Full transcript of “Changes Made to Anime for America (Sailor Moon, YuGiOh, and Power Rangers)”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 Oh welcome back to part 2 of our Severely Abridged History of Anime Localization in America! Let’s pick up from where we started with an entertainment company… Called Saban. And let me empty my mouth… So it’s not rude... Saban entertainment produced a lot of killer kids content in the early 90s like Super Mario Bros Super Show, ALF: The Animated Series, and a whole bunch of Marvel cartoons including X-Men and Fox Kids’ Spider Man series. The latter of which had some crossover episodes that give Infinity War a run for their money. Like in this clip where it takes the combined forces of the Avengers, X-Men, Spiderman, and the Fantastic Four to beat up a lizard. God, remember when people got excited about the Fantastic Four? That was a big IP once…
0:48 Damn you Fox- But Saban is probably most famous for licensing the popular, live action Super Sentai franchise and localizing it by cutting out everything but the fight scenes and filling the gap with good ol fashioned teenage shenanigans in Angel Grove, California And that is... The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers ♫ GO GO POWER RANGERS ♪ The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was a really big deal! Obviously... It’s also a fun parallel to Voltron in that it localized through recontextualizing the original content. Both shows are about a bunch of normal ass people who turn into Superheroes to fight monsters of the week. But Super Sentai didn’t have the 25 year old highschoolers that were being pestered by 30 year old bullies named Bulk and Skull.
1:36 Rita Repulsa is the same though, they just dubbed over her voice and gave her a new name. Nice... But if you think Power Rangers engaged in some Voltron-era level editing then I wanna draw your attention to this shit. The Samurai Pizza Cats is the crown jewel of localization: where most crappy localizations might change the plot, context, or characters, Samurai Pizza Cats swapped genres. What we have here is much more slapstick, animaniacs-style comedy instead of the relatively straightforward children’s anime it originated as... And the reason why they changed it so much is crazy. Let’s go back to the intro, I wanna show you this line in the opening sequence of Samurai Pizza Cats
2:30 Yeah, that thing about the script. That’s true, they didn’t have a script... See Kyatto Ninden Teyandee didn’t do very well in Japan and so Tatsunoko Productions didn’t bother preserving the original production documents. So when Saban licensed Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, the localization team found that the scripts were either translated poorly, not translated at all, or just straight up missing. So the team did what any group of writers who want to keep their jobs would do - watch 50 episodes of good ol’ foreign animation RAW and just went buck wild, complete with fourth wall breaks and 90s pop cultural references. "You guys?! Well you're too late this time..." "We spoke to the producer there's plenty of time left in the episode!!" "What?! Now they tell me!!"
3:17 And despite all that, the core framework of the show remained intact. It’s still about three masked heroes protecting Neo- Tokyo from the king’s evil advisor and his army of evil ninja crows. Even the food is actually spot on - this isn’t an instance of changing onigiri into donuts, the cats just run pizza joints in both the Japanese and English versions. Thank you pizza… You’ve saved anime… So how did the dub of Samurai Pizza Cats do? Was it terrible? Well.. no. It actually it did really well. I mean it wasn’t a Pokémon or anything, but it did a lot better than the Japanese original and ended up being exported to 32 different countries. Since then it’s become a bit of a cult hit, had several DVD releases, and - like many
4:03 of the anime we have mentioned in this video -- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. Check it out *wink*... I can't wink... Pioneer was an American-based spin-off of a Japanese Electronics company in the early 90s. They made laser discs, everyone’s favorite now-defunct cyberpunk media device. But eventually they’d get into the anime distribution game by releasing a whole bunch of Tenchi Muyo. Remember when Toonami was basically all Tenchi Muyo? Ahhh... the good old days… Well, eventually they’d come out with a show called… Sailor Moon. The Dic dub of Sailor Moon is pretty infamous. ♫ Fighting evil by moonlight ♫ ♫ Winning love by daylight ♫ There were the obligatory name changes and a content edit that ended up dropping the
4:51 episode count from 89 to 82. They’d cut stuff like when Sailor Moon would get drunk and nudity in some of the transformation scenes or shots like this, And they continued the tradition of the extremely good Sven accent from Voltron, with Molly and her.. Boston? "I'm so happy you CAWLLED me..." Brooklyn?? "Stay right there Maxfield OI think OICAN help YOuU!" Southerrrrnnnn???? Accent??? And then there’s this gem from Chad who sometimes sorta sounds like a surfer and says shit like this. "Hwhat? No way... I'm a singer man Nawt a Munkey" Chad... They named a person Chad... They also edited out any hint of LGBT content in the show. For one thing, Zoiste was changed from a gay man to a straight woman, also erased their relationship
5:40 with Malachite for another they cut the entire season about the Sailor Starlights- *Cough* I just wanted to make a quick interruption... To say that after recording this video... Uh... We found out that uhh... VIZ actually announced they will be dubbing this... So... Yeah... Ignore what I just said... You know... About that last bit... 2019 baby... 2019... And most infamously, the uhhh... ‘cousining’ of Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus. Now no matter who you are, you have to admit that Neptune and Uranus being gay is a lot less confusing and potentially harmful than them being cousins: Yeesh...
6:27 4Kids!... Everyone's favorite... 4Kids has a pretty interesting history. They were originally called Leasure Concepts Incorporated and throughout the 70s and 80s they made merchandise for popular intellectual properties. They mostly made stuff like Hulk and James Bond toys and that Nintendo branded cereal - the Nintendo Cereal System... Delicious! They also helped Rankin/Bass in the initial production of Thundercats, but they didn’t really get into TV production until the early 90s - with a heavy focus on anime dubs. Dubs like... *Pokémon theme* ♪ I wanna be the very best... ♫ ♪ Like no one ever was... ♫ and Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece and Biker Mice from Mars!
7:14 So here we are, finally full circle... bringing this all the way back to Brock being a dumbass with one of the most notorious anime lines of all time: "These donuts are great! Jelly filled are my favorite!! Nothing beats a jelly filled donut!!!" What’s fun about a lot of 4kids localization of Pokémon is that their editing choices are often more perplexing than anything else. The onigiri example is a good one. In order localizations it was common to replace Japanese texts or names with English ones, but you didn’t have many cases of where you’d try to mess with the actual animation. And when you did it was usually for a reasonable reason, like erasing blood, or hiding Goku’s *DIC* behind a flower, and changing Bulma’s underwear color??
8:02 But it’s usually not for editing a fully animated sandwich into a shot. To be fair that sandwich animation is really bad. It’s not even rolling, it just kinda looks like it's sentient and is moving towards Ash... My god Ash... GET OUT OF THE WAY- But Onigiri isn’t the only Japanese food that 4Kids had to scrub out of existence. In the second episode of the original series of Pokémon, Professor Oak facetimes Ash while boiling noodles that are right there. Soon after there's a doorbell chime, then we hear the sound of water boiling over, and then Professor Oak says his pizza is here. Ok, I get it, in the original Japanese Professor Oak was making ramen and this was another moment where 4Kids was I guess afraid Americans wouldn’t know about what Ramen are... But here’s the thing. Why pizza?!
8:48 I know that this is a weird way to boil noodles, but they’re still in the shot! Just say he’s making spaghetti or just say noodles? Did Americans not know what noodles were? You guys know what noodles are???? Comment down below- And while we are on this subject can we take a moment to reflect on the KIND of pizza 4Kids decided Professor Oak wanted.. Anchovies, spinach, and pineapples . What the f*** Oak... But these bizarre food edits are just the tip of the 4Kids iceberg, because we’ve also got a number of banned Pokémon episodes. Get ready for this listicle... There’s Beauty and the Beach which aired twice in the US before being taken out of rotation because of James’ fake titties... The dub was never aired again, scrubbed from Pokémon.com, and doesn’t appear in any of the subsequent video releases.
9:34 RIP… Then there’s Cyber Soldier Porygon that had a flashing lights sequence in its original Japanese airing that sent 685 viewers to the emergency room for epileptic shock, vomiting, and eye irritation. It has been completely wiped from the Pokémon website and has never been released in any format afterwards. That’s probably good. Not RIP... But of all the banned Pokémon episodes the craziest HAS to be #35 of the original series: Legend of Dratini which includes whole new levels of potential violence to the Pokémon franchise and it’s all cuz of this: a Safari Zone care-taker named Kaiser. Kaiser is clearly a high strung dude because he gets upset at Ash for singing too loud, pulls A GUN on him, and asks if he WANTS TO GET SHOT.
10:20 And, just to be clear, the gun is IN NO WAY played for a joke. Ash, Brock, and Misty are terrified, look at them! They're about to DIE But that’s not all! He threatens them again LESS THAN A MINUTE LATER after explaining the rules of the Safari Zone By saying that his 'hunderbolt’ will get them if they break the rules. Being the classic dumb idiot, Ash asks what his ‘Thunderbolt’ is and so Kaiser cocks his gun and points it at Ash’s face. God. DAMN. The episode wraps up with Ash blowing up Team Rocket with dynamite. And while this ending is cartoonish in Looney Tunes sort of way, it still feels wrong after the introduction of firearms into the Pokémon universe. I Can't wait for f***ing... Gun... Mon.........
11:07 But if you think the Legend of Dratini is ridiculous, then we need to talk about Yu-Gi-Oh. First off, it also had a gun problem. Like in this scene when Pegasus, the guy who canonically created Duel Monsters, sends armed thugs after Kaiba. Well 4Kids edited the guns out in a totally not weird way at all.... Yeah... And then there’s this scene, where patented American ‘Bandit Keith’ points a gun at Pegasus head and 4Kids, once again, edits it out in a totally normal way. So normal. Or this scene where Kemo, another one of Pegasus’ goons points a gun at Kaiba. This one was deleted though, so we don’t get any extremely convincing finger drawings to go along with it. And then, while we’re still on the gun-subject, there’s Barrel Dragon..
11:52 A dragon that’s like got guns, you know? Ya know... Barrel Dragon... Well those guns? Too real. So 4Kids went ahead and edited these very realistic gun barrels into very stupid futuristic gun barrels, ushering Yu-Gi-Oh into a fine tradition of American children’s shows where the only guns are laser guns. But the 4Kids dub did a lot more than just lose the guns. Like, you know how sometimes people would be sent to the ‘Shadow Realm’? Yeah, that doesn’t exist in the Japanese version. 4Kids is covering up the same way DBZ’s Ocean dub did When people would get sent to another “dimension” "I want them ALL in the next "DIMENSION"" "I'm sorry to have to TAELL ya this but he was sent to another "DIMENSION"" "From another "DIMENSION"" "DIMENSION"
12:37 "And he sent Cui to another "DIMENSION"" Nah... No dimensions... They're dead... I think the best example of the ‘Shadow Realm-ification’ of Yu-Gi-Oh comes from the second season where Yugi battles Arkana in ‘the worlds most lethal dueling arena.’ In the 4Kids version of this episode Yugi and Arkana duel with their legs clamped down and for every life point they lose ‘dark energy discs’ move closer - the first to lose will be touched by these discs and sent to the shadow realm. And the Japanese version these discs are just buzzsaws and the loser will get their legs chopped off. To be fair, no one does get their legs chopped off - Yugi saves Arkana before this can happen - but still real ass BUZZSAWS are a lot scarier than ‘dark energy discs’.
13:25 So yeah, the 4Kids dub really tamed Yu-Gi-Oh, but the manga was even worse. Here’s an example: In both the anime and manga Pegasus has the millennium eye stolen by Yami Bakura at the end of the Duelist Kingdom arc. To be clear, if you don’t know what I’m talking about that’s fine, the Millennium Eye is one of the Millennium artifacts and all the Millennium artifacts are OP as sh** and the Millennium Eye is also Pegasus’ eye. So when Yami Barkura ‘steals’ the Millennium Eye he’s pulling it out of Pegasus’ head. In the anime this puts Pegasus into a coma, but in the manga this kills Pegasus and it's bloody and then Bakura licks the blood. Damn Yu Gi… I don’t think it’s time to ever d-d-d-duel… After 4Kids we are approaching the Adult Swim era where anime started getting faithful localizations.
14:13 Cowboy Bebop’s incredible dub seemed like an anomaly when it came out in 1998, but a few years later Kazuya Tsurumaki, the director of Fooly Cooly, would say that he prefers the English dub of Fooly Cooly to the original Japanese recording. There were still bumps in the road, of course, and subs do tend to be more literal than dubs, and less popular anime don’t get the same localization treatment as more popular stuff. Fact is, anime hasn’t been obscure for at least 15 years and, perhaps because of that, many facets of Japanese culture have become common knowledge knowledge to Americans. Take Japanese food, for example. More and more people know the difference between udon and ramen, or Japanese and Indian curry, but back when Power Rangers came out sushi was considered that weird foreign food made up of... raw fish.
15:00 Go back to ten years before that, when Robotech was king, and I’d bet most Americans didn’t even know what sushi was. "Exactly what is this stuff?" "Uh it's uh Sushi, raw fish... very good" "Woops! That flew right outta my hand! If you did... brownie points for you if you did... Case in point, there’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer finds out about a Japanese mascot named Mr. Sparkle that looks exactly like him. He makes a call to Japan to ask about it and is sent a promotional video that sorta answers the question - fish-bulb - but mostly just perplexes Homer. It’s an entire episode about how weird and crazy and indecipherable Japan is, and it
15:45 came out in 1997. 1997! That’s the year Toonami and Pokémon came out and the predominant American understanding of Japan was still ‘they’re just crazy over there’ And in the 22 years since it has just become better and better to be an anime fan. Digital distribution has brought us simultaneous world wide releases, streaming services cheap and have huge libraries now, and localization has become more about editing for clarity instead of content. Just think about it: if Naruto had come out just 5 years earlier he would’ve been saying “Believe it” twice as often and his favorite food would have been something like... ‘chicken noodle soup.’ Or maybe they would change the whole Ichiraku joint into..... A Donut shop…
16:34 And that... Is the abridged tale of the Anime localization Be sure to comment on the strangest localization for anime that you've seen! In the comment sections below AND go to Crunchyroll.com right now and check out Samurai Pizza Cats... We'll put in the link down in the descriptions down below So uh... give that a go... you'll be pleasantly surprised! Be sure to like, subscribe, comment all that good stuff my producer told me to say... And uh... Yeah! The endscreen uhh... Click on any of the videos that pop up and uh. Yeah... That's it... See ya guys later...
