have pointed out though, old shows that were edited/re-written into what basically amounted to a completely new show (Robotech, Voltron, Samurai Pizza Cats, etc) have been preserved and have nostalgic value to people both in and outside of the anime fandom, while shows that simply had nudity/language/blood sanitized for TV broadcast, but were otherwise untouched are unlikely to ever see the light of day again, if they were preserved at all (it's the old mindset of "this show needs to be changed to appeal to American children" vs "this show needs to be changed just for TV" that we commonly see nowadays).

Most of those types of edited-for-content shows were marketed directly towards anime fans outside of the TV broadcast anyways, making for example, Adult Swim's slightly-bleeped, occasionally-blurred version of GITS SAC completely obsolete as it's available uncut on DVD, whereas Voltron was only marketed towards kids both on and off of TV in a time where the American anime fandom was almost non-existent and there was basically no demand for an uncut version to appease these fans.

4Kids (or whatever they're called now) licensed shows are the closest equivalent we have that old mindset of "this show needs to be changed to appeal to American children," while mostly ignoring actual anime fans as a potential target audience. The big difference is, unlike back in the 80's, there actually is a large fandom that knows of these shows before they ever make their way to the English-speaking market, and most of us would rather just have them uncut.
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Lili-Hime



Joined: 05 Jun 2014
Posts: 569
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:37 pm Reply with quote
Still got some of the old Sailor Moon DiC dub!!! Anime hyper Ofc this was obtained via... questionable means lol in all fairness I did tape them off TV religiously when I was 14/15 but there are always these! Even if they didn't include all the episodes

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SahgoDN



Joined: 09 Mar 2013
Posts: 86
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:54 pm Reply with quote
I am pretty curious as to how "bloodless RK" turned out (I'm not from the US, so I never got even a glimpse of that version).

I also would love to see clips of the "Disco Guns" of Gundam Seed. It's very amusing in screenshots, so I imagine it would be even more so in motion.
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Alan45
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Joined: 25 Aug 2010
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:58 pm Reply with quote
@Darkabomination

The only uncut English dub of Card Captor Sakura that anyone here has mentioned was the Animax dub done for Asian release. That was included with the NISA Bluray set as an extra.

The only dub done in the US was for the show Cardcaptors. This involved rearranged and missing episodes and heavy editing. It is also incomplete. The stated purpose was to make Shaoran the main character in order to appeal to boys. They were apparently convinced that girls would not watch the show.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 7:03 pm Reply with quote
Yeah, in the Toonami case I think they literally just used the old broadcast tapes which must have been sitting in some Williams Street broom closet for a solid decade. [adult swim] also used the same broadcast tapes for Cowboy Bebop for ages, well after the time when they could have aired just about every bit of content that was edited. It's kind of fun to think of those old things being squirreled away there. Besides the legendary April Fools' farting episodes, my own personal wish would be for the language-edited Samurai Champloo broadcast: the *scritcha-scratch* record sound they used for bleeping was honestly more fun than hearing the uncensored dialog.

As for the original question, obviously you're SOL for legal releases unless the show happened to get some sort of edited home video release. However, I do know that there are at least a few people out there who post/share old recordings of edited show broadcasts. If it's mostly a case of a certain broadcast dub, and not necessarily the video being edited itself, some uploaders will release a version of the series including the audio track paired with higher-quality video. I do agree that it's nice to have at least some record of what was done to a series, a la Mike Toole's "Dubs that Time Forgot" panels, whether it's for nostalgia purposes or pure academic interest. I mean, something like this gem deserves to be preserved for eternity. Very Happy
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NJ_



Joined: 31 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 7:31 pm Reply with quote
wonderwomanhero wrote:
I remember the one Sailor Moon S episode featuring Mimette and some villain was censored cause the monster of the day had starfish over her breasts....or didn't? I can't exactly remember but it was censored when aired. Not sure if it shows on the DVD edit.


If you mean this then no, it's not on the DVD. It might be on the VHS though since Pioneer was releasing both versions of the dub on that format at the time.
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CCTakato



Joined: 24 Jul 2015
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 7:41 pm Reply with quote
Lili-Hime wrote:
Still got some of the old Sailor Moon DiC dub!!! Anime hyper Ofc this was obtained via... questionable means lol in all fairness I did tape them off TV religiously when I was 14/15 but there are always these! Even if they didn't include all the episodes

ADV actually released all of the DiC dub of Sailor Moon on DVD before the show originally went out of print. They were single volumes but they had about six episodes per volume. I imagine with the new Viz dub replacing it, the used copies of those must still cost a fortune on Ebay. Even though I prefer the new Viz dub myself, I still hope Viz will one day rescue license the DiC version if only for compeltionist sake. And for all the problems the DiC dub had, the music and voice acting were actually pretty good in it. As far as what edited for content dubs are available on home video, I remember Bandai released the edited version of Gundam Wing on VHS. I still actually have my VHS copy of the Toonami version of Endless Waltz. The Cardcaptors version of the first CCS movie is also available on Discotek's release of the home video release.

Quote:
The only dub done in the US was for the show Cardcaptors. This involved rearranged and missing episodes and heavy editing. It is also incomplete. The stated purpose was to make Shaoran the main character in order to appeal to boys. They were apparently convinced that girls would not watch the show.
That's not entirely accurate though. Geneon also produced an uncut English dub of the Sealed Card movie they released on DVD which had professional American anime VAs and was entirely uncut. For some reason though, NIS and Discotek are still ignoring the existence of the second movie and have yet to rescue license it and I have no idea why, considering it's the actual ending for the anime. I was lucky to get my copy of the special edition DVD but I would still love to own it on Blu Ray as I love the Sealed Card movie. Also in regards to Cardcaptors, it was only aired incomplete in the U.S. but Nelvana did release all 70 episodes of their Cardcaptors dub in all other English speaking countries. They even created a new English dub version of the Japanese theme songs for the Australian broadcast instead of using the American Cardcaptors theme song. The episodes that only aired in other countries were still censored and Westernized, but had significantly less edits than the Kid's WB episodes and were actually pretty good for an Americanized dub of a kid's show.
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rizuchan
Collector Extraordinaire



Joined: 11 Mar 2007
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 7:50 pm Reply with quote
I personally would love to see a release of "Cardcaptors". And not because I have any nostalgia for it - I wasn't much a fan when it was on the air, even though I'm a huge CCS fan now. I hated edited dubs back in the day because that was all we had available to us, but now that it's so easy to see the original Japanese version I kind of like seeing how they changed things. In fact a lot of times I end up strangely defending these dubs because people tend to exaggerate the edits, as if 4Kids and Nelvana were trying their damnedest to turn great shows into crap. Laughing
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Darkabomination



Joined: 17 Mar 2015
Posts: 89
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 7:53 pm Reply with quote
The Samurai Champloo edit was fun, yeah. The vinyl scratches done over the cursing worked with the show's flavor, and made the dialogue more entertaining, since only the direct swearing was censored and the rest was untouched. To the point that I was kind of disappointed with the uncensored audio.
As for Card Captors, I've heard a lot of sources say that the English cast did prepare an unaltered version of the scripts, and that the Kids WB edit was done later, but the masters appear to have been lost or having legal issues.
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JEArgumedo



Joined: 11 Apr 2012
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 8:15 pm Reply with quote
Hey everyone,

I wanted to really quickly chime in as to what happens to these tapes from at least the broadcasters end. I've been working in television for years now and while there's slight differences to how certain networks preserve things, they all pretty much save everything they air. I also went through getting stuff from our archive for the upcoming IGPX release. (I currently work for Turner Broadcasting, by the way)

As has already been pointed out, Williams Street brought out their tape library for the Toonami April Fool's joke, and no, FUNi, nor Bandai sent those tapes over, they dug those out of their storage. Basically, every single episode that's ever been sent or produced of any show is saved in storage (used to be mostly tape, but we've gotten pretty efficient in digitizing this stuff). On top of the original episode tape, we save a copy of network feeds constantly, or as we call them, "airchecks". Now, we don't use tape anymore (at least where I currently work), but we keep stuff on servers as well as professional disks as back-ups. So basically, all the networks might have up to 3 copies of the same episode, and we take care of this stuff very carefully.

Obviously it's not available to the public for multitudes of reasons like losing rights to air it, not having the right to distribute it, music issues, etc, but we hold on to it, because if we get the license back (like say, Cowboy Bebop) we can just run the old tape (now long since digitized and upscaled to 1080i HD) without taking up any expense or time, unless there's a new version or an HD master of the show (like say, Cowboy Bebop) that looks better that we need new masters for.

We still have those old masters of Cowboy Bebop, by the way, but I doubt they'll ever run them again.

Hope that answers some questions!

PS: Tape is really resilient when cared for properly. I've dived very far back and found some great stuff for work that holds up extremely well. And remember, these aren't simple VHS tapes, these are Betacam SP or Digibeta tapes that are capable of displaying a much higher quality that's needed for broadcast and are designed not to degrade in quality when stored or copied.
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Alan45
Village Elder



Joined: 25 Aug 2010
Posts: 9798
Location: Virginia
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 8:18 pm Reply with quote
@CCTakato

You are correct that The Sealed Card movie came out under the Cardcaptor Sakura label. I wasn't thinking of that since it was not part of the TV series. For the record it came out under the Pioneer label before they changed the company name.

I really doubt it is being ignored. Either the TV series or the first movie didn't do well on Bluray, or much more likely, since it was released later it may still be tied up in licensing hell.
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Desa



Joined: 07 Mar 2015
Posts: 285
PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2015 8:25 pm Reply with quote
This reminded me of that episode of Rail Wars (I think it was episode 4) where the TV version was significantly less censored than the blu-ray version. One of those rare cases where the TV version has more than the disc version. There are also some rare cases where a TV broadcast has better picture quality than a disc release, so it would be a shame to lose those recordings.
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