Forum - View topic

Did heavily edited early dubs help the industry?

But US does have some egregious examples. Card Captor Sakura for TV in North America, or as they named it, Cardcaptors, was edited to hell and back by Nelvana, with emphasis on making Syaoran more prominent as the main lead. Strangely they DID produce a dub for all 70 episodes(not to be mistaken for the Animax dub)(that version didn't air in US, but I think it aired in Australia if I remember correctly...).

But here's the thing, the DB license was lucrative, so you definitely had other, more established companies like Pioneer, AnimEIGO, U.S. Renditions, or even Viz who had their eyes on the license, and the 3rd one listed was apparently on track to get it after Harmony Gold's licensing rights expired, until Gen Fukunaga's producer uncle at Toei Company stepped in and pulled some strings to get it to his nephew's start-up company after they were initially rejected.

And we've seen a glimpse of what professional companies like Pioneer could do if they had the license, aka DBZ movies 1-3 dubbed by Ocean (which Funimation learned absolutely nothing from when they made their fake uncut editions).

If you think Dragon Ball would have been as successful in 1997 with two uncut episodes on VHS for $40, I don't know what to tell you. Also Toei is a business and they want to make money and they clearly see their deal with Funimation as successful.

The same Ocean who heavily censored the first 65 episodes of DBZ and were infamous for changing death to "sent to another dimension" and also skipped and combined tons of episodes? Ocean also produced a heavily localized version of Escaflowne that cut out all the scenes with Hitomi as a focus because Fox Kids wanted to market it to boys. Ocean also produced their own localized dub of the later seasons of DBZ for Canadian TV that was also censored and had music changes and other alterations.