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I hate anime editing. Ohh, a character smokes, big deal! Hel, in One Piece they even changed this japanese food into chocolate chip cookies!! Same with all the kanji. And the blood. And any death that ever ocured. Hey, 4kids animation, here's a tip: if it's not suitable for kids in the first place, don't change it! Oh and Sailor Moon stare Those "cousins", and that music group., So they where all lesbians, boo hooey. At least here they "just" made it so the dialogue would confused the hell out of us when it came to their gender. And Card Captor Sakura... Well I can't say I have complains about that one smile Toya's and Yuki's homosexuality was obvious to anyone wiht half a brain, however, the voices where evil! EVIL! Sakura sounded like a kid on a sugar AND crack high! GOD! Anyway, Anime should be viewed in it's purest form. I don't give a rat's a** if you translators think us westerns won't understand it, I want to watch it in Japanese, with all the cultural/religious/sexual references it has. Period.

I dislike editing, period. Straight translation is fine, removing excessive blood and gore that contributes nothing is fine, but some things are stupid. For instance, the One Piece edits. The things they edited harm the story. Sanji smoking is actually a part of the storyline, and it's important. It's a story about pirates; it's violent by nature. There are guns; there are characters who use only guns. To pretend they don't use guns or that guns don't exist harms the storyline.

Other edits seem to be simply because they want to avoid offending people or to make it "suitable" for children. I'm going to use a longtime favourite of mine, Sailor Moon for example. In the first season, they change Zoicite's sex so as not to offend anybody or expose kids to same-sex relationships. They do the same thing with Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, changing them from lovers to cousins. Naturally, this destroys a beautiful part of the story as the interaction between them is downright amazing in some parts. It also makes it a little...odd...that they would raise baby Hotaru (in the manga). They STILL have not bought the rights to the Stars series, and my theory is that the Stars disguise themselves as male, so they would essentially be seen as transsexual, which we all know is "inappropriate." rolleyes

Then there's the silly edits where they change the music. The first three seasons of Sailor Moon had the original score replaced entirely. Not so bad for the first two, but horrible for the third, which is very dark and disturbing in some places because of (you guessed it!) the music! They took it out and replaced it with bubblegum circus-music. Why?!

So editing==bad in my book. If it's inappropriate for TV, don't show it on TV stupid. Put it on DVD and sell it. Make commercials to advertise it. After all, it's okay to advertise R rated movies; why wouldn't it be okay to advertise a cartoon warranting MAYBE a PG-13 if it's SO inappropriate for TV? It baffles me.

Wait, WHAT? Tomoyo was in love with Sakura, and Tomoyo's mom was in love with Sakura's mom? How did I miss that? gonk Then again I didn't watch all episodes redface As for the pictures, I think they kept it, at least I remenber seing Sakura and her dad saying good morning to her picture at breakfast scenes.

*MINORITY OPINION*

I agree with Calixti. If it takes away from the storyline to edit it out, leave it. I also don't like editing stupid stuff (calling wine (not whine, wine - sorry, pet peeve) juice; calling cigarettes lollipops, etc) but

1) I watch most of my anime in its translated version when it is released to the US. Why? Because many times the subtitled versions are fan-subs and that means that the people who should be getting paid for their wares, aren't. If I wrote, produced, directed or starred in a show I'd want to get paid when someone gets it to watch. Therefor, I take the bad with the good. I listen to the American voice actors (and I like many of them truly) and I put up with lost in the translation stuff.

2) Nakedness, while not a problem for most viewers (as an adult I don't mind seeing naked cartoons) isn't suitible for younger viewers. When they decide to market a show (like Dragonball) to pre-teens (whether or not they should have) they HAVE to do something about the nakedness. They have to.

3) Homosexuality is something that is dealt with in several anime (Sailor Moon and Cardcaptors among them) and again when marketing to younger viewers (whether or not they should have) something has to be done because your typical 8 year old isn't going to understand two women being in love (maybe someday that will change but not yet.)

That said, the people who translate and market anime for the US do seem to be listening. They no longer change names/locations as much as they used to (there are some exceptions, Tokyo Mew Mew for example). People have come to realize that animation doesn't equal kid show automatically so there is less of the misplaced marketing than there was. Aside from One Piece the anime's mentioned are older ones so *shrug* they can't change them back at this point.