Anime in Arabia.

Generally, yes.

I dont know about other countries in the middle east, but concerning UAE (more specifically abu dhabi)I find it harder to belive that it's taken this long for anime to become acknowledged here~.

Spacetoon was AFAIK the only kid's channel (that didnt require subscribing) available in the late 90's, and pretty much all of it's shows were anime . MBC 3 which did have western animation didnt come out until way later . so a lot of teenagers and adults here grew up on arabic dubbed anime.

They had a lot of mecha and magical girl series, there was also yu-gi-oh , digimon (they even dubbed tamers ) , pokemon (I'm not sure if they ever took it off air though),dragon ball, the secret garden, heidi , ETC. The most famous ones I think were captain tsubasa (renamed captain maged)and Detective Conan. well those are the ones I remember anyway.

As far as censoring goes I'm pretty sure a lot was editted , considering their target was (muslim) kids. for example in Conan :

• they made Ran and kudo (forgot his first name) already engaged
• pretty much all of Ran's school scenes were removed (due to the short skirts)
• the culpirt always says he regretted what he has done at the end of each episode(even if they didn't in the original)
• and completly changed Ran's best friend's personalty (in the original most of her dialogue was about boys)

oddly enough though , while some of the names were changed, they still sounded japanease . and most of the voilance and murder scenes were left unedited I think .I also remember watching an episode of sinbad the sailor , where he was completly naked ( he looked sort of like naked gimmy in the hotsprings episode of gurren lagann).

~only recently a comic con was organized and was supposed to be held in april though ended up being delayed till after the summer , due to both the earthquake in japan and the unrest throughout the arabic world.

Manga here is a different case , but this post is already too big .

edited 9th Jul '11 7:52:44 AM by mir123

Detective Conan did get all of its original bloody scenes censored so that they happened "off-screen", replacing them with repeated cuts from a previous scene; in the very first episode's rollercoster case, you wouldn't even know that victim had died by decapitation until it's pointed out by the police inspector later on!

And as for Sinbad... Well, it was done in a time when cartoon importing was still new, and thus the Moral Guardians were completely ignorant of the whole thing. I think it was done in the '80s, right?

oh , well then I guess I'm not remembering right for conan . I don't know much about sinbad , just that it caught me offgaurd when I saw it .

I remember reading about a Manga being created by a UAE writer and Japanese artists called "Gold Ring," a Shonen-type series about...Falconry! They even got actual Falconers from the Middle east, Japan, and Britain to consult on it apparently.

...that sounds badass.

I know, right? Apparently you can even buy it in English if you're willing to buy it through mail order.

Here is the wikipedia entry...I would link to a better article, but my internet is acting up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Ring

WOW! It looks cool! I want it!

I know that Rose Of Versailles as well as a few shojo sports series were successful over there.

See second half of my post for most probable reason why that happened.

Also I found this SUPER AWESOME dub of the Ojamajo Doremi ending (Strangely Reporpused as the opening)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKQm5_wKncU

Weird how they dont allow skirts but very short shorts are okay.

There is also this other other anime. Can anyone tell me what its name is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqqjDKcSlk&feature=related

Because short skirts mean the possibility of Panty Shot, and even if that trope never occurs, the mere implication of it is too offensive to Muslims. That said, I think short shorts (i.e. stopping at mid-thigh) on adult/adolescent females does get censored too by Arabian-based/-originated dubbers (Al-Zuhra is based in Syria, but its level of censorship smells too much of Arabian conservatism to not hint at the founder(s) being Arabian), as opposed to Egyptian/Syrian-based dubbers.

No wonder Sailor Moon has never been dubbed. And Pretty Cure. And no wonder Rose Of Versailles was accepted, no woman in the show uses skirts, only dresses (And in Oscar's case, male uniforms) and stuff.

Tell me, how did they handle One Piece? Did they cut out all the scenes where Robin/Nami/Vivi use skirts?

edited 19th Sep '11 3:20:44 PM by CocoNatts

Yep, and the censorship also extended to violence and blood. Mind you, I only watched snippets of the episode where Captain Kuro, having already revealed himself, finally clashes with Luffy and is using his "cat claws" and Super-Speed.

edited 19th Sep '11 3:26:40 PM by MarqFJA

I recently saw some Arabic dubbed One Piece episodes on the net and I saw some really weird edits. For one thing, they digitally edited sleeves onto Nami's tank top, yet didn't color over her tatoo. Another thing is that Mr.9's crown was edited so that is was made to seem rounded (really bizarre). I understand the Nami edit but what's so wrong about a crown?

King, crown, something like that?

I've found arabic subs of New Getter and Diebuster

It's not that it's a crown, it's that it's a crown with prominent and unmistakable crosses forming it's structure. Depicting symbols of other religions (except probably when it's contextually necessary to identify another religion/culture/country) is a taboo for Muslims.

Wow, thanks for posting so quickly! Thanks for explaining. Ya know, all the money and effort it takes Venus to edit show could be used for better dubbing and releasing epsiodes faster (I mean, they've only aired 104 epsiodes since 2008 and they've only got 400+ more to go.

Here's pic BTW tiny.cc/f4koi

I must ask though, are there any other strange edits like this in any other dub (I'm not actually Arabic but I like to listen to foreign dub from around the world. I too am informed. )

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:09:45 PM by wjbraden

Any Arabic dub that airs on an officially Arabian-based channel is bound to be heavily censored. You'd have better luck watching stuff whose first debut was on London-based MBC or some such channel than, say, the Bahrain-based Spacetoon and Spacepower.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:12:00 PM by MarqFJA

The only thing is, from what my Arabic friend told me, they seem to eat this stuff up, even though it's been edited to hell and back! I mean the product itself looks sloppy because the crudely made digital edits look weird and the constant rewinding of clips to cover "bad" scenes messes up the broadcast quality. And what's up with that too, do they not want the episode run-time to be a little short or something?

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:19:21 PM by wjbraden

The ones who eat it up are the children. In Arabia, animated shows are considered kiddy stuff, and anyone from adolescence and older who still regularly watch animated series are quite likely to be looked down upon as immature at best.

And the reuse of "safe" sequences to cover up edited-out scenes is a sadly-hilarious bad attempt at covering up the censorship. The sad fact is that nobody in Arabia knows that most of the TV animations that they're watching are redubbed imports until they either grow old enough to start questioning the oddities and discover the truth in their seeking of answers, or they're lucky enough to accidentally discover said truth on their own by sheer coincidence.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:36:50 PM by MarqFJA

I thought to bump this thread in order to give another perspective from an Arabic anime fan. Yes, there's ton of censorship in Arabic dubbed anime but it didn't used to be like this.

Back in the 70's and 80's, censors were less strict on censoring scenes like a girl wearing a mini-skirt, heck I remember some nudity shown on Arabic dubbed anime that were released on VHS tapes back then, as of right now there have been releases of DVD with Arabic dubbed anime like Tiger Mask, that according to the group releasing them is supposed to be uncensored.

I also bought an Arabic translation of the Yugioh manga, which kept a scene where Jonouchi/Joey pulls up Anzu/Tia's skirt, not sure if it's still in publication though. Of course American comics over here in Egypt are left untouched however they are quite high, a recent issue costing around 15 Egyptian pounds since the economic crisis.

MBC 3 has shown ton of cartoon shows involving magic and witchcraft if I remember correctly. There are still Arabic channels that show cartoons that have less edits like ranging from Arabic versions of popular American networks like Cartoon Network Arabia whose shows like Dexter's Labratory and Gumball are mostly intact, or lesser known Arabic networks.

The problem is a company like Venus the owners of Space Toon, has the monopoly over the amount of anime and cartoon licenses plus their over the top censoring including some edits done for minor scenes(mostly stupid edits that don't conflict with Islamic culture at all) have made them really unpopular with diehard anime fans in Arabic speaking countries, when they announced about making a channel called Space Power for older viewers, I thought there was hope for less censors but no, once again Venus has proven to be the 4Kids of Arabia.

While an anime like Sailor Moon hasn't been shown in Arabic countries, it has been broadcast in Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia, of course Turkish television is quite liberal.

But Ojamajo Doremi IS about witchcraft! And it aired on Space Toon.

Japanese cartoons, why don't people assume it is just a case by case basis rather than any given country banning another country's entire export of a product. It'd be more likely in China or Russia, have a histories of hostility with Japan, but hasn't been the case there.

I'd have loved to have the debate over the Zionist Pokemon though. Not to change his mind(ten years ago I might have even believed him), just to pick his brain and learn about the mind that came to such a conclusion, or what the crosses have to do with Zionism and gambling.

IIRC, they edited out every mention of "magic", "witchcraft", or any such synonym, as well as any scene that is obviously using supernatural stuff. Don't remember what they used as a substitute, though.

"Case by case basis"? Elaborate, please, because from what I've seen so far, most anime that get Arabic dubs are licensed to one of the most conservative dubbing studios in the region, and they always bowdlerize those works in the name of appeasing the Moral Guardians that run them, riding roughshod over nearly all sensibilities.