Executive Meddling / Anime & Manga

aka: Anime

Sometimes in the Anime world orders come from on high:

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• Angel Beats! was originally supposed to be a 26 episode anime. However, executives inexplicably cut down the number of episodes from 26 to 13, forcing a lot of subplots to either be rushed or cut off.
• Arata: The Legend's creator Yuu Watase wrote in her personal blog (via ANN) about suffering this treatment. Her editor thought her readers were morons, would bulldoze her ideas in favor of his own, tell her to "draw it exactly the way I tell you," and was inconsistent with his demands. Fortunately, that editor was replaced starting with the Yataka Arc.
• Astro Boy:
  • The entirety of the "Blue Knight" saga and the subsequent story arc were added due to editor mandate. Apparently, Astro's willingness to work with the police and try to change the social order from within made him unpopular with the new generation of student radicals in the late '60s who believed that modern society was corrupt beyond all redemption, and called Astro Boy a hopelessly idealistic anachronism. Osamu Tezuka's editors at Shōnen Kobunsha magazine noticed this and ordered him to make the series Darker and Edgier and have him fight against the forces of law and order.
  • The 1963 anime suffered too, but in this instance the meddling came from NBC Enterprises, a U.S. syndication firm that was covering a considerable amount of Tezuka's production costs ($10,000 / ¥300,000 an episode) for the initial 52 episodes. But the revenue came at a price: the American backers demanded no ongoing storylines or adult themes. By the time Tezuka learned of the American terms, six of the twelve already-delivered episodes had been rejected (though three were ultimately salvaged by careful editing).
• Bakuman。: Often comes up as an In-Universe plot point, as Mashiro tells Takagi about the differences between good and bad editors, and this is particularly relevant with regards to Miura, who becomes Mashiro and Takagi's editor when they get their first series. Miura is fairly new, and he feels pressured to get a series going, one that he launched himself (To him, their first series doesn't count because Hattori launched it, and if anything, Miura feels responsible for getting it cancelled by not noticing Mashiro's declining health). As such, he prefers to go what he believes is the relatively safe route of doing a gag manga, while the main characters don't see it as compatible with their styles. This leads to many arguments about their manga, including one in which Miura goes so far as to suggest that Takagi find someone else to work with if Mashiro won't go along with Miura's suggestions, which Miura apologizes for later. However, when Takahama, another mangaka under Miura asks for a new editor due to feeling as though Miura won't let him write what he wants, only to get refused and told that if he feels that way, it's the same as admitting he doesn't have enough talent. Mashiro and Takagi then conclude that they've been blaming Miura too much and resolve to think up a good idea on their own.
• Battle Angel Alita: The author was working on a special celebration chapter — chapter 100 — which would be the headliner for the phonebook sized Ultra Jump magazine in Japan. It was around this time that his publisher's legal department approached him with censorship demands for the reprints, demanding he change a line using the word "crazy" as it "may offend people with incurable mental disorders." The suggested changes were "mad" or "angry" instead. He caved in because they also cited a part of his contract stating that if he missed the deadline on chapter 100, they would prohibit all future reprints of Battle Angel Alita, effectively ending his career. He later regretted it, especially when he discovered they had made similar changes without his knowledge. He approached them with an ultimatum — either the legal team apologize to him for overstepping their bounds and recall the edited versions, or he'd switch to a different publisher. They didn't, so he did.
• Bleach: When Bleach: Hell Verse was released to DVD, the Japanese edition included a message from Kubo explaining that crediting him with the film was inaccurate. The filmmakers rewrote the script he'd provided at the last minute, with the end product being almost nothing like the original (they'd also rejected all of his ideas and refused Kubo's request that his name be removed from the credits).
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: The anime was Cut Short because of complaints from a Japanese Parent-Teacher Association. The sequel manga, Shinsetsu Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, was also Cut Short due to lukewarm fan reaction.
• The foreign versions of the 2018 Captain Tsubasa anime kept the original names and title at the request of the anime's producers. This did not go over well with fans who know Tsubasa by other names ^note (e.g. Supercampeones in Latin Spanish, Olive et Tom in French, and Holly e Benji in Italian) Regarding the original version, Yōichi Takahashi has had to deal more than once with this (e.g. at least two matches from World Youth Cup were totally skipped).
• The manga adaptation of A Certain Magical Index skipped the Deep Blood arc, which features Aisa Himegami as the female deuteragonist, due to the Editorial Staff wanting to reach the Science Side and Mikoto-focused story arc (namely, the Sister arc) quickly. Unfortunately, skipping that story arc means sacrificing important character growth for the male lead Touma Kamijou and an Adaptation Induced Plothole as well: since the Deep Blood arc never happened in the manga, therefore Himegami's life was never in danger (at least before the Daihaseisai) and Himegami would have absolutely no reason to transfer schools from Kirigaoka Girls Academy (one of the elite schools of Academy City) to Touma's high school (which is just an ordinary school with many Level 0s).
• Code Geass:
  • Sunrise initially had little to no faith in the show because of director Goro Taniguchi,^note Reports variously blaming his being relatively new and untested or his perfectionism giving him 25 episodes rather than the originally requested 50 and severely limiting the staff's resources, forcing them to piggyback off of other Sunrise shows being made at the same time. After it became a runaway success, Sunrise gave the staff more leeway, but still interfered in other ways.
  • The initial series plan involved an idealistic rookie soldier and his ideological conflicts with his battle-hardened C.O. (which was recycled as the base for the idealistic Suzaku vs. the hardened Lelouch conflict); when Sunrise rejected this concept, the creators took it back to formula and after some retooling (introducing new elements like the Geass power and C.C. herself) made it the show it is today.
  • According to Word of God, the show being moved to an earlier time slot screwed the staff up in two ways, firstly by forcing them to tone down the content and secondly by making them feel like they had to take time out of the plot to get new viewers acquainted with the premise, which is usually blamed for the first handful of episodes feeling like rehashes of parallel episodes from the first season. This also forced the staff to essentially throw out their original plans for the show's second half, adding in a one-year Time Skip and starting from there.
  • For the American airing, [adult swim] didn't give Geass much love either. [as] gave the show very little advertising and kept shifting its time slot around and eventually landed into a dead early-morning time slot where next to nobody would be awake. Since this was a time before DVRs became commonplace in cable and satellite hook-ups, the show suffered agonizingly in ratings, and was booted from the network after one rerun, which began at a reasonable time slot, but was pushed back to the same early-morning slot as its premiere run had suffered. This made viewers stop caring and CN ended up with their rights to the show expiring after only two runs.
• Cyborg 009:
  • When the manga was first adapted into an animated film in 1966, the film executives felt they needed a Kid-Appeal Character. Thus, they took the Shapeshifting Cyborg 007/G.B. and transformed him from his mid-forties to a Former Child Star and the second youngest of the cyborgs (with 001/Ivan remaining the youngest as an infant). Ishinomori disliked the change, but briefly incorporated it into a one-shot chapter released in the same year titled "The Man with the Expensive Castle", and in a special "Prologue" story (and rewrite of the team's origin) that he published in Weekly Shonen Magazine before the start of the Underground Empire of Yomi arc. The child form would briefly be referenced in the actual arc as a sort of Sleep-Mode Size gag, but was otherwise phased out immediately. However, the child version of G.B. would persist in the the 1968 monochrome TV series.
  • The '68 series ignored the teamwork aspect and had 009/Joe completely overshadow most of the others. Aside from Joe, 003/Francoise and 007/G.B., the others rarely got time to shine outside of Days in the Limelight... which often ended with Joe stealing the show anyway.
  • The abrupt, anti-climactic ending of the "Mythos" arc in the manga was caused by then-recently hired editor-in-chief at Weekly Shonen King. He began to pressure Ishinomori with the threat of cancelling Cyborg 009 over the fact that the arc was "too confusing" for kids to understand and had too many characters, so Ishinomori wrapped the arc up in a haste that implicitly killed most of the main characters in the series. The meddling and dissatisfaction with the Shonen King staff lead to the arc being considered non-canon when the feature moved to Kodansha's "Weekly Shonen Magazine", with the Undergound Empire of Yomi arc not referencing its events at all and acting as if the Vietnam arc had been the team's previous adventure.
  • "The Undersea Pyramid" was intended to be the second-to-last arc for the series, with Ishinomori intending to rewrite "Battle with the Gods" and continue it afterwards. However, due to the 1979 anime adaptation happening, Ishinomori's editors swayed him into continuing the series so that there would be a manga feature running at the same time as the anime.
  • The movie The Legend of the Super Galaxy was to originally reference the manga a little more, with having the Neo Black Ghost organization involved (an organization with an identical name appeared in the 1979 series, but was entirely different). Ishinomori had also envisioned the team remaining within the solar system for their space trip, but Toei mandated that the team travel to another galaxy.
• Death Note: The editor confused Near and Mello's character designs, so Near became the deceptively young-looking man with Shonen Hair and Mello the androgynous youth. In addition, due to this error, it lead to their personalities, as Ohba and Obata first envisioned, being rewritten for the plot with the design swap: The one who became "Near" was meant to be the darker and more vengeful one, and be the elder, while the one who became "Mello" was originally envisioned as being calmer, younger, and more effeminate.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Data Squad: There is an episode where a bomb-shaped Digimon called BomberNanimon attempts to blow up an amusement park by throwing bombs everywhere. When dubbed, its color was changed to orange, the bombs were turned into ''fruit juice'' and it was re-named "Citramon." English producer/writer Jeff Nimoy stated that he had to do this or Disney would cut the episode.
  • Digimon: The Movie was created by combining three movies into one. Jeff Nimoy personally didn't care for the idea and would've preferred to only use the first two movies (he wanted the third movie to be shown as a TV special), however the runtime wasn't long enough.
  • Rampant during production for Digimon Adventure 02, such meddling included:
    • The inclusion of Davis into the story and has lack of development as a character.
    • The loss of the Dark Ocean arc, and Dagomon as an antagonist. Both were introduced by Chiaki Konaka, who later directed Digimon Tamers. He and several other writers threatened to break their contracts out of protest, but Toei was unwilling to allow so and gave them the rights to their own series in order to keep them on.
    • The entire season owes its existence to this, as the head writer of Adventure didn't want to create a sequel.
    • In the season itself, Jeff and his co-writer Bob Buchholz were instructed by Fox Kids to make the series "funnier," which annoyed a lot of fans. Eventually, Jeff and Bob left the show due to frustrations with Fox's demands. Fox Kids must have backed off afterward because the final 8 episodes of the season were noticeably less Gag Dub.
  • Ryo Akiyama being included in Digimon Tamers was the result of this, as Bandai insisted he be added to the story against Chiaki Konaka's wishes. Konaka retaliated by intentionally minimizing the role Bandai wanted Ryo to play in the story. Konaka also originally wrote Juri's father as a Yakuza member, but Toei refused.
• Double Arts: The manga was ended by Shonen Jump because it was hated by younger readers. A retool was attempted to make it into a more fighting-based series, but it didn't pan out.
• Dragon Ball:
  • An inversion occured prior to the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai arc; Akira Toriyama threatened his editor that if Goku didn't grow up into an adult, then he couldn't continue with serialization. The editor responded with, "You can have the protagonist grow up, just don't scare me like that!"
  • The reason the Cell arc kept constantly changing villains (from Androids 19 and 20, to 17 and 18, before settling with Cell) was because of an unusual variant of this. Toriyama's former editor kept telling him that the villains he chose weren't good enough; Toriyama seemingly had no real obligation to listen, but did so anyway for some reason. A straighter version occured with Cell's forms; his first "Imperfect" form was initially his only one, but Toriyama's current editor thought he looked ugly, suggesting he transform like previous Big Bad Frieza. The following Semi-Perfect form, which Toriyama himself liked the most, was meant to have a larger role, but the editor thought he looked like "a moron", and pressured him into having Cell achieve his Perfect form much sooner than planned.
  • In Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters, Funimation hired members of Team Four Star to voice the characters in the So Bad, It's Good Cell Games Reenactment in a sequence with many references to Dragon Ball Z Abridged and DBZ memes in general. Toei Animation found out about this thanks to a Toonami promo that used an audio clip from that scene and ordered Funimation to re-edit it out of spite, replacing TFS's audio with that from the original dub of DBZ. Fans were not pleased. Then in late 2017, Toei leaned on Funimation to stop hiring members of Team Four Star for their dubs, effectively getting some of them "greylisted".
  • There exist a plethora of rumors claiming that Toriyama intended to end the manga at certain points, such as the Freeza or Cell saga. However, there is only one point at which he had intended to finish the manga but was encouraged to continue, that being shortly after the release of the tenth volume. Though he did not have a clear ending in mind by then, Toriyama decided to write on significantly longer than he would have due to the manga's skyrocketing popularity.
  • As of the Dragon Ball Super era, as the one who writes stories for new arcs, Toriyama now finds himself in the interesting position of simultaneously being subject to and the source of this trope. As an example of the former, employees at Toei Animation noted the popularity of the non-canon character Broly, culminating in the character being rebooted into main continuity by Toriyama in the film Dragon Ball Super: Broly with critical acclaim. As an example of the latter, Toriyama quite frequently gives notes and corrections to Toyotaro, who draws the manga.
• Elfen Lied: Nozomi didn't make it to the anime version because the director hated her.
• Galilei Donna: The anime was supposed to run for two-course with the storyline already planned out, but was then asked by Aniplex to cut down to 11 episodes.
• Gundam:
  • Mobile Suit Gundam:
    • The series got poor ratings in its first run in Japan, so the sponsors tried to cut it down from 49 episodes to 39. Yoshiyuki Tomino and the staff begged for an extension to wrap things up, giving it the highly unusual 42-episode run it ended up with.
    • Tomino's intent was to create a serious war drama, but this was repeatedly hampered by the various demands of the toy company Clover, which acted as the show's sponsor.
    • Clover demanded that Tomino give the Gundam a bright paint job, since his intended design of white, gray, and red wasn't eye-catching; Tomino countered that the Gundam was supposed to be a weapon of war and not a parade float. Clover won this battle, resulting in the famous "parade colors" of white, blue, red, and yellow; in a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, these colors became so iconic that almost every Gundam protagonist's machine sports them. As for Tomino's white-and-gray version, it still exists as the "rollout color" version of the Gundam, with the more festive version being labeled the "demonstration version".
    • Clover demanded that there be more Toyetic mecha, including the G-Fighter and many Zeon Monster of the Week designs like the goofy Zakrello and knightly Gyan. When Tomino got the opportunity to turn Gundam into a movie trilogy, he excised almost all of these, even going back and replacing the G-Fighter with the Core Booster, a more realistic fighter plane.
    • For the dub, the iconic salute "Sieg Zeon" was changed to the more generic "Hail Zeon". All other references to the Nazis or Hitler were also covered with references to fascism instead. Averted with Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, particularly episode 4, which used the former anyway.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack: Tomino's original plan involved protagonist Amuro Ray being married to Beltorchika Irma (his Love Interest in Zeta Gundam) and expecting their first child. Bandai reportedly didn't like the idea of the franchise's main hero being married or a father, which resulted in Beltorchika being replaced by Chein Agi, a Girl of the Week character who ends up getting killed late in the film.
  • Mobile Suit Victory Gundam: Tomino wanted the show to start off slow and with Character Development, not even introducing the titular Gundam until episode 4. Sunrise refused, and forced him to make the show action-packed from the start. As a result, the first four episodes are in Anachronic Order; the first aired is Tomino's intended Episode 4, after which the original 1-3 are aired as a "flashback" to explain How We Got Here.
  • Mobile Fighter G Gundam:
    • When asked to make the Japanese guy the hero (against original planning), they gave it to them - Domon Kasshu, colossal Jerkass for half of the series.
    • Director Yasuhiro Imagawa was practically in open war with Sunrise over the series. Sunrise wanted a Tournament Arc, so Imagawa introduced it and then quickly shoved it to the side to focus on the Devil Gundam plotline.
    • The Dub Name Changes were mandated by the bigwigs at Sunrise and had nothing to do with Bandai America. This has carried on for years, as any time Domon appears in a video game like Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, it'll be called "Burning Gundam" instead of "God Gundam".
    • In an interview with a fansite, Mark Gatha (Domon's English VA) said that after they finished the series, he and the other Bluewater actors wanted to go back and redub the first 20 episodes, feeling that their original performances weren't up to snuff because they hadn't gotten a proper feel for the characters yet. Unfortunately, Bandai denied them permission and just released the episodes as they were.
  • After War Gundam X:
    • The show was chopped down to 39 episodes due to being tossed around the schedule.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: When the sales of the GAT-X103 Buster Gundam models were lagging behind the others, Bandai asked Sunrise to make Dearka pull off a Heel–Face Turn.
• The Idolmaster: In-Universe. The show Are We Live? is canceled despite good ratings to free the timeslot for other shows.
• Initial D: The translators originally wanted a straight translation, but Tokyopop executives demanded various changes such as hip-hop dialogue and cheesy nicknames. This resulted in the translators writing an open letter to the fans in which they joked about releasing the manga shrink-wrapped with White-Out and a felt-tip pen.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Battle Tendency: Hirohiko Araki regrets that his publishers forced him to keep Lisa Lisa from being more cool. It would go on to be one of the biggest motivations for him making Stands, since it allowed him to create fights that weren't the same traditional genre style, and allow him to use characters more naturally.
  • Stardust Crusaders: Araki originally planned for Anne to join the heroes as a long-term ally and proper combatant, but was forced to change her role due to his editor being opposed to letting her fight.
  • Golden Wind: Araki has discussed in an interview that Part 5 came with an especially high amount of meddling and editorial missives forcing him to alter events, resulting in a lot of stress due to the feeling that he was unable to express what he intended to.
• Parodied in-universe in the second episode of Mangirl!. Hana proposes lots of ridiculous and clichéd modifications to the author's manga...but only after the author asks if she wants to change the story. The others draw the line at Hana's suggestion to name the heroine after her.
• Medaka Box: The manga was forced to make a Genre Shift from Slice of Life into action, lest it risk being cancelled by Shonen Jump for being unpopular with the younger demographic. Once it reached a point where it was popular enough to avoid the cancellation, it switched back.
• Naruto: Creator Masashi Kishimoto shares several stories about editors and executive meddling in this 2014 Fuji TV Kobayashi interview:
  • Kishimoto explains that the Chunin exam was mandated by his editor, because introducing each of the teams one-by-one would take too long. His editing team also told him to disrupt the tournament with Orochimaru, the villain that became the threat for many years.
  • Kishimoto shares that the anime team forced him to create Sakura's Love Letter scene in Chapters 539 and 540 so that they could create a filler arc from it. No such filler arc came to fruition in the end. Kishimoto admits that since he didn't know what to write, given his own admission that he's terrible at writing romance, he had to put something to appease the anime team, so he halfheartedly created the scene.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Ken Akamatsu wanted to try something new and do a Shounen series, but the executives wanted to capitalize on the success of Love Hina with another Unwanted Harem series. As a result, Mahou Sensei Negima! starts out like an Unwanted Harem, but starts adding Shounen elements around volume 3, which increase in frequency until it becomes a Shounen series with some Unwanted Harem and Fanservice elements still hanging around.
  • Akamatsu rushed the ending due to the threat of losing the rights to the series.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Originally, Hideaki Anno intended to use a piece of the Polovtsian Dances for the opening, but the studio came to the conclusion that it would be too confusing for the viewers and thus had "Cruel Angel's Thesis" made to replace it with modern J-pop.
  • The rather controversial more literal re-translation of the anime for the 2019 Netflix release was the result of Khara gaining creative control of the translation process. Not only that, but Carrie Keranen confirmed in a now-deleted tweet that the studio also had to personally approve the new voice cast in order for the project to get the final greenlight.
  • Later in 2021, it turned out that not only did Gainax attempt the same thing for the ADV dub as what Khara pulled off on Netflix, but that they used the exact same script as Khara. In a pair of tweets by Amanda Winn-Lee (who voiced Rei in the ADV dub), she revealed that Khara's script was completely unchanged from Gainax's, and it took Matt Greenfield putting his foot down to Gainax's face to let the team go ahead with the more Woolseyism-heavy script that audiences heard back in the day.
  • After You Can (Not) Redo ended its theatrical run in North America, Funimation worked directly with Dan Kanemitsu to re-translate the film and re-record some of the English dialogue for its home video release, reportedly due to the negative audience reception of the initial release. Then when Amazon re-dubbed the initial three movies thanks to legal issues with Funimation, Kanemitsu further rewrote the scripts for the cast and crew to redub, on top of him handling the localization of the then-untranslated Thrice Upon a Time. Tiffany Grant and some of the voice cast had to fight to keep certain elements in.
• One Piece:
  • Toei forced 4Kids Entertainment and FUNimation to have Monkey D. Luffy be voiced by a woman when they did their respective dubs of the anime.
  • The 4Kids dub itself owes its very existence to this; 4Kids only really wanted to get the license to Ojamajo Doremi and possibly a few others, but Toei was desperate to have someone capable of getting One Piece on American TV handle the license, and forced them to dub it. 4Kids reluctantly agreed to the terms despite feeling the show wasn't appropriate for them, and decided to dub it until they could legally drop the license.
  • In a positive example, author Eiichiro Oda had already planned out most of the Sabaody Archipelago arc when his editor asked him to add more new characters to the arc to spice things up. A mere three hours later, he'd come up with designs for nine new characters, whom fans know as being the members of the Eleven Supernovas together with main characters Luffy and Zoro. All nine of them are quite popular with the fans to varying degrees, with one, Trafalgar Law, gaining such popularity that he's practically become a Breakout Character.
• The third episode of Osomatsu-san was pulled off the air after its initial showing and is not allowed to be reshown anywhere in the world. This is because it contains a parody of Anpanman, and one of the executives of the channel is a fan and steadfastly doesn't allow anyone to poke fun of it.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Clefairy was meant to be the mascot, but Pikachu was chosen because of its popularity.
  • After "Electric Soldier Porygon" caused a bunch of children to experience seizures caused by the high amount of flashing lights, it was permanently pulled from the air and never given VHS/DVD releases. The writing team was also forced to make "Pikachu's Goodbye" due to the incident.
  • Takeshi Shudō's original intention for the series was one that could be enjoyed by both children and adults. However, Creative Differences with the show's staff saw him forced to include the Strictly Formula elements which have largely characterized the show. Shudo's blogs reveal the direction he originally had in mind for the series, namely that Ash and Gary's rivalry would be an ongoing Story Arc, and the finale would involve a conflict between humans and Pokémon — but that meddling from the staff meant the show ended up going on far longer than he'd intended. On a lesser note, his original idea for the third movie (which involved a reanimated Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, as well as the mystery of real-world animals in relation to Pokémon) was rejected by the staff because they thought it lacked success potential.
  • The GS Ball was planned to have contained a Celebi, which would follow the cast and have a major arc centered around it. However, the higher-ups decided that Celebi would be the star of Pokémon 4Ever and the arc, now seen as redundant, ended with the GS Ball remaining with Kurt in hopes that viewers would forget it.
  • Throughout the first 22 episodes of Pokémon: Black and White, a Story Arc develops concerning the new and improved Team Rocket seeking out a meteorite with special powers. It was all set to conclude with episodes 23 and 24, a two-part event where Team Rocket obtained the meteorite but became engaged in a fight with Team Plasma over it, causing earthquakes and destruction to Castelia City. Episode 22 aired, the two-parter was all set to air... and the Tohou earthquake and tsunami happened. The two-parter was pulled due to being considered in poor taste by the TV executives, the arc was never given any resolution, and Team Plasma had to be introduced much later on under different circumstances.
• Pretty Cure:
  • In a rather odd example, Cure Black's outfit from the original Futari wa Pretty Cure was changed in Max Heart after complaints from parental groups about her exposed midriff in her original design. Later seasons would bring back the midsection showing outfits in spite of this.
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star notably initially toned down the fisticuffs of its characters due to complaints about Max Heart, the second season of the original, having fights that were seen as too intense. The second Max Heart's movie where Cure Black and Cure White are brainwashed into fighting each other also got complaints from parents for making their children cry at seeing their idols fight each other, and was cited as the other reason for this.
  • The even more intense fights of Go! Princess Pretty Cure were once again stated by some parent groups to be too violent, so executives forced the animation staff to tone down the fisticuffs in the series, notably with Maho Girls Pretty Cure! focusing more on transformation based special attacks and, rather infamously, ended up causing KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode to have no fisticuffs at all, not even later on in the show, something even Splash Star ended up managing to do by its second half. HuGtto! Pretty Cure brought this back in spades, with the official movie for the series even being a crossover with the Max Heart incarnations of Cure Black and White.
  • While some of the ideas for Doki Doki! PreCure was scrapped for multiple creative reasons, there was a few that was rejected by the higher ups:
    • Cure Sword was originally going join the team at the series halfway point, becoming this season's Sixth Ranger. However, Toei had already decided to include Sword in New Stage 2, so the writers were forced to tack Sword on to the team much earlier than expected.
    • Young schoolgirl Mana Aida and the much older mentor figure Joe Okada was going to have an Age-Gap Romance at one point. Series writer Ryota Yamaguchi actually thanked the female staff for interfering with that decision.
• Sailor Moon:
  • When creator Naoko Takeuchi was trying to think of a new series, it was her editor Fumio Osano who suggested the heroines wear sailor suits (he had a thing for them) and thus began Codename: Sailor V. However, they had a fight over the length of the skirts — Osano wanted longer skirts, but Takeuchi fought for the short length they have today.
  • Codename: Sailor V was meant to be a one-shot comic that became popular and was continued. When Toei got wind of it and wanted to make it into an OVA, Takeuchi was asked to expand it into a team format. Sailor Moon was soon created and V was made into a member of her team under the name Sailor Venus. Due to Moon's quick popularity, the OVA starring Sailor V was never made and her series was wrapped up after Sailor Moon's despite being much shorter.
  • Takeuchi originally only planned the manga to last one year, and the anime was also intended to only be a 46-episode series, ending with the deaths of the main characters at the end of the Dark Kingdom arc. The popularity of the franchise led to the anime getting more series and naturally, Takeuchi being required to keep stretching out her storyline from series to series.
  • When DiC Entertainment got the rights to Sailor Moon's Western release, they decided to jumble up the episode sequence a bit, by airing the original season, then jumping to second half of Sailor Moon R before heading back to the first as a mini-series called "The Doom Tree Saga". This created problems because "The Doom Tree Saga", despite being filler, explained how everyone returned to normal after the end of the first season. This only lasted one run before the "The Doom Tree Saga" was restored to its rightful position.
  • In the anime adaptation of Sailor Stars, Toei changed the Sailor Starlights from women who dress in drag to full-out gender benders who are men in their civilian forms and become women when they transform. They also get ascended to main character status, while they stayed supporting characters in the manga. The ending was also changed rather drastically, with Chibi Chibi's role being completely re-written and Sailor Cosmos never appearing at all. Takeuchi was not pleased with the changes.
  • In the later prints of the manga, Takeuchi added some Yonkoma at the end of every volume, explaining how she came with some of the ideas that made it into the final version, some of them are about how she originally intended things to be drastically different until her editor, Fumio Osano, told her to do some changes. For example, the manga was going to be even Darker and Edgier than it is, compared to the anime adaptation, as she planned to get the Sailor Guardians Killed Off for Real at the end of the first act, including an early and graphic death for Sailor Mercury. Also, Sailor Mercury was going to be an android or a cyborg, something that was later used for Hotaru/Sailor Saturn.
  • Takeuchi herself invoked executive meddling when it came to the creation of the all new English dub from Viz Media. She had to personally approve the new voice cast in order for the project to be given the final greenlight (although the choices she approved ended up causing a somewhat Broken Base).
• Adriana Olmedo voicing Sailor Jupiter in the Latin Spanish dub of Sailor Moon Crystal instead of the late Araceli de León's daughter Mariana Ortiz, who had voiced Jupiter for the Talk Box DVD's and in addition had auditioned for Crystal!Jupiter and in addition had been speculated by many Latin American Moonies to be the new Jupiter for the series, has been speculated to have been caused by this. Executive Meddling also led to Rocío Garcel being replaced by Irene Jimenez as Luna; Irene was initially just a stand-in while Garcel was out of commission due to health issues, while she ends up replacing her retired sister Sylvia in Sailor Moon Eternal as Queen Neherenia.
• Saint Seiya ended prematurely because of this. It was planned to have two more big story arcs which would focus more on the Gold Saints, but the series was canceled and it took the anime more than ten years to finish afterward.
• Shaman King: Hiroyuki Takei was told to rush the ending because the series' popularity was declining, leading to some questionable narrative choices and a Cliffhanger ending. Fan outcry on how it was handled led to Takei going back and fixing the rushed chapters.
• Skip Beat!: The author wanted a minor character to be a middle-aged man, since the character was a successful director and therefore logically should be of a respectable age. The editor said no, and the character ended up being about 30.
• Slayers:
  • A fourth anime season, reportedly titled "Slayers AGAIN", was supposed to follow up the third season, Slayers TRY. However, it was rumored to be cancelled when Megumi Hayashibara, the Japanese voice actress for the female lead, was bogged down with work, making everyone else virtually lose all interest. It wasn't until 11 years later that a new television series was actually released.
  • The Light Novel writer deemed season 3 Canon Discontinuity because he disliked how it came out.
  • The prequel light novels are ongoing because of obligations from the magazine they're published in. They're on hold, but the writer made it clear that he has absolutely no intention to continue the regular series.
• Streamline Pictures suffered from this under distributor Orion Pictures in what turned out to be its waning years. Numerous cases of No Export for You and Cut Short, most infamously involving Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Mega Zone 23, and Princess Knight, ensued.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Originally to be titled Megaroad (or, to give the sponsor-imposed tag, Super Dimension Fortress Megaroad), one of the producers from Big West suggested changing the title to Macbeth, as he was a huge Shakespeare fan. Kawamori and the rest of the staff weren't keen on the name, but didn't feel they could really outright oppose the man who authorized the checks for production money. So, instead, they suggested a compromise name — Macross.
• Tamagotchi was meant to be a series capturing everyday life for families. But when the fanbase of the franchise was presumably shown to mostly consist of girls, Bandai executives requested that the show crew put in a story arc surrounding the Tama-Hearts, with the inclusion of a human girl (lasting 14 episodes) for the final 2 seasons of the first show. Lovelitchi and Melodytchi were the main focus of most of the marketing. It would continue with Yume Kira Dream and Miracle Friends, in an attempt to capitalize on the growing popularity of Japan's Idol Craze. They went back to basics with the fourth and final series, GO-GO Tamagotchi!, presumably at the request of the show's director, Joji Shimura.
• Tokyo Mew Mew:
  • Mia Ikumi wanted to do a horror series focusing on a much darker catgirl, without a colourful cast of Little Bit Beastly friends, but the executives wouldn't allow it.
  • Ikumi also blames part of the failure of Tokyo Mew Mew a la mode on her Nakayoshi director limiting her to two volumes and telling her not to focus on the previous series's characters.
• Transformers: Armada: The show was rushed through all stages of development due to Cartoon Network wanting to sign off on a certain amount of episodes before airing.
• Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-: NHK and Bee Train decided to make the anime more oriented towards a younger audience akin to the adaptation CLAMP's Cardcaptor Sakura, thus toning down the violence and not going into the darker chapters in the manga. Understandably, CLAMP was dissatisfied with the end result.
• Warrior Cats: Graystripe's Adventure was originally meant to be a single volume manga called The Lost Warrior. Then somebody had the idea to release it on the same day as The Sight. The artist was only a third of the way done, so it ended up being split into three volumes, and further manga in the series have followed suit.
• You're Under Arrest!: The manga had an extremely short and rare Western license because creator Kosuke Fujishima only wanted a select amount of stories (sixteen in total) released correspondingly with the anime. The chapters in question were all made towards the end of the run.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Kazuki Takahashi's editor told him to hurry it up during the Millennium World arc because of the declining reader interest due to the long Battle City arc. A lot of plot threads that were originally intended to be expanded upon didn't see the light of day, such as Seto waging war against the Pharaoh and Akhenaden as revenge for Kisara's death.
  • The original manga started out about various games of all types, not just Duel Monsters. When it became unexpectedly popular (and conveniently marketable), Kazuki Takahashi had to retool the series to revolve around it.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:
    • It's rumored that the show was cut short because Yuki Judai's voice actor was fired and the show's developers didn't want to spend the extra cash to replace him in the middle of a season; as a result, the show was forced to wrap up half-way through its run, and its successor, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's was rushed to air to make up the difference.
    • The manga had to rush its ending to make room for Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL's manga.
• YuYu Hakusho: The manga was supposed to end with the climactic Chapter Black arc, but one last arc was created due to editorial request, and later ended prematurely by the author himself.

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