Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Were TV Series Cut Into "Movies" For The US?
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Codeanime93
Posts: 599 |
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I guess Dallos counts as an example of this type though it's an OVA I guess, different thing. Still hilarious trying to market a mature anime about a moon colony rebellion to children.
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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And then there was Cinar's run with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which did both full series and movies; Hey, why turn down money?
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Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1751 |
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I think it's awesome that a cel was used as the header image for this article, even though it's from the 1990s version of the series, not the one that those around in the 1980s might remember.
So much this. You either mailed blank VHS tapes to fan sub groups or you paid $10/tape and that included shipping. This stuff was a godsend to me as a teen simply because Suncoast charged $40 for 1 VHS tape with 3 episodes. That put most series out of the price range for most students. It was great seeing the first Pokémon movie unedited. I remember watching the US version and being really upset that they deleted the first part of the movie, thus making Mewtwo into more of a villain instead of the emotionally tormented character that he was. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2027 |
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The first example that comes to my mind is when Harmony Gold produced a combined dub of Dragon Ball movies 1 and 3 in 1989. You can still find that dub if you look hard enough. The two movies make little sense together as one cohesive narrative, but they tried to rewrite the dialogue so that they directly reference each other. Editing the first two movies together would’ve made more sense, since they directly lead into one another. The voice acting was solid too. I particularly like Wendee Lee’s performance as Bulma.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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When I got into anime in 98 (I’m old fart but not quite old guard), it was mostly about the fansubbed VHS. Which certainly had its challenges, but even then there was still enough of a fandom infrastructure that access to a decent variety and number of titles wasn’t all that difficult. But on the more legit side of things, I was a bit annoyed that back in the day all you could find was movies and short OVA series. And then for a while the only TV series to be had was Evangelion. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4099 |
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Wow, I never bothered with fansubs as I found plenty of anime on syndicated UHF to cable in the early 90s. Maybe I just had really weird stations as they had a lot of interesting blocks, monster movies and serials on the weekends as well as more esoteric things.
Yeah, this wasn't the norm for the rest of the US, huh? I really remember watching the earliest DBZ because I saw bits of Dragon Ball and I still don't know which those bits were from. Once I got a VCR, I got cable as my signals weren't good enough for recording and my options for anime skyrocketed. Curiously, I'm pretty sure I saw Dragon Ball Z on the International Channel before Cartoon Network. Original language, no subs too. As to the original question.. Sandy Frank, Sandy Frank! Look at what he did to Time of the Apes and Gammera... They did it because they could, it's really not more complicated than that. Later Japanese companies were more involved with what US companies could do and could not do with their IP because, surprise, there is money to be made in merchandising.
Cute but no? Seeing how it was all of Japanese media being cut up and spat out, it's kind of weird to look at Godzilla 1985 and say "Look, geeks made sub only, pure anime popular in the 90s! And just that!". And I'm still waiting for the release of the original Japanese cut of King Kong versus Godzilla which, amusingly, I did see through a fan sub. |
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Haterater
 Posts: 1727 |
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Closest I experienced at the time was that Little Women anime of mixing some Christmas episodes for video. Still did all the episodes, but just as a Christmas theme thing did that complication. Overall, felt like cliff notes, nothing too bad if you seen the episodes.
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Triltaison
 Posts: 734 |
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Thanks for answering my question, Justin!
It's nice to have my suspicions of them using the first few episodes because lazy basically confirmed. I did wonder if perhaps screener episodes were sent out as examples and the US companies just never bothered to request others and would staple together what they had. I've known most of the why on the matter, but the how is now slightly clearer. Thanks! |
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OjaruFan
Posts: 60 |
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Indeed. And the ones that ran over 65 episodes were too difficult to dub and market to American TV networks anyway. Doraemon 1979 technically could've aired here in 1985 since apparently, Ted Turner licensed 50 episodes and planned on airing them on TBS. It didn't happen not because there were too few episodes available (there were over 800 episodes available at the time), but most likely because the show was believed to be "too Japanese" for American audiences. Other Fujiko Fujio anime didn't come over here in the 1980s for the same reason. |
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doomydoomdoom
 Posts: 278 Location: Michigan, USA |
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Same! I became a buff in '05. There was still lots of stuff unavailable in its complete uncut and Japanese-language form or out of print at the time I became a fan (Sailor Moon, Sonic X, One Piece, and Lupin immediately come to mind), particularly if you were into older anime and manga like I am. You had to torrent it in low quality. YouTube was way way wayyyy too new. Many manga were still printed in the backwards Western way (like InuYasha) or were only available in out of print, backwards editions with crappy "Americanized" translations (Sailor Moon). But again, with me being there in the middle of the torrent and scanlations boom, none of this was too much of a problem if I just wanted to consume the story. I sadly never chased down DBZ on International Channel after reading Chris Psaros's DBZ Uncensored. I sadly never ordered fansubs of Devilman, YuYu Hakusho, Fushigi Yugi or DBZ at $10 per tape or went shopping for 10 blank VHS tapes to mail to fansub groups. I sadly never had to deal with " dubbed movie cuts" of anime instead of the real thing. All of these are experiences I've read plenty about but never had. But from what the Gen X anime buffs say...it's probably best that way LOL. I'll take Funimation's One Piece and Discotek boxsets and beautiful new hardcover JoJo's Bizarre Adventure over the other crap.
Ah yes, you witnessed Funimation's first failed attempt to dub the original Dragon Ball show in 1995. They only got through the first 13 episodes. It got 5 AM timeslots on a school night for a few months before it tanked so hard that Funimation had to rip it off the air. They released those episodes on tape through Trimark. AND! your memory serves you well because you did see Dragon Ball Z on the International Channel, I think they picked it up just before Cartoon Network. You can see screenshots of the broadcasts of those episodes on DBZ Uncensored where Chris Psaros compared it with the censored Funimation version. It was the first time many people saw those episodes. I think a few of them were even used as fansub sources. IC continued to air it along with GT until 2003 or 4. Even before DB or DBZ had been dubbed into English, it aired (along with DB) on a Hawaiian cable station called Nippon Golden Network (still around I believe), from 1990 to the mid or late 90s. NGN subtitled them in-house. This was the first ever "official" subtitling of the DB shows. Their subbed original DB episodes were distributed on the fansub scene. When Funimation picked up the show they stopped subtitling it. Anyway, all of this is well known in the DB fandom now so if you do a basic Google search the old-timers have written all about it. Also, I wonder if the kung-fu kids show Justin passed on when contacted by Sandy Frank (who is still obviously very old and alive) was this one discussed by Fred Patten here: http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/streamline-pictures-part-2/ LOL. Apparently the production was a money laundering front for the Triad or some such thing. Wouldn't surprise me if Sandy Frank had become that desperate to sell something, anything. Anyway, that's just what came into my head when I read that. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, to be fair, as was mentioned in the article, that was pretty much the only way they could sell the show to a network. And these companies got stuff from so many different parts of the world that they would've needed an army of translators if they wanted anything accurate, which they couldn't afford. They essentially made the best out of the situation they had.
Something to consider is that reading from right to left, at least in terms of paneling and layout, was unheard of in the west, and when Tokyopop tried it, this was a very risky move. Even with the warnings and instructions, there was a good chance people would miss it, not understand what was going on, and not buy because it wasn't making any sense to them. And to an extent, they were right: When Viz's Shonen Jump came around when I was in high school, I subscribed to it, and I was known among my peers, and various others, as that student who subscribed to these manga. Pretty often, someone would ask me how I was able to follow these stories and make sense of them...and while I initially thought they were referring to the serialized format, I soon realized nearly all of those comments were from them attempting to read it left-to-right, as they had never seen anything flow right-to-left before. They skipped the "You're reading the wrong way!" warnings, and the thought never occurred that they're doing it backwards. Indeed, even I get thrown off when I see webcomics from artists heavily inspired by manga that are read right-to-left, because I will assume, if it was done by a westerner, it will be left-to-right. (ONATaRT is a good example of this, whose comics are read right-to-left even if what he's drawing is based on western properties.)
I don't know if they actually made it to the end, but Viz got very far into Ranma 1/2, further than I would've thought releasing them weekly, one chapter at a time.
In Little Tokyo, near downtown L.A., one of the Jungle stores has a big poster for Prince of Space, namely one promoting its DVD release. I found it to be a pretty interesting slice of history in what is otherwise a store dedicated to following whatever is most popular in anime (or what they predict to be the most popular).
Which is a bummer, since, as the dub shown on Disney XD demonstrated, there are plenty of culturally neutral episodes of Doraemon, as is the premise overall (a robot from the future comes back to bestow amazing technology to an unlucky kid, but the kid proceeds to misuse those devices and gets into trouble--this is something any culture can understand). |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1821 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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I still remember the U.S. movie edits of Voltes V and Daimos ("Star Birds"). We got local English dubs of both series.
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9873 Location: Virginia |
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@leafy sea dragon
Viz did not complete Ranma 1/2 in comic book (floppy) format. They began issuing this series in flipped, floppy format in May 1992 and continued on a monthly basis through Part 12 # 1 dated February 2003 for a total of 129 floppys. Normally each comic book contained two of the weekly Japanese chapters. The first seven issued (Part 1) were not only flipped but colorized. They eventually completed the series in 2006 with graphic novel volume 36. The title remained flipped through the end. It was not issued unflipped until the recent Omnibus edition. Dark Horse was the last publisher to give up the flipped floppies. They continued Oh My Goddess! in that format until 2004 and Blade of the Immortal until November 2007. There were a fair number of series completed in flipped/floppy format. Maison Ikkoku, Sanctuary and Mai the Psychic Girl from Viz. Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Outlanders, Caravan Kidd from Dark Horse and Legend of Lemnear, Chirality and Midnight Panther from CPM just to name a few. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Thanks for the details about Viz's Ranma 1/2 publication and the others. Do you know how far Viz actually got? I do remember continuing to see them on the comic book racks at Borders when I got into college (back before bookstores had their own comic book section). If each weekly release had 2 chapters, and a new one came out every month from May 1992 to February 2003, that would be 262 chapters, though I wouldn't know if there were months without releases or extra releases as comic book publishers will sometimes do (and I know Viz is, at its core, a traditional publisher, as I've gotten some non-manga books from them as recently as October last year).
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9873 Location: Virginia |
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@leafy sea dragon
You ask some interesting questions. This involved digging three boxes out of deep storage. 
There were months missed and at least the first chapter was extra long and took a whole issue by itself. After some digging and calculating, there were 129 individual comics issued in that period. They covered through the first two chapters of volume 23 (of 36) of the first printing of the entire series. It also corresponds to the first two chapters of volume 25/26 (of 38) of the Omnibus edition. Unfortunately, Viz did not consecutively number the individual chapters. They restarted the count in each volume. However, by adding up individual volumes this comes to chapter 258 of 407. So slightly more than half the series. The discrepancy in the volume count is because early on Viz made no attempt to make the beginning and ending chapters of a graphic novel volume match the volumes issued in Japan. Dark Horse did the same thing. |
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