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This Week in Games - Censorship in Japan

See, each character in CAPCOM Vs. SNK is given a "cost" of one to four points, usually based around their basic power. Your roster for each match caps at four points, forcing you to be strategic to play a tag-style match. Heavy hitters like Geese Howard or Akuma will take up all four points, but obvious "weaker" characters like Nakoruru will only cost one. I see the logic behind the system, and I know why it was implemented, but it never felt good to use.

In English, Beast Wars was a serious cartoon with a complicated, layered storyline. In Japanese, the voice actors went nuts ad-libbing gags into every other line (and the fans love it)

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In English, Beast Wars was a serious cartoon with a complicated, layered storyline. In Japanese, the voice actors went nuts ad-libbing gags into every other line (and the fans love it)

What, like Ghost Stories?

X-Men originally aired on TV Tokyo from 1994 to 1995. For the TV Tokyo dub of the series, the intro was replaced with a new, Japanese-animated sequence and a new theme: "Rising" by Ambience. Starting with episode 42, a second intro was used, featuring the song "Dakishimetai Dare Yori Mo" (抱きしめたい誰よりも, "I want to embrace you more than anyone else"). The end credits sequence was also changed: it featured shots of American X-Men comic books set to the song "Back to You", also by Ambience.

The TV Tokyo dub was directed by Yoshikazu Iwanami and featured scripts rewritten to include a more humorous, self-satirical tone with an emphasis on comical adlibbing, a hallmark of his dubbing style. Episodes were edited for time so that new segments could be added to the end to promote X-Men: Children of the Atom, which featured the dub actors pretending to play the game as their characters. A second dub was made in the early 2000s for broadcast on Toon Disney (Japan) that is more faithful to the original English scripts and does not cut episodes for time. This version used the original American intro and end credits rather than the unique ones created for the TV Tokyo version.

The second television dub, and inarguably the most popular, began its run in 1993 on TV Tokyo for a grand total of 102 episodes, ending with “Donatello’s Bad Time”. TV Tokyo is one of Japan’s major networks (comparable to NBC or CBS here in the states) and thus its programming was more easily accessible to a wider audience than a satellite network like NHK2. While the series did not complete the full US run of 194 episodes, you have to understand that a foreign cartoon running for 102 episodes on a major Japanese network like TV Tokyo is nothing short of a miracle.

In Japan, there are various rules and guidelines in place that frequently prevent foreign programming from appearing on major networks like TV Tokyo, as they wish to save their broadcasting timeslots for Japanese programming so as to stimulate jobs and what-not. These sorts of guidelines are not exclusive to Japan; it’s my understanding that Canadian networks have very similar rules. For a foreign cartoon to appear on networks such as TV Tokyo, there has to be a considerable amount of backing from Japanese companies as well as respectable ratings after the fact. These factors would contribute to the ultimate failure of the 4Kids Ninja Turtles cartoon in Japan many years later, but that’s getting ahead of myself.

Voice-wise, this version is probably best recognized among Western audiences as the one with “that Krang”. You know what I’m talking about. But in case you actually don’t, this version gave Krang the notoriously high-pitched, whiney, squealing and all-around painfully obnoxious voice (provided by Hideyuki Umetsu) that Japanese fans know and love so very, very much. I fail to see the attraction, but whatever. It also carried several exclusive gags, such as Shredder constantly referring to Krang as a “stupid octopus” (a far cry from the “Mr. Krang” heard in the other dub), and a considerable amount of adlibbing, often to the point of having the characters speak when their lips are visibly not moving.

While I cannot confirm whether this also relates to the NHK2 dub, I know that the TV Tokyo dub also featured a few name changes. “Oroku Saki” is not a very…er…real name in Japan. So, while the “Oroku” stayed, the “Saki” was changed to “Sawaki”, an actual name in Japan. An even greater change was made to “Hamato Yoshi”, which became “Yoshihama Takeshi”. Eh, close enough. Rex-1 was also renamed “Robocop” in an act of pure trademark infringement, but the less said about that, the better.