Forum - View topicIs it true other countries had it better than USA in showing uncensored localized anime? Esp dubs?
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Samuknight
Posts: 35 |
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I remember reading an article years around 2011 by an American anime fan who was also a journalist. He was criticizing in the article about how America always censors dubs mature content like smoking, sexual content, cussing, and esp violence esp blood and gore and he even pointed out how American companies idiotically change names and even basic terms such as altering Saiyan to Saiyajin in DBZ's first localization, changing Usagi to Serena,and even fully translating attacks to English like Kenshin's various attacks.
He was boasting about how other countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Latin America, and so on show anime in its authentic forms without censorship, name changes, etc. He went as far as saying even the backwards Saudi Arabia has it far better than Americans do when it comes to experiencing accurate dubbing. How true is this perception? I was just talking with a French otaku on DeviantArt and when I learned from her Hokuto No Ken was shown in France when she was a kid on public TV at children's time slot equivalent of Cartoon Network's Toonami and Disney's JetX, I was so impressed. I literally told her its awesome France shows even violent stuff to kids. She than pointed out although kids did watch HNK when she was growing up, to start with it was a big mistake that a French company assumed it was just a cartoon. That when the voice actors where reading the translation, they were surprised at how violent HNK was and the French company **** in its pants that they were going to cause an outrage by showing this on TV. At this point the French company already spent a lot of money on buying HNK's licensing rights from Toei........ So what did they do? They changed to dub to make it so stupid to the point of feeling like an abridged series. Completely taking out important parts of the story to give it a Saturday Cartoon feel, even the parts they shown that connects the dots to a a real overall story had lines changed to sheer stupidity. The extremely violent parts weremade into comedic effects through altered scripts (despite all the blood, gore, exploding organs, open wounds from cuts or cracked body parts from being hit by a club, etc) to make it seem not so serious. Even the opening was intentionally given a stupidly hilarious song to follow this pattern. So despite HNK being so violent, it got away in public TV at a children's slot because the cutting out of parts of a story made the violence seem like BS nonsense and even the intact parts that clearly shows villagers getting massacred and bad guys exploding organs out were made very funny instead of serious because of the extremely BS idiotic script. It was not HNK at all except for featuring scenes from the series. In addition she tells me even accurately dubbed series had some censorship such as Captain Harlock cutting out vulgar language and sort of simplifying the script for children's age and DBZ eliminating open body holes and toning down the blood and more serious series such as Gundam eliminating slaughters of civilians (or at least removing the specific scenes and replacing it with still shots and voice acting describing what happens). And that its a miracle Saint Seiya and Rose of Versailles were dubbed completely without censorship (with perhaps only the language altered and replaced without cuss words). It seems many English speaking casual otakus have this impression that Pakistan doesn't pay attention to nudity in anime or that Saudi Arabia openly shows something like Berserk where people are getting their arms and legs cut off by swords. How true is this perception? The French lady's explanation makes me wonder if the article about how "even Saudi Arabia has it better than we do" is utter BS? |
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doctorx0079
Posts: 55 |
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All of your examples are really old. I wonder how much Toonami has changed since the old days when Gundam Wing, DBZ and Saint Seiya (Knights of the Zodiac) were censored. Since I don't have CN I couldn't say, but I'm sure there are other people on here who can help us out.
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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In my experience there is an important distinction to make here: are you talking about the anime which was broadcast on American television? If so, then yes, that kind of content would often have been censored, fans hated it, and there has been a lot of debate about it. For example, when Tenchi Muyo aired on Cartoon Network they added digipaint swimsuits to characters in the hot spring bathing scenes, they changed the dubbing to refer to alcohol as "tea", and so on. Various shows had blood edited out or violent scenes were shortened. But even that was limited, during their late-night programming block "Adult Swim" they did not have that editing, and they also broadcast other shows which had more extreme content uncut. There were also localization edits made too. One famous one: in the 4kids dub of Pokemon the characters refer to onigiri (rice balls) as "jelly donuts" instead. BUT that is only limited to mainstream broadcast. If you buy or rent a VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray those are not censored. If you watch on a streaming platform things are very rarely censored. To give an old example: Carl Macek from Streamline is infamous in the Anime community for cutting up Macross, Mospeada, and Southern Cross to create Robotech, earning him the nickname "Carl the Butcher" or worse. Yet, despite the infamy of his hackjob on Macross, and it have been made at roughly the same time, the Streamline dub of Doomed Megalopolis is excellent, IMHO. And not only is the dub of good quality, they didn't censor a single scene, the translation is very accurate, and that's surprising given that Doomed Megalopolis is a horror show packed with objectionable content: language, nudity, blood, violence, monsters, demonic possession, pentagrams, rape, incest.... So it really comes down to how/where it was shown. Broadcast on mainstream daytime TV? It was probably censored/edited. Available anywhere else? It was probably not censored. I'd also like to add that this is mostly an older problem. When I was getting into anime in the mid-to-late 1990s it was pretty common for dubs to change cultural references or jokes. That was one of the reasons which drove me to pretty much ignore the domestic market and focus on imports and learning Japanese. But an awful lot has changed since then, dubs have gotten a lot better an censorship is pretty much unheard of these days. Ironically, I have heard about a case of the opposite happening: Manga Entertainment in the UK would deliberately ADD cursing and foul language to their dubs even when it was not present in the original audio. Apparently the logic behind this was that it made the show get a higher age rating, which they felt was better for marketing the videos to edgy teens. Last edited by AkumaChef on Mon Jan 13, 2020 10:32 am; edited 1 time in total |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Amazon Prime is streaming Babylon, Vinland Saga, and Blade of the Immortal, and none of them appears to have any censorship, at least of the violence. We see decapitations and lots of blood. Immortal also has a number of rape scenes, some of which are pretty brutal. My suspicion is that only people relatively new to anime watch on a platform like Toonami. Those of us who follow seasonal anime shows use Crunchyroll, Funimation, Netflix, and Amazon. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Agreed. I'm unwilling to go out on a limb and say that there is zero censorship with modern day releases or with streaming services, but I certainly haven't come across any personally, and I think it's safe to say that if any exists it's the exception and not the rule. You really had to dial the clock back and talk about literal broadcast television 15 years ago in order to run into examples of censorship. These days most platforms people use (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Funimation, etc...) broadcast exactly what was broadcast in Japan. |
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doctorx0079
Posts: 55 |
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But my question is, does Toonami still censor stuff? I suspect they have to. Do they censor as much as they did in the Gundam Wing days?
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5936 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I would think there would be a greater chance that the (daytime) Toonami could have censorship, and much less the (nighttime) Adult Swim.
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