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Toonami Producer on Editing Process
Bonker writes "Anime News Network is featuring an interview with Jason Demarco, senior writer and producer for Cartoon Network's 'Toonami' block. Mr. Demarco explains why and how the editing process for several anime shown on Toonami, Midnight Run, and Adult Swim happen, as well as the pressure they're under to produce a product acceptable not only to fans but to parents as well. " Gives an interesting perspective on what CN goes through
to get certain anime on US TV. I've said it before, but I'd still love a Toonami channel that didn't need to edit (or maybe just less). I watch more Toonami then any channel.
Q: How do you determine what to edit?
A: Whiny parents screaming, "Won't somebody think of the children?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Nothing's gonna solve the editing problem. It's on a network aimed at children, and children do watch.
Only way to get around that here in the states would be to have sci-fi suck it up and show it uncut with a (frequent) TV-M rating (though many shows would be unfairly labeled as such).
Even then, many of the best shows won't ever make it on TV here, simply because they don't have the style of Bebop, the Action element of gundam, and the "crap" that somehow attracts people like Dragonball Z does.
Editing will likely bar some shows entirely from network TV. ADV, who holds the N. Am. license to Evangelion have said it won't be licensed for TV if it has to be edited.
Or sometimes it's politics. The head of Toonami is a BIG Rurouni Kenshin fan. Problem is, Media Blasters can't show their (the original version) on TV. If kenshin ever hits the air in the US, it'll hit as "Samurai X," a hacked up, rewritten version of the original show (not related to the ADV release of the Kenshin OAVs as Samurai X).
Screw TV. I'll stick with my DVDs thank you.
A friend and I were just discussing Cartoon Network's current juggling act of all the material everyone wants to see, especially us not getting our fix of old-school cartoons. They should split into three different channels:
TOONAMI: The current anime lineup, as well as stuff for "more mature audiences" later for the hardcore adult animers (or some undersexed, anime-hooked nerds like those who will read this reply, and therefore will mod it down, wrecking my karma. Meanies.)
CARTOON CARTOON: Move all those goddamn annoying "Cartoon Cartoons" to this network. You know, stuff like Cow and Chicken and Sheep in the Big City. Some of it is good, but a select minority. Most of it is trash, but it brings in ratings from the little ones.
OLD SCHOOL CARTOON NETWORK: My favorite. Scooby-Doo (all sans Scrappy), Hong Kong Phooey, Superfriends, Wacky Racers, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pink Panther, Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, and all the good old stuff that I miss.
Divide and conquer, Cartoon Network, by heeding the call of the wild Eddy Johnson!
Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
From the article:
... Anime is often full of stereotypes surrounding race and religion that non-otaku will not understand and will take offense to. ... People in America generally don't want that kind of thing in their cartoons, however you and I may feel about it."
"Any direct references to religion, especially juxtaposed with violence, sexuality or hypocrisy, is not allowed.
Maybe if Americans had the chance to see cartoons with that kind of thing, they'd change their minds. Of course this is probably a mixed blessing, as Evangelion is already incomprehensible enough without TV-Y7 editing...
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I thought it was "Toonami."
Posted by CmdrTaco
Ah, there's the culprit. And we're expected to pay for this?
--saint
Typically, I've seen a few types of editing of anime when they make a US version, especially for TV. Here are just a few:
Crappy 80's Hack and Slash:
We saw this with "Robotech" and "Voltron," where
huge portions of things were hacked out. In the case of Robotech, they combined multiple series, that had no relation to one another, into one. Thankfully, most people remember Robotech for the sections that were really Macross.
Pointlessly stupid cultural editing:
This includes changing the names of characters to
sound more American, and attempting to remove all
hints that the characters were originally supposed to be Japanese, living in Japan, etc, even though it is obviously Japanese animation.
God forbid that little Timmy realizes that there are other cultures out there that aren't American.
Pointless Censorship
This is mainly what Toonami has to deal with.
Typically, people feel the need to edit out "Bad Stuff". However, it always seems that people FAIL at this. An example is that there was a drink that was supposed to be sake in an episode of DBZ, and they ended up making it milk or something. This is all fine and good, but this is a series that features huge muscled guys blowing eachother up with high powered energy attacks. I guess it is
important that we sheild Junior from alcohol, but
showing him acts of superhuman violence and fights that span several weeks worth of episodes is OK.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
What I don't understand is how a network show on primetime like NYPD Blue can show real life nudity, but a cable show on at 11 pm can't show cartoonish nudity.
Just makes no sense.
Cartoon Network isn't running seperate feeds for east coast/west coast. Sceptics should check the showtimes.
That means that a show in adult swim is showing in the same time block as primetime, which means they need to keep it to primetime TV standards and that is TV-14. Remember all the trouble MTV got into for not having standards for Beavis and butthead? They aired it in prime time, but had too much swearing and violence and ended up putting the show into the 11 PM eastern time slot. Sticking to the TV-14 standards makes sure the shows are edited down to what you can see in shows like NYPD blues. If they ran the seperate feeds for each coast and aired around the time southpark does they could loosen the standards a little.
Oh and the 18+ is what is known as a 'marketing' gimic. They know there are a lot of anime fans out there. If they can get more of them to watch slightly edited 'adult swim' blocks it makes more animes possible to bring over.
BTW TV-14 does allow brief nudity, so they could for instance have run un-edited tenchi if it had been an adult swim program instead of a toonami block. I also hope they do more of the uncut midnight run. Gundam wing was shown uncut there and that was really awesome of them. I know you have a Tivo so if they do more uncut midnight runs you'll be sure to catch them.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
There is plenty of good anime. However, I'm not sure
how much of that would really be very successful on American television.
For Example:
I don't think showing Love Hina would survive through the censorship ringers. If every
panty shot and accidental incident of the male
character walking in on the females while they
are naked is removed, there wouldn't be that much
to put on air.
Nadesico is just full of parody and references to other anime. I don't think most American viewers
would appreciate the show within the show, Gekigangar 3, very much.
InuYasha is probably too heavily based on Japanese
mythology. Plus, while it is an excellent series,
it has lots of violent fighting that would probably
be destroyed by censors.
And showing Evangelion would probably make Toonami the target of every religous, human rights, parenting, whatever group in the country unless they edited it so much that it wouldn't be the same series.
....
Though there is probably plently of lucritive opportunity for someone to start a tentacle pr0n channel on Pay-Per-View. (Joke)
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
A large part of the problem is that the shows on Toonami were originally made for an older age group than the group they are marketed for here in the US.
Take for example a popular Toonami show, Dragonball Z. When it was originally aired in Japan back in the early 90s, it was primarily for 13 & 14 year olds. But here in the US, it's marketed towards 9 & 10 year olds. So, the cartoon has to be largely censored to meet the new age group. Indeed, when DBZ is aired on the international channel in Japanese, it is rated for 14+, IIRC. (P.S., its been a few years since I've seen that show on TV, so if any of this has changed, correct me!)
Another large part of the problem is the cultural background difference. In Japan, what gets aired for their younger children is far less censored for the same children here in the states. What happens is you wind up with matter being heavily censored in the import to the US. When Midnight Run used to air Gundam Wing, they would air the uncut version of the episode they played earlier that day. It's a shame every episode couldn't be aired like that, it was far more enjoyable.
Escaflowne online has a site about the editing/censoring that
The Cartoon Network has done on one of their shows Outlaw Star.
It's quite interesting the changes that were made. Some are simple digital edits that add clothing for nude characters, removal of blood, to whole scene cuts, and even in one case an episode cut.
Cartoon network has changed a lot of the series they show (DBZ's Mr. Satan to Hercule...even digitally changed on some of the signs the fans hold up). Some are for good reasons, some are probably them being over cautious.
Don't forget the REAL service that cartoon network is serving in exposing people to other forms of animation that they may end up liking. Some of the big anime conventions like Fanime and Anime Expo have gained a whole new fan base because anime has been shown on Cartoon Channel (and even Fox when it was showing Escaflowne).
Someone earlier slammed Robotech, and some of the earlier anime which was brought to the US by Harmony Gold, but without it, a number of us may have missed out on a whole genre that is quite appealing.
If Cartoon Network is going to censor stuff, let them. If you dont want to see their censored versions, go out and buy some of the multitudes of anime dvd's you can find for sale. And believe me there are many more great series out there that Cartoon Network won't be showing. Not because they don't want to, but there's just so much to choose from.
-Alex
For some odd reason, a lot of people in the U.S. think that cartoons are only for kids. Thus they assume that any cartoon should be suitable for junior, and get pissed when their presumption is wrong.
I've got a better question, why can't we show nudity? I'm not talking about sexual acts with nudity, I'm talking about plain old nudity. The U.S. really needs to get off it's damn hangups and realize that there isn't anything inherently dirty about the nude human body. If anything, the fear of nudity causes more problems than it could possibly be solving.
BlackGriffen
This is a pretty good interview, but the interviewer is really a bit too hung up on specific edits. I realize that's the whole point of their site, but damn. "Why did you paint a bathing suit on this woman here?" "What about the bathing suits under the towels in this episode?"
The interviewee made it pretty clear up front, I thought, that they've got guidelines to follow. It's clearly a decision made by the CN executives, and not this guy. Doesn't seem fair to make him defend himself repeatedly for it.