Bad Export For You / Anime & Manga

• This almost always means that a work of Japanese origin (animated or live action) has been watered down for release in the United States or elsewhere outside Japan. Prices for everything in Japan are very high, especially for entertainment goods; for example, Anime DVDs are typically $65+ for 3 episodes, $95 for the special edition, with 5 to 10 DVDs required for an entire (short) series. In addition, the distribution system makes it hard to get any media at a discount.
  • Even when the costs of things like overseas shipping and currency exchange are taken into account, it is usually cheaper for the Japanese consumer to import from the United States or other countries than it is to buy the home version (And it's not even accounting the difference in Region codes, which only a few Japanese would know to disable it). Many companies realize this, and will therefore license inferior versions for overseas distribution (often by removing the Japanese audio and subtitle tracks) so as to discourage this practice.
  • Some companies have taken the opposite tactic of pricing the U.S. releases at similarly high prices, which doesn't go over too well, either. Aniplex earned quite a bit of flak for the pricing schemes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica ($40 per disc for 3 blu-rays with no extras, or almost twice that for the limited edition) and Fate/Zero (a whopping $370 for each half of the 26-episode season, and this is significantly marked down from the SRP of $500). They still sold reasonably well due to the extreme popularity of the shows, but to many people this felt like exploitation. In late 2013, Aniplex re-released Fate/Zero for a much more reasonable but still overpriced $150 for the first half and $140 for the second half. Unfortunately, Aniplex will be sticking to this strategy... not anymore! Thanks to their merger with Funimation, the latter is now selling priced-down re-issues of their releases, starting with Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.
  • Pony Canyon has joined the western market, only they are actually price-matching the Japanese release. Unlike with Aniplex, Ponycan USA releases their series on home video within a week of Japan's, complete with English dub, so the increased price is due to sheer speed. Time will tell how well this model will play out.
• The US release of the original Mobile Suit Gundam lacked a Japanese audio track because there wasn't a Japanese DVD version yet (mainly because of age damage to the audio track) and Sunrise didn't want Japanese fans reverse-importing... especially not with a remastered version in the works. Bandai Entertainment was even forced to replace the original Japanese opening and ending themes with Toonami's custom credits after the first few volumes because of this.
  • Speaking of the music issue, the American release of Zeta Gundam replaces the openings with the titular mobile suit's orchestral theme from the sound tracks; however, this is because Neil Sedaka wrote the songs and his family currently owns the rights, adding another name to the list of royalty payments that have to be made to use them. Thus they can be used (as in a few Super Robot Wars games), but usually Bandai just uses BGMs instead.
  • Syfy's airing of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 had its endings cut due to music licensing, which would be annoying enough if not for the second season having a minute-long Stinger after each episode, which were hit with Credits Pushback. Often these scenes were plot-critical, such as the penultimate episode showing how Seravee Gundam was destroyed; without the scene, American fans were left wondering why it wasn't there in the big final battle.
• The original American Princess Mononoke release was going to lack a Japanese track for this reason. After fan outcry, Miramax decided to release it with one, but also delayed the release so it wouldn't compete as much with the Japanese release.
  • StudioCanal's UK releases of the Studio Ghibli Collection often have NTSC-to-PAL conversion artefacts such as ghosting or PAL speedup on DVD. While the Blu-rays often have colour shift and DNR that are not present on the Japanese or American Blu-rays. Making matters worse is that many of the transfers used for the Netflix streams are taken from StudioCanal's Blu-rays. And these transfers are usually the same ones used for Madman Entertainment's (now Crunchyroll) Australian releases.
  • Speaking of Netflix, the Netflix stream for Earwig and the Witch only has the English dub, despite Netflix still listing the original Japanese cast and posting a trailer on their YouTube channel with the original Japanese audio.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Toei Animation licensed it, subtitled, to ADV Films for about... ten minutes. The masters were so poor, many fans suspect that ADV was actually stuck using the old masters that DiC originally had to use to make the dub, and they did not give them episode 67 (no great loss, it was a pointless Beach Episode that had no connection to the plotline, but still irksome on principle). This has been speculated as due to the desire to prevent reverse imports, but nobody really knows. It wouldn't be licensed again for another decade.
  • Viz Media's re-release encompasses all 200 episodes (including the never-before-released in America final season, Sailor Stars). As for the video quality, it also has its fair share of problems. Despite the fact the both the Blu-Rays and Hulu/Neon Alley versions re-release of Season 1 are based off of the Japanese DVDs, the Japanese DVDs appears to be worse sources than what was given to non-US distributors (i.e the Italian version 4 years earlier) with lots of artifacting and ghosting present in addition to inconsistently colored episodes (one scene will be tinted more blue and another will be tinted orange, all while the red saturation is pumped to the max.), the verdict is out as to whether this is the result of Viz's "Remaster", the authoring job done by Subatomic Digital, or if Toei intentionally sent Viz crummy masters. Part of the reasons for the quality issue was due to the fact that the HD transfer of original masters for the episodes did not exist yet. The DVDs for Set 1 include all of these problems and have black bars on the side of the video, meaning the image is considered widescreen even on 4:3 TVs and as such won't display properly. Later sets didn't have this issue, including Viz's rerelease of the season 1 boxset, which corrected the issues.
• Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie was released in the US as a censored version, a less censored version, and a more censored version with Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, while the UK and Australia versions contained profanity but were still censored. An uncut version was released on DVD in the US and Blu-ray in 2016.
  • Inverted in the case of the 2016 uncut Blu-ray, as it was given an extensive HD restoration and a lot of bonus content, yet the only way to watch the film in its native country of Japan is through a 2-decade-old DVD release.
• Bandai America licensed Blue Comet SPT Layzner, but according to Bandai's PR rep the masters they received were badly damaged and tinted blue, making them completely unusable. Replacements never came, and after several years the license expired with absolutely nothing to show for it. Thankfully, when Discotek Media got the rights to the show in 2023, the masters they got didn't have these issues.
• Night on the Galactic Railroad was released in the West on DVD only once until 2015, in 2001. Uncut, properly subtitled, great sound, but bad picture (the source was the laserdisc release). And it's now out of print, with only a few copies available online. The Japanese got a MUCH better DVD only a year after which Discotek will release on American DVDs in 2015.
• Milky Animation, a Japanese adult animation company, intentionally gave its American localization partner Kitty Media an unfinished/inferior copy of an episode of the popular hentai series Bible Black because the uncensored dual-language English versions were being reverse imported.
  • And before that, they tried to have the New Testament sequel series released English-only for the same reason; this backfired so badly that the series returned to dual-language by the second volume, with sub-only versions of the episodes on the first volume included as extras to boot.
  • Kitty Media also saw this happen with their release of Moonlight Lady: those with access to the original Japanese footage noted that the visual quality was dimmed quite a bit, to the point where a lot of the details in the character's hair was lost.
• This applies to almost all movies from Eleven Arts (not the movies that are being distributed in theaters). Yeah, they have all the rights to those movies, but no company are interested in them at all. The movies are: 5-tou ni Naritai, Chocolate Underground, Daisuki Dai-chan, Chikyuu ga Ugoita Hi, Garasu no Usagi, Momoko, Kaeru no Uta ga Kikoeru yo, Happy Birthday: Inochi Kagayaku Toki and Inochi no Chikyuu, Dioxin no Natsu.
  • Averted with ICE, since it was licensed by Sentai Filmworks.
• The original release of Blue Submarine No. 6 was sold a single episode at a time at relatively high prices to make it harder to reverse-import. A cheaper compiled version eventually did come out.
  • The same goes for Freedom Project, with the added caveat that its only initial release in Western markets was on the HD-DVD format (which was region free) right before it lost the format war to Blu-ray. The initial Blu-ray release was an expensive box set, and a cheaper compiled version was later released as well.
• This is the reason that some anime releases outside Japan do not feature the original Japanese versions of the opening and ending credits. This has led to cases where the ending sequence changes in each episode in the Japanese version, but the same ending reel is used for all episodes in the English release.
  • That's borderline. Sometimes it does happen because the Japanese won't give the Americans the proper materials, bringing it under this trope, but sometimes it just happens because the American company doesn't want to use openings and closings that contain kanji, and they do have the original openings/closings, but not clean versions. Examples of this include the original release of Trigun, and Sailor Moon.
    • This very reason is why the US release of Dragon Ball used the first version of the opening for the entire 153 episodes (the original version changed for the last 53 episodes to reflect the introduction of King Piccolo and to add characters such as Krillin to the intro) because the second version of the opening did not have a clean version (though interestingly, a clean version was available in the 80s for Harmony Gold to use for their short-lived dub).
    • Funimation attempted to get around this with Dragon Ball GT. Opening 2 and endings 2-4 had no clean versions, so FUNimation used rotoscoping technology to create their own, with surprisingly good results. They also tried this with some of the Dragon Ball Z movies, but nothing else. For other shows (like Birdy the Mighty and some Dragon Ball Z movies), they shrink the screen into a box in the corner while the credits roll along a black screen along the side, to much controversy. For others (like My Bride is a Mermaid), they use a freeze-frame. Other times, they just roll the credits after the animation.
• DVD image quality for anime releases outside of Japan is often intentionally reduced for this purpose. One of the most insane, however, was the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion by ADV Films. Rather than giving ADV high-quality transfers to use for their VHS and DVD releases, ADV was "granted" what essentially amounted to retail VHS copies of Evangelion that would degrade in quality when copied — even to DVD. This lasted until the Platinum Collection was released in America.
  • This trope in general is now made worse with the fact that anime is now often released in some half-finished formats, depending on the studio releasing the show. Recent shows like Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Divine Wars, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny and Code Geass have received massive overhauls when "converted" over to DVD. Most companies are polite enough to generally give the localization companies the "fixed" versions of these shows — but there have still been releases that wind up basically shoving the lower-quality TV episodes at the American audience like it's the best they'll ever get.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • Bandai Entertainment's contract when it licensed the first season demanded that, despite the fanbase wanting it badly (and because the Japanese fanbase wanted it too and hadn't gotten it), they couldn't put the episodes on the DVDs in broadcast order, only in chronological order. Bandai reacted by providing two releases: the bare-bones chronological order DVDs and the special editions, which came with Feelies, chronological order and broadcast order discs, single albums and other merchandise.
  • Slightly inverted in that the US bonus discs are the ONLY release in either country that contains the original next episode previews. (the originals had a running gag where the main characters couldn't agree on how to number the episodes, while the DVD previews are mostly silent aside from the next title)
  • It should be noted that the UK Anime Legends release only has the chronological discs.
• The ADV Films' release of Mazinkaiser is a textbook example of why this trope occurs, with Japanese fans ordering the American version and cannibalizing the Japanese release's sales.
  • This is actually the inverse of the overpriced-export situation — Japanese anime DVDs are outrageously expensive in Japan, and while still quite expensive in the US (a DVD with 6 episodes costs as much as a DVD set of an entire season of a US show) they're nowhere near as bad as Japanese DVDs.
• The US Blu-Ray of Black God lacks a Japanese track. The Japanese licensor seems to be doing this to prevent reverse importation; Japan and the US have the same Blu-Ray region code.
• Section23 is releasing The Asylum Session Stateside this April... but only in a 2D subtitled version despite being made as a 3-D Movie.
• Mostly averted with the US Blu-ray release of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Instead of removing the Japanese audio, Aniplex made FUNimation lock the subtitles so that they can't be turned off unless the English audio is turned on.
  • So they punish legitimate importers who (probably) can't override DVD PGC codes, but not pirates. Good job!
  • This has gotten very common for recent anime Blu-rays from all companies.
• The entirety of Gaiking: Legend of Daiku Maryu is available on Hulu. However, the subtitle job, to put it mildly, essentially amounts to a very amateurishly made fansub; some words, and even entire sentences sometimes get left out, and there's at least one scene in one episode that isn't translated at all (specifically, the scene after the ending credits in episode 31). A headscratcher, since Japan gets its own Hulu which is only accessible within Japan, and Hulu USA is only accessible from within the US.
• Some have observed that the VHS / DVD releases of the first three Digimon Adventure/Digimon Adventure 02 film dubs, a.k.a. Digimon: The Movie, use a sub-par video track which provides a much more washed-out and bland look. Among other problems. What makes this particularly confusing is that only the films are affected - the DVD sets for the Digimon Adventure and Digimon Data Squad dubs use higher-quality video tracks on par with the Japanese releases.
  • Some episodes on Digimon's Australian DVD release were direct American TV rips complete with the Fox Kids logo in the corner. Madman Entertainment explained that the materials for many of Saban's English dubbed episodes were lost, and that this was the only way to obtain them. Fans believed it... until New Video/Cinedigm's US release had perfectly clean masters for all episodes.
• Monster Rancher, while the anime itself was well made and well translated, large chunks were cut due to violence and blood present, in particular a scene where Genki is slashed across the chest and left for dead had all the blood erased. But, far less understandably, series two was only aired once and the third season, while dubbed, never at all. It didn't see a completed DVD release until 2014 when Discotek released the whole series in 3 English dubbed box sets (with plans for one giant subtitled set of the Japanese version).
• The second season of Heaven's Lost Property released by FUNimation was downgraded from DVD/Blu-Ray combo box to DVD only. According to an anime distributor, the Japanese license holders were a bit too cautious for having the Blu-Ray release being too soon after the Japanese release date, so Funimation decided to ditch the Blu-Ray option rather than delaying the release date.
• The Toho International export dubbed version of Macross: Do You Remember Love? was apparently rumoured to be used as an educational tool to teach English. It featured an ''eclectic'' bunch of Hong Kong voice actors who hammed it up despite the serious tone. It was released on VHS with 30 minutes hacked off in the UK and US as Macross: Clash of the Bionoids. Due the localization problems associated with the Macross brand, it may be the only adaptation of this film to come to the West.
  • A subtitled, and slightly edited (mostly for nudity and two decapitations) version did come out for a microsecond in the '90s. Lotsa luck finding that one — it was here and then disappeared, most likely due to you know who...
  • There does seem to have been a German VHS release of a "Macross- The Movie" (see here).
• On the subject of Macross - the ADV dub of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series (already delayed because of an infamous legal snarl) never made it to a UK R2 release, though whether that has to do with ADV going bust before they could manage it is uncertain. But, of course, we still have the arguably-inferior version that is Robotech. Same goes for the corresponding dubs of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, still available in their Robotech incarnations but not the originals.
  • And a wierdly Zig-Zagged Trope for Macross as well: The original US release from AnimEigo used a remastered soundtrack that came from Big West, one that ADV for whatever reason did not have access to for their later release, though they did have access to the remastered video that had been done by AnimEigo.
• Inverted with One Piece. Season Four was released on DVD in Japan (and several other places) in Pan and Scan, but the eventual English FUNimation release was in un-cropped widescreen.
  • The Alabasta movie was also released on Blu-ray in America before Japan.
  • However, FUNimation did have issues getting the 14th closing song included on their DVD release, and is skipped.
  • Ever wondered why the FUNimation home video releases have such plain-looking boxes whereas the Japanese releases' artwork is so colorful and vibrant? This is because FUNimation is forbidden to use any official artwork or screenshots other than what Toei Animation provides specifically for the western DVD and Blu-Ray releases. That aside, FUNimation is free to use any non-character artwork FUNimation itself produces, hence stuff like the dramatic billowing flags on the collection sets.
  • For US streaming services, the footage for Film Red is the uncorrected theatrical footage. The Japanese bluray release corrects many things, so it remains to be seen whether the US bluray will be lucky enough to use the corrected footage.
  • The Manga UK release of movie 8, despite retaining the English language dub, drops the surround sound tracks for 2-channel English and Japanese, as well as losing the English version of Compass, possibly through porting the audio tracks used on the UK movie collection DVDs which featured a similar arrangement for said movie.
  • Barring the above examples, One Piece has had it pretty good when it comes to international releases. It probably helps that the dub is hundreds of episodes behind Japan, where the older episodes are probably out of print there.
• Persona 4: The Animation was released billingually on DVD in North America as usual, but the Blu-ray only has the English track, due to fears of reverse importation. This was averted with the UK release though, since their Blu-ray region is different from Japan.
• Reverse importation is also the reason Kadokawa Pictures USA refused to allow any of their anime to see the Blu in North America at one point.
• The now-out of print US release of End of Evangelion had great audio quality, but bad picture quality. Manga Entertainment decided to turn the Gamma/Brightness up on their print, possibly as a form of censorship. As a result, the print looks extremely washed out and certain scenes (the infamous masturbation scene) look like they were shot on the surface of the sun. The Japanese Renewal release doesn't have this problem, but it lacks English Subtitles. It's also non-anamorphic, meaning it looks tiny if you watch it on a modern widescreen TV.
• Foreign editions of Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods have the insert song "Hero ~Kibou no Uta~" and end theme "Cha-La Head-Cha-La" sung by FLOW replaced with alternate versions sung (poorly) in English instead of the original Japanese songs. Even on the Japanese language track.
• American copies of Dragon Ball Super: Broly on bluray have a green tint to the footage due to Funimation's footage being damaged. This isn't an issue with the English release in other regions, such as the Australian release handled by Madman, which do not have the green tint.
• The US releases of Girls und Panzer have two major ones:
  • The songs "Katyusha" and "Polyushke Polye" aren't available for the Blu-ray release from Sentai Filmworks, as well as for the Crunchyroll version. Additionally, the credits from the Crunchyroll and Sentai releases are different from the Japanese one. The reason is that the authors obtained the license for the Japanese broadcast free of charge from the original Russian copyright owners, but in the US, the copyright for the song is owned by a different entity, so for Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks, it would have to be licensed separately since the original Japanese licensor was unable or unwilling to do that.
  • Also, the animation was changed for the parts that were deleted in the footage for the Sentai release, plus the subtitles can't be changed in order to prevent reverse-importation. Those parts were deleted altogether for the Crunchyroll version.
• The US release of Looking Up at the Half-Moon's anime adaptation has one of the most rare examples of this trope:
  • First, it was licensed for streaming by BOST in 2007, albeit only in Australia and New Zealand.
  • In June 2013, it was licensed for home video/streaming by a new anime distributor called Crimson Star Media. This company was ruled by Corey Maddox, a registered sex offender. This guy was also accused of Internet scam. Some people were not amused by that.
  • Crimson Star Media released the first episode on YouTube. It's the only episode that was officially released on the United States by that company.
  • However, Maddox was arrested one more time. He was attending an anime convention, where minors were present, violating his parole. Some guest recognized him and notified to the police.
  • On top of that, Neil Nadelman, the translator of the series, said on Anime News Network that he didn't pay the full price of the license. Therefore, the anime is now on a licensing limbo. Also, the DVD release is no longer listed on Amazon and RightStuf.
  • It was finally subverted by RightStuf. It was announced on November 12th, 2014 by RightStuf's label: Lucky Penny.
• During the '90s, a lot of popular anime releases such as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball were only available in most of Europe through the French AB Groupe's distribution, both for regular television and home video. The problem was that they only distributed their pre-dubbed, pre-edited versions, not the original series. The shows were subjected to major editing to make them more kid-friendly, which included horrible censoring, nonsensical name changes, mistranslations, bad voice acting, plus bizarre, lazy theme-songs and the deletion of the original soundtrack in certain scenes. Yes, this is where the infamous "Big Green Dub" of Dragon Ball Z (named after AB Groupe's rather on-the-nose name-change for Piccolo) comes from. They also came in bad-quality, grainy and at times jumpy video masters that cut off bits from all four sides of the screen. Further, these series were sold as strictly children's material, which has lead to some controversy in a handful of countries that picked them up.
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise, by all appearances, would have run in the US in a relatively intact state... if it hadn't been a building-destruction-happy series airing in mid-September 2001. (The first episode aired on 9/8.) Several episodes were immediately pulled from their intended airdates for more editing, and at least a few never aired in the US at all; the timeline-screwery of this utterly mangled the overarching plot. For the person looking to watch the series now, the episodes that never aired or aired out of order in the US aren't so much of a problem, as the only available DVDs, and thus the source for any online copies, are from the UK airings, which kept the series in its intended order and broadcast every episode. But the unedited versions of most of the episodes were never aired in English and have likely been destroyed.
• Unlike most TV Tokyo shoujo anime, Tamagotchi did get an English dub... but it only aired in Australia on GO! despite the franchise being more popular in America, and only the first 26 episodes were dubbed, stopping at the episode where we meet Telelin to air re-runs of Animaniacs, which then proceeded to take over three other slots on the channel to become the most-aired show on the channel. The show later came to American shores as Tamagotchi Friends, an English version of Tamagotchi! Yume Kira Dream - not only did the show only get aired on a website, but the episodes were shortened to three minutes long. That's right, Bandai didn't realize that they could have dubbed whole episodes and aired them on the internet, in a similar manner to Nickelodeon shows like The Legend of Korra.
• Sony's short-lived DVD releases of the 2001 Cyborg009 series definitely played to this trope. The "uncut" releases did not bother to actually use subtitles for the Japanese track, instead utilizing dubtitles that retained all of the dub's alterations and added dialogue. While the USA only got the first eight episodes, Australia fans had gotten the first twenty-five and had further issues to report in their own release: Sony had been given subpar DVD masters, and in addition to the dubtitling problem, some of the episodes inexplicably used the shortened dub-only opening sequence and ending credits while others used the original Japanese equivalents.
• The 2015 DVD release of the 2012 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime has also fallen victim to this trope. Aside from not having a Blu-ray version (though dubbed episodes are available in HD on Amazon Video), this DVD features menus barely better than what WB did for movies in 1997 (see the header for Vanilla Edition for an example), and while it also has Japanese audio, the subtitles used are dubtitled, despite the fact that both the Crunchyroll stream and Japanese Blu-rays of season one (both offered by WB) have proper subtitles. Fortunately, the series would eventually receive a proper Blu-Ray release from Viz Media from 2017 onwards.
  • In an interview with the Voix Ouf podcast, the director of the anime confirmed that the controversial international name changes applied to all licensed music references in the series are also a measure enforced to discourage reverse importation rather than an actual licensing issue.
• When the Fist of the North Star anime was first brought to French TV, the executives thought it was just another shonen, and had no idea about the series' famous Ludicrous Gibs and Your Head Asplode moments. What's more, the dubbers hated the themes (comparisons to Nazis were involved) to the point of making a completely nonsensical Gag Dub filled with snark and puns, something like an Abridged Series before its time.
• Sgt. Frog: A very minor case. It has nothing to do with the localization, but rather the Region 1 DVD release by Funimation. The company's "Season 2" releases contains episodes 27-51, which are actually part of the original Japanese "first season". The actual "Second Season" began with episode 52 in Japan (as read on the covers for the Region 2 DVD's). It's unknown why Funimation decided to do this.
  • Seasons generally run 24-26 episodes, and Funimation didn't take into account what the Japanese used, even though they do for other long-running shows.
  • Also, Funimation has mentioned a few times that they only licensed those first 51 episodes (despite implying earlier that they had acquired up to around episode 102). Since everyone already knew that this is a show lasting multiple seasons, Funimation may have decided to just split the difference and call it two seasons to be done with it.
    • But now Funimation has decided to release the next 26 episodes (eps.52-77), and are calling it "Season 3", which has managed to reopen this argument over semantics.
• When S'more Entertainment announced an uncut, dual-audio release of the Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo anime in North America, fans of the series were quite pleased. However, upon receiving the DVD sets, there was a major error...there were no English subtitles, despite them being listed on the DVD packaging. The company got so much backlash for their sloppy releases of both Bobobo and Galaxy Express 999 they left anime licensing for good.
• Anchor Bay's Blu-ray release of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is so bare-bones it doesn't even have a scene selection, has audio glitches, uses 'dubtitles' and closed-captions for the hearing-impaired instead of proper Japanese subtitles that the DVD versions, released by another company, did have. It also has an ugly menu screen.
  • Their Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions release was just as bad, having no scene selections, dubtitles, replacing a credits song from the Japanese version with the English-version instrumental theme, and a confusing menu screen. Lionsgate eventually offered refunds and replacements for affected items.
• Zoids:
  • While DVDs of New Century/Zero are available in English, they lack Japanese audio tracks.
  • The DVDs of Fuzors, available in Australia/New Zealand only, are of terrible quality, right down to a botched NTSC to PAL conversion.
• The Blu-Ray release of Re:Zero by Funimation in North America has severe video compression issues, to the point where the stream on Crunchyroll looks higher-quality. This unfortunately also affected the UK release, as they used the same masters.
• Funimation's release of Tsugumomo has half of the episodes censored, while the other half are the uncensored Japanese home video versions. Funimation has stated they only used the masters that they received, which they believed to all be the uncensored home video version. Some believe this was deliberately done by the Japanese companies to stop reverse importation. However, the most understandable reason is that the Japanese licensor decided to avoid any legal problems in most of the world due to the risqué content (remember, most characters shown naked are underaged), so they decided to give foreign companies censored masters to avoid any risks at all.
• Pokémon
  • The first six Pikachu shorts that showed before the first six Pokémon movies are this to most countries nowadays. In Australia, the first three were released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2017 with the first in Pan and Scan (as with the earlier Pokemon movies' older DVD releases) and the later two in widescreen. The other three? Well, they might not get a new DVD at all (as they were owned by Miramax, whose current DVDs of the fourth-to-seventh movies are in widescreen without extras).
  • The original DVD releases of the first five movies in the UK were mostly identical to the US, with the exception of Pokémon 4Ever, which removes its Pikachu short for no apparent reason. The UK releases of Jirachi Wish Maker and Destiny Deoxys remove the bonus features altogether.
• The original home video release of FLCL in Western markets was 2 episodes per DVD, 3 discs total for the whole series, with the discs sold individually for the standard DVD price of $30 each. This means the whole series cost $90 US, or $15 per episode, at a time when you could generally expect 8 to 10 episodes per disc. It included very few extras, meaning most of the space on all three discs was just empty.
• The Spanish home release of Danganronpa: The Animation by the group Japan Weekend Anime, wich is sold for 20€. The main problem this edition has is that the only Spanish subtitles seem to be done by novices, as these are often sped up and cut before the character that is speaking at the moment can finish the sentence, making these lose important information in the best cases or become completely illegible at worst. Outside that, the DVD and Bluray disks often have problems with reading them to be played and the extra gallery images seem to be of low quality and inconsistent sizes.
• Tubi carries a subtitled version of Futari wa Pretty Cure, which had grainy audio and slightly-blurry visuals.

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