Post
by devilmaykickass » Thu Feb 23, 2006 12:46 pm
They have to conform to network standards!?!?!? THOSE BASTARDS!
Seriously people, it's just different here than it is in Japan. A prime example is the fact that in Japan, Sailor Moon is a show aimed at 6 to 12 year old girls, yet here they had to edit the crap out of it, completely removing alot of episodes and making a couple so short that they combined them both into a single 20 minute episode, completely changing the dialogue, changing character backgrounds, genders, and relationships completely to a point where nothing made sense from one episode to the next anymore and the thing STILL gets a Y7 rating.
I mean, now there's Adult Swim and the "Anime Network", but tell me one anime series that was dubbed and shown on a normal timeslot before those two things existed that wasn't cut up, rewritten, and pasted back together (did Hamtaro have cuts and rewrites, I wonder)? I certainly don't know of any. Hell, even Pokemon got cuts and rewrites, and how much more kiddy can a show get than Pokemon?
Cultural differences in local society values exist between the two countries, which could also excuse the soundtrack changes. Again, Japan is a different place, and what appeals to the general young there is, much more than likely, drastically different than here, in terms of music certainly. Kids here go for stuff like what's on the horrendous Kids Bop CDs....search "Singo Mama no Oha" on google if you want a small look into current music sweeping Japan's children. I even remember when they dubbed the thrid and fourth season of Sailor Moon finally, they actually left the original music intact...and that got more complaints than anything from a good deal of the strictly dub watchers...they thought it was just "new music" and for the most part hated it next to the Dic episodes because of it.
These things will continue to happen, because sadly, businesses like 4Kids, Cloverway, Funimation, and all those other ones are just that: businesses. They aren't in the business of retaining art in the form it was meant to be presented in, broadening horizons, or anything else other than the business of making money. Sure it gets on my nerves and I think it's to some degree "wrong" because I do look at film and animation as an artform (sadly some people don't, I guess), and editing art only to rehash it as something it was never meant to be seen as in the first place just sickens me...but having grown up some since I first got into anime, I realize that it's really not about that, and rather, strictly business.
Personally, I can just be content in the fact that I can actually buy all the stuff that is availible on DVD now that wasn't back before anime was a household term and on so many tv channels. If I want to see a series, I get the DVDs, and the fact that that way I'm getting to see it the way it was meant to be seen and that I now can do that is good enough for me, and just gives me one less reason to even think of looking at that now discusting cespool of uninspired filth they're still calling "television".
