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Companies
4Kids Entertainment
4Kids Entertainment was infamous for localizing shows like this, especially in their early years. Their CEO at the time, Alfred Kahn, went on record
to say, "By the time we localize the programs, kids don't even know they're from Japan anymore." Their reputation was rather poor, to say the least, and other companies (like Viz Media and FUNimation) found much greater success by actively not doing what 4Kids did and being more faithful to the source material. In the end, 4Kids was sued into bankruptcy by TV Tokyo in a licensing dispute and reorganized into 4Licensing Corporation. Among their attempts at this:
to say, "By the time we localize the programs, kids don't even know they're from Japan anymore." Their reputation was rather poor, to say the least, and other companies (like Viz Media and FUNimation) found much greater success by actively not doing what 4Kids did and being more faithful to the source material. In the end, 4Kids was sued into bankruptcy by TV Tokyo in a licensing dispute and reorganized into 4Licensing Corporation. Among their attempts at this:- They did the early years of the Pokémon: The Series anime. They changed a lot, such as characters' names (largely to match the games' localizations) and personalities to make them more relatable to American children (and at least in Misty and Brock's case, to tone down the sexuality). It was a hit anyway, even among those aware of the changes. The dub is also considered good in the West. Later seasons were done by the Pokémon Company International and were much more faithful to the source material, but the Nostalgia Filter has led a number of older fans to prefer the 4Kids version.
- 4Kids also did the movies, and some of the changes there weren't as well-received. Most notably, Mewtwo from Pokémon: The First Movie was rewritten as a stereotypical Evil Overlord, whereas the original was Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life (albeit rather violently).
- Pokémon Chronicles was so different from the original, it may as well be a completely different series. This is most evident in its Non-Indicative First Episode, The Legend of Thunder, a TV special that was split apart into a 3-parter episode. The dub had a penchant of rewriting from scratch multiple dialogues to add things such as references to Pokémon that weren't mentioned in the original version (such as Professor Oak mentioning his research about Jirachi or Casey stating she owns a Rapidash and a Magmar).
- The 4Kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh!, besides the typical Dub Name Changes and Never Say "Die" mentality, also changed the entire premise of the second and third seasons, boiling down a number of complex self-discovery Character Development arcs into a fight against a villain trying to Take Over the World. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series never misses an opportunity to highlight the dub's absurdity (although the 4Kids people said they enjoyed the abridging).
- After their dub of Shaman King, which had less edits than their other works, brought complaints from parent associations due to certain very violent scenes, their dub of One Piece, by contrast, changed as much as it could. 4Kids' experience with Shaman King led them to believe that they had to retool One Piece to fit their target demographic. Given the long-running and intricate story, they only succeeded in creating a morass of plot holes, removing whole episodes and even whole story arcs (Laboon and Little Garden). It also went big into Never Say "Die" and Frothy Mugs of Water (but failed to fix a sequence where Luffy tries to cheat at a Drinking Contest), and it went nuts removing all traces of weaponry (once digitally altering a rifle into a shovel, only for a mob actually wielding shovels to have them edited into bizarre neon blobs later). The cuts reduced the first 144 episodes to 104. After 4Kids finally dropped the license to One Piece, FUNimation redubbed the entire series, including the 4Kids-era episodes.
Nelvana
- Nelvana, a Canadian distribution studio, edited Cardcaptor Sakura and turned it into "Cardcaptors". While their dub Anglicized the characters' names and censored some of the more controversial relationships (such as Tori/Julien and Rita's love for her teacher), it was otherwise passable for a Saturday morning dub. However, the U.S. broadcast on Kids' WB! is the one most people remember, since it was extremely hacked up and rewritten. In a rather clumsy attempt to widen the show's appeal beyond its original demographic, half the first season was cut out or chopped up into flashback sequences, the episode order changed drastically, and the scripts were rewritten, trying to turn supporting character Syaoran Li into a lead character alongside the original heroine. At the same time, a much more accurate subtitled version was released on tape and DVD under the original name; the DVD version of the original sold so much better that the dub version was discontinued.
Saban
- Saban Brands pulled this off with the English adaptations of Smile PreCure! and Doki Doki! PreCure (which were renamed to Glitter Force and Glitter Force Doki Doki respectively), by removing some episodes and combining others, resulting in a shorter run time compared to the Japanese original. While Smile didn't lose too much from this, Doki Doki was hit hard; Toei had already slimmed it down after criticism of Smile's egregious use of Filler, so that left very little fat to trim, and it ended up with 19 episodes re-cut or removed entirely, resulting in uneven pacing and whole arcs missing.
Anime series
Sailor Moon
- DiC and Cloverway made many, many changes to Sailor Moon to make it more palatable for American audiences. It's nigh impossible to list them all (although some sites have tried), and many of them were rather inexplicable. The biggest changes were of a Never Say "Die" variety (which didn't always leave the plot unscathed), Westernizing names, and trying (and failing) to remove Homoerotic Subtext, even infamously changing a lesbian couple (Sailors Uranus and Neptune) to "cousins" only to get even more subtext than they bargained for. It also resulted in the oddity of the Mexican dub, which was much better received and closer to the original, using the Americanized names for the first two seasons. Interestingly, this wasn't the first crack at Sailor Moon to hit this trope — Toon Makers was bidding for the rights as well, and their plans for the show were so drastic that they included original American footage, both animated and in live-action. Here's some footage of a promo showing how lucky the fans were.
Dragon Ball
- The Dragon Ball franchise ran into several attempts to localize it before finally hitting its stride:
- The earliest attempt to launch Dragon Ball in America was from Harmony Gold, responsible for Robotech and Captain Harlock below. While their test dub was much more faithful to the original than their previous efforts, it still changed lots of dialogue and Westernized all the names, with such gems as "Zero" and "Bongo" for Goku and Krillin respectively, and Korin being renamed "Whiskers the Wonder Cat". This dub only covered the first five episodes, but Harmony Gold also produced a TV special made up of footage from the first and third movies, with heavily altered dialogue combining the two stories together.
- Next crack at it was FUNimation, working with The Ocean Group in 1995 on Dragon Ball. This dub only had the first movie as a pilot and the first 13 episodes. Interestingly, the script was mostly recycled from Harmony Gold's earlier dub of the film, with the result that it also had heavy censorship and altered dialogue (although it would also factor prominently into FUNimation's uncut redub years later). They decided to cut their losses and move straight to Dragon Ball Z.
- For the first dub of Dragon Ball Z, Saban Entertainment joined Ocean and FUNimation as a partner. Many early episodes were cut and rearranged, the third movie was chopped into three separate episodes, many scenes were digitally censored, and nobody died — they were just "sent to another dimension". Some additional Early-Installment Weirdness resulted from incomprehensible guidance from Japan. The resulting dub reduced the first 66½ episodes and the third movie to 56 total episodes. It failed to find an audience in weekly syndication, but proved to be a huge success on Cartoon Network's then-new Toonami block, allowing FUNimation to continue the show with their own in-house dub. FUNimation's dub mostly averted this, since while it replaced the soundtrack and toned down some of the dialogue, it was largely uncensored.
- For their dub of Dragon Ball GT, FUNimation cut the first 16 episodes into one recap episode, replaced the intro with a rap song, and went for a Darker and Edgier tone than the source material.
- The European Portuguese dub of Dragon Ball Z did this to such an extent that it became So Bad, It's Good. The dialogue is nonsensical and the voices are exaggerated, but when you have King Kai trying to call the fire department to stop Earth from exploding, it loops back around to hilarious.
Transformers
Transformers goes both ways!
- When Beast Wars, a rather dark series with somewhat outlandish comic relief moments at times, was dubbed into Japanese, it received a Gag Dub with no sense of self-restraint and a few other random changes, such as turning the Predacons' computer into a character (or characters) named Naviko. Many Japanese Transformers fans were quite unhappy with this. The blame for this can be pinned on director Yoshikazu Iwakami, who applied this same wacky, over-the-top dubbing style to every future American-made Transformers series until he left after Transformers: Prime.
- By contrast, American fans were quite pleased with 2001's Transformers: Robots in Disguise which rewrote the bland Transformers: Car Robots as a maybe-sequel to The Transformers cartoon (it was later determined by Fun Publications to exist in its own universe). Its endearingly quirky characters and the added Mythology Gags were a surprise hit in America, while Car Robots had done so badly in Japan that it was pulled from television before airing its finale. The changes eventually cross-pollinated back to Japan, albeit not without some Continuity Snarl.
- The dub of Transformers: Armada was heavily rushed, leading to many cases of characters being referred to by the wrong name and a lot of weird, out-of-place dialogue that didn't relate to what was actually happening onscreen.
- The dub of Armada's sequel Transformers: Energon was similarly rushed, with the same awkward dialogue and wrong names, and also with several deliberate changes. Never Say "Die" was in full effect, and scenes (and at least one full episode) were cut for no reason, especially Primus's dialogue, leading to quite a few plot holes.
- Transformers: Cybertron, the sequel to Armada and Energon, was by contrast considered a Woolseyism of the highest order, but its dub caused its own share of problems. In Japan, Cybertron was an independent series and not a sequel. This didn't cause much stress until Galaxy Force came out. Fun Publications would later reconcile the continuity errors by shoehorning in a few lines about the "Unicron Singularity" warping the very fabric of reality itself, and manufacturing three shots of the previous series' characters in the series finale. Ironically, Galaxy Force has since been retconned into Micron Legend continuity in Japan.
#-M
- All the foreign dubs of Daimos remove Nana's unreciprocated crush on her adopted brother, due to incest being frowned upon by most societies and cultures.note
- Digimon has a number of Dub Induced Plot Holes across the individual shows, mostly concerned with characters mentioning siblings and pets they didn't have, and they produced them so close to the original that it was hard to predict whether any lines would cause continuity errors later on. Beyond that, they mostly just changed names (although some were Westernized, and others were changed to different Japanese names). The worst from the series would be the second season of Digimon Adventure, where Executive Meddling resulted in a lot of forced humor, most of it at Davis' expense, to the point that it made Davis look like a complete dumbass. The second season's Non-Serial Movie, Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!/The Golden Digimentals, was also combined with two short anime movies about the kids from the first season to form Digimon: The Movie, with a lot of reworking having to be done to cram the continuities together.
- Hello! Sandybell: The episodes with the drug dealers were deemed to violent for a child audience, and were cut out of the Italian dub (Rai edition).
- The Lady!! manga series was adapted into two television series, Lady Lady!! and it's sequel Hello! Lady Lynn. When the anime was being dubbed into Arabic, the Jordanian company that dubbed itnote added the episodes of the second season to the episodes of the first one, and also left out the last final episodes (which were mainly compilation/recaps of the prior ones).
- Kaze no Shōjo Emily has some minor ones with the Arabic dub. Aunt Nancy is Grandma Nancy, Aunt Tom is Grandmother Tom, and Dean, who was Nancy's husband in the original Japanese version, is Emily's step-grandfather.
- MegaMan NT Warrior is more or less given the cold stare from the Mega Man Battle Network fandom for being a total mess of changed names, randomly edited scenes, and other strange changes. The name changes in particular were weird, not because the fandom preferred the original Japanese, but rather that the characters already had Westernized names from the localized source material, the Battle Network video games. This led to characters with three names. The same thing happened to some NPCs in Mega Man Star Force.
N-Z
- Primitive Boy Ryu: In the Polish dub Ran is Ryu's girlfriend, even though in the original Japanese version there was no romance between them.
- Seraph of the End:
- When Krul hugs Mika after turning him into a vampire, the hiragana says "ぎゅう" (which can mean "big hug", more than a simple gesture of affection) but the English translation misses it.
- Chapter 43: Mika says Krul raises him in the English translation, whereas in the original Japanese he says "飼う" (かう, ramaji: kau), which is translated as to "keep (as in a pet or an animal)".
- When Krul hugs Mika after turning him into a vampire, the hiragana says
- Science Ninja Team Gatchaman:
- The first of these adaptations, Battle of the Planets, is generally thought to be its own separate entity due to the amount of censorship and rewrites that went into it, along with newly-added Off-Model animation made to cover up the missing material. It's an early example of a Macekre, even with its better points. Most overseas releases of Gatchaman based their scripts off of this adaptation (since Sandy Frank held the international license), although there would be the occasional dub that stuck to the Japanese version or those that adapted from G-Force: Guardians of Space and Eagle Riders.
- While most of these English adaptations used either the first Gatchaman TV series or OVA for their source material, Eagle Riders was a Macekre of the second and third series (Gatchaman II and Gatchaman Fighter). Numerous episodes were cut, some episodes were rearranged or had portions from others spliced together, nobody could die, and the series ended on a random episode with no resolution to the main plot.
- Samurai Pizza Cats is one of the most successful of these translations. Saban Entertainment wrote an entirely original script for it, matching the dialogue to the Mouth Flaps and whatever was happening on screen. The result was a Gag Dub that even the Japanese creators preferred. How it came about this way isn't certain; the most common story is that the English dubbers didn't have a script and had to improvise with the footage, but Robert Axelrod, who was one of the writers, claims that they totally did have scripts, but in Engrish.
- Space Battleship Yamato was dubbed into Star Blazers. It had the usual for this trope; dead bodies were edited out, many a Dub-Induced Plot Hole, and Never Say "Die" (even for characters who would be revived later). Odder things involved super-futuristic Westernized names, strange voice acting decisions (like giving the Season 3 Big Bad a ridiculous Russian accent), and removing some Character Development (degrading some moments to a Senseless Sacrifice). The Comet Empire movie also suffered from this as well, in addition to having 20 minutes cut from it.
- Saint Seiya's English broadcast dub (not to be confused with the later ADV Films dub) was renamed "Knights of the Zodiac". It tried to eliminate references to death, excessive violence, and religion, despite the show being more or less about a religious war with appearances by saints and gods themselves. They also changed a ridiculous amount of blood into "spiritual energy", gave the Siberian a Surfer Dude's accent, and cut some pretty epic music.
- Though they never succeeded, if you look up the Gaga Communications trailers for 1988 on YouTube, they were clearly anticipating this trope. Titles and character names for series (including some ones which eventually went on to be well-known in the West), for example, and some details of the stories are already changed — all without a single bit of English dubbing. Perhaps this is just as well — for example, imagine Project A-Ko as "Supernova". (This particular trailer inspired someone to do a Bowdlerized fan-edit of the first episode as if it had been taken up by Celebrity Home Entertainment for their "Just for Kids" label.)
- The English dub of the 2001 Cyborg 009 series suffered this, as part of Sony Pictures' attempt to sanitize it for younger viewers. The dialogue changes and visual cuts also carried over to other countries where Sony distributed the anime, as they were given the English dub scripts to adapt. It also experienced inconsistent dubbing, with the faithfulness of scripts and dialogue varying heavily, and some episodes' flashbacks not even retaining the dialogue that was in the sourced episodes. When the first few episodes appeared on Toonami, complaints from Moral Guardians caused further edits, removing any questionable language, mentions of 002's atheism (and his Jerk with a Heart of Gold nature in general), and a stronger Never Say "Die" attitude.
- The Italian dub of the Marmalade Boy anime has been considered by many people "the most censored anime dub ever" since there are many plot changes, episodes that are either missing or fused together into a single one and so on, but the truth is that is that what aired there was not a dub of the original show, but a complete rewrite which starts as a slightly altered version of the original plot (in the original version, the parents of the main characters do a reverse marriage so that Miki's dad marries Yuu's mom and viceversa: in the Italian version they say Yuu's father is dead, so the new husband of Miki's mom is just one of her colleagues) and then diverges from the original more and more as the series goes on. This new series was called Piccoli problemi di cuore and was also sold in many foreign countries with the international title of A little love story. A second season made using all the footage that was cut for the original series (plus some recycled footage from what was actually used originally) was also planned but never released.
- The French version of the Ayakashi Triangle manga has some strange deviations that tend to either create plotholes or need even stranger methods later on to fill them in. Most notably, the first appearance of Suzu's omokage has it changed to some kind of shapeshifting spirit instead of Enemy Without, its later appearances treat it as a separate entity, and Shadow Mei claims to be the shapeshifter even though she was still sealed away in the original version.
- Voltes V:
- The Philippine-English dub changes Heinel's motivation to keep fighting against Voltes V.
Original Japanese: "I will not run away, Katherine! I will defend this place by fighting Voltes V, that's what I want to do, and now I have no other choice but to fight them myself. Aside!"Philippine-English: "Draco is dead because of them, do you not understand, Zandra? Those despicable earthlings were responsible for Draco's demise. Our fallen comrades cry for vengeance. Aside!"- It happens again in the same episode, regarding his Last Stand.
Original Japanese: "Katherine, I promise I will not die. Until I defeat Voltes..."Philippine-English: "I will avenge you. Voltes V will pay for your demise!"- In the Italian dub, Heinel is Driven to Suicide after Katherine dies. Losing all will to live, he throws himself into Godol's flames, dedicating his last words to shouting her name. To his shock, it turns out that Godol is actually a mecha Hidden in Plain Sight. Jumping on the opportunity to avenge her, Heinel lays scourge all over Boazania.
Original Japanese: "For the glory of Boazania!"Italian: "Kazarin, l'ultimo mio pensiero a te!"note- In the Italian dub, after Heinel saves Kenichi, the latter begs him to live, but Heinel, being able to only think of the death of Katherine, cries as he lets the flames consume him. This is in contrast to the original Japanese dub, where he accepted death to atone for his sins, his last words being "Father...!".
