People, for years, I never realized that some anime out there has been americanized, until now. Practically, there has been anime that has been heavily edited and sometimes poorly dubbed, like the sailor moon DIC dub. But most distrubutors tend to take a step. further. Like godzilla, king of the monsters!, which involved taking the japanese version of the first godzilla movie, and added scenes with raymond burr, the same has been done for some anime. Seeing how successful king of the monsters was, and with the trend of other kaiju films being americanized, people knew that it was so easy to do the same thing with anime. Since animation is much easier to edit than live action, some american distrubutors decided to take the route of westernizing japanese animation, whether it was too violent, too sexual, "too japanese"(what?
)or for no reason whatsoever.
Perhaps the most perfect example of this process has to be
battle of the planets, the first english adaptation of gatchaman, where not only they took the gatchaman footage and dubbed it, they added in new scenes with 7-zark-7. Of course, anime like voltron or robotech had the same treatment, but were lucky enough to suffer only with having several shows mixed into one.
Though, one rare example of this process has to
saber rider where not only the distributor, WEP, rewrote and reorganized the entire series, but removed five episodes for their content and replaced them with six newly animated episodes! Yeah, weird huh! You don't see that in most anime these days, don't you!? And there's not much information for the episodes, like who animated the episodes, and who directed them, the only info I know has to be the characters designs and differences to the regular japanese episodes or settings.
But the most controversial one of all has to be the never-before seen pilot of the american version of sailor moon, dubbed "saban moon" due to the confusion of many people believing that the show has to be made by saban. But in reality, the company behind the pilot was toon makers. The only thing that exists of this pilot has to be a 2 minute music video that is now currently shown on youtube. This probably has to be the most rarest example of americanizing anime there is.
So, this brings me the question, will there be any more anime that'll be americanized, and well will this process come back? But most importantly, how good does americanized anime stand to regular anime? And what do the japanese think of it? Comment me on what you think. That's all for now, I hope I explained enough. I rest my case.
