What if DiC/Cloverway had dubbed Stars back in the day?

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Apr 9, 2019
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#1
Forgive me if a thread like this has done before, I couldn't find anything in recent searches... but anyway, I'm sure we all have wondered what if DiC or more likely, Cloverway had dubbed Stars back in the day, what would it have been like and what changes would've been made?

Obviously the biggest hurdle would have been the Sailor Starlights and their gender-bending. I still wonder what they would have done with them. I've read before that in one of the dubs, I believe the Italian one, the story was re-written so that instead of changing gender when transforming, the Three Lights call upon their "twin sisters" to help them out. I can only imagine how silly and contrived that must have been.... I think I even read that after about episode 188, they did away with the rewrite and just stuck to the original story. The only other option I see other than the "twin sister" silliness is to just make them female all the time... but then you'd have a lesbian relationship with Seiya and Usagi. A lot of their scenes would have been too obvious to really write out, but if they really tried hard enough, I guess they could've... they did it with Haruka and Michiru, albeit not very well.

Other than that the major issue of the Starlights, the rest of Stars wouldn't be as difficult to handle... Yes, it was darker and dealt with a lot of death and destruction, but so did S and they actually kept most of the references to death in that. It seemed after DiC, they no longer shied away so much from death and characters dying. There's still the issue of Usagi's nudity in episode 200, but they could've easily painted a digital bikini or something like they did with the monsters in S and SuperS.

Of course, all of this is a moot point now that it's 2019 and DiC/Cloverway are both long out of the picture, Viz is about to produce a faithful dub of Stars, etc. It's just something that's fun to think about and speculate on.
 
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NJ_

Gurges Ater
Oct 31, 2009
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#3
^Or just use RiRi. :P
 
Sep 6, 2014
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#4
Starlights would be female all the time. Instead of the girls crushing on them like a N’sync/Backstreet Boys thing it would be more like them admiring them in a girl power! Spice Girls kind of way.

Starlights would keep their attack names (they stopped changing attack names from S onward excluding the pre-established one) of course Star Gentle Uterus would have been Star Gentle Creator.

Depending on if there had been a gap between SuperS and Sailor Stars (I think the most likely time it could have reasonably happened in 2003) Terri Hawkes likely would have resumed the role of Serena from Linda Ballatyne. Ballatyne only took the role in S and SuperS because Miss Hawkes was on maternity leave and Optimum made it clear Hawkes was their favorite Serena

It might have aired on KidsWb since Kidswb did run some episodes as a test trial back in the day and Toonami seemed to have lost interest in Sailor Moon. Then again KidsWb seemed to hate girl shows (see Cardcaptors)

Miss Bishop would have voiced one of the female villains. Probably Lead Crow. Or maybe Galaxia

Lead Crow would be called Red Crow due to to the L and R thing and Optimum’s track record with not getting the intended word in favor of transliteration (see Nephrite/Nephlite)

Seiya’s crush on Serena would be handwaved as just feeling super protective of her.

The whole “we’re cousins really”! would have been mega rammed down our throat at Neptune and Uranus’s death scene.
 

Memento

Stella Nova
Mar 8, 2012
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#5
While S was really front loaded with the "cousins!" stuff, by the end of the season it wasn't really mentioned iirc, so I could actually see them just ignoring that all together in Stars.

I think they would have gotten "Lead Crow" right. "Tin Nyanko" would probably have become "Tin Kitty-Cat." Not sure if they would have kept Kakyuu or called her Princess Fireball or something else instead.

I could see them staying true to the manga re: the Starlights (they'd really be girls who were just pretending to be guys), but I don't know if they'd have the Three Lights be a girl band outright. Plus they'd undoubtedly do an uncut dub again, so there's that scene of Seiya in his little towel to consider...

I feel like they might use the Starlights' last names as their first names and just ignore the "Kou"s altogether.
 

MariaTenebre

Systema Solare
Jul 22, 2009
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#7
I always wondered why the Three Lights being girls who disguise themselves as males and literally change their gender would have been so controversial. I mean I watched X-Men the animated series and there were many times where both Mystique and Morph changed themselves into someone of the opposite gender. So why would it be a big deal in Sailor Stars?

As for Chibi Chibi's name I actually like the name Itsy Bitsy it sounds cute.
 
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Apr 9, 2019
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#8
I always wondered why the Three Lights being girls who disguise themselves as males and literally change their gender would have been so controversial. I mean I watched X-Men the animated series and there were many times where both Mystique and Morph changed themselves into someone of the opposite gender. So why would it be a big deal in Sailor Stars?
I think it's stupid and I agree it shouldn't be a big deal but I still think that back in the day, as in, the early 00's, DiC/Cloverway would have probably done something about the gender-bending. I know at the least, the Italian dub felt it necessary to change it. Nowadays though, people are a lot more open-minded and I think Stars could probably even be shown on Cartoon Network, hypothetically speaking, without any rewrites regarding the Starlights.

Also for whatever reason, sometimes it seemed like American animated series were able to get away with more than dubbed anime did back then.
 

blondibear_17

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Mar 3, 2017
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#9
I think it's stupid and I agree it shouldn't be a big deal but I still think that back in the day, as in, the early 00's, DiC/Cloverway would have probably done something about the gender-bending. I know at the least, the Italian dub felt it necessary to change it. Nowadays though, people are a lot more open-minded and I think Stars could probably even be shown on Cartoon Network, hypothetically speaking, without any rewrites regarding the Starlights.

Also for whatever reason, sometimes it seemed like American animated series were able to get away with more than dubbed anime did back then.
I imagine they were slipping through a lot of cracks and the creatives were probably trying extra hard to get away with some things. Sailor Moon was much more a vehicle for selling toys in the west with probably much less passion behind the people adapting it so anything that wasn't advertiser and child friendly for the time wouldn't have been worth messing with. I think they could have maybe cut enough episodes and changed the script enough to get by and get it aired but I think most people are glad they didn't even bother with it. As a kid I would have been interested in seeing it any way possible and I think it would be really interesting to dissect now a days.
 
Sep 6, 2014
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#10
.

Also for whatever reason, sometimes it seemed like American animated series were able to get away with more than dubbed anime did back then.
Not really. American kids cartoons had pretty strict standards back then too. Sailor Moon had about the standard level of restrictions that its contemporaries did.

People will point to characters like Him and even James from Pokemon as cross dressing examples but those characters weren’t hitting on men like Fish Eye.
 
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Jun 6, 2006
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#12
I always imagined they'd probably do something ridiculous like what Italy did. Then of course, I'd sure it would've been digital bikini city for the final episode.
 
Sep 6, 2014
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#13
What about the episode where Him licked Professor Utonium?
I mean what about the episode where Fish Eye rips off her shirt (which was in the edited dub)?

What about the episode where Serena and Mina chase after a dude only to find out he’s a she?

What about the episode where Chad is jealous of Raye’s closeness to a female?

What about the episodes with blood?


Sailor Moon and its ilk only seems overly sanitized because it was censored from an existing Japanese program. But again it really wasn’t any more sanitized than your average program at the time. If the DiC/Cloverway dub was an original program no one would be saying “Wow this show was heavily censored!” There’s an extremely biased perspective.

Even Batman the animated series, a show that has a reputation for having much lax censorship still had fairly hefty restrictions.


Even if Him licking the Professor might raise an eyebrow he’s still not really human. It’s not even in the same ballpark as a character like fish eye who regularly crossed dressed to attract and seduce men and looked human.

When HIM licks the professor its just some weird devil crab thing with a gender ambiguous voice being a weirdo. When Fish Eyes does his things its a gay man being gay and therefore not acceptable by western standard in the 2000s due to Joyce Lovegood types.
 
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MariaTenebre

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Jul 22, 2009
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#14
Again with the Starlights though I don't see why since in shows like X-Men Mystique and Morph physically changed into people of the opposite gender all of the time as disguises so I don't see why it would be a big deal for the Starlights to do the same thing. Is it because they Starlights don't change into different people but have the same features as boys and girls? I just don't get it?
 
Sep 9, 2011
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#15
I think the biggest issue would be Seiya having romantic feelings for Usagi in her male form. I could see that being a bit taboo for Cartoon Network circa 2000-2002. But otherwise, the Starlights aren't that different from Ranma in Ranma 1/2 changing back and forth between a male and female, and apparently that show DID get a brief run in US syndication, at least in a few markets. That show has never been seen as anything super taboo, and there's a good reason why it was a popular gateway show among anime fans of the mid-90s.

Again, contrary to popular belief, the biggest reason Sailor Stars was not licensed back then was because it (along with the rest of the franchise) was made unavailable by Toei (for reasons still unknown, likely involving a contract renewal dispute with Takeuchi and/or Kodansha) before anyone could license the season. Both Geneon AND ADV expressed interest in at least giving it a sub-only release on DVD. There were plenty of anime available on video in the US market at the time that were far, far, far worse in content.
 

blondibear_17

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Mar 3, 2017
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#16
I think the biggest issue would be Seiya having romantic feelings for Usagi in her male form. I could see that being a bit taboo for Cartoon Network circa 2000-2002. But otherwise, the Starlights aren't that different from Ranma in Ranma 1/2 changing back and forth between a male and female, and apparently that show DID get a brief run in US syndication, at least in a few markets. That show has never been seen as anything super taboo, and there's a good reason why it was a popular gateway show among anime fans of the mid-90s.

Again, contrary to popular belief, the biggest reason Sailor Stars was not licensed back then was because it (along with the rest of the franchise) was made unavailable by Toei (for reasons still unknown, likely involving a contract renewal dispute with Takeuchi and/or Kodansha) before anyone could license the season. Both Geneon AND ADV expressed interest in at least giving it a sub-only release on DVD. There were plenty of anime available on video in the US market at the time that were far, far, far worse in content.
How is that possible? Girl type Ranma is totally topless at least once every few episodes?
 
Sep 9, 2011
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#17
I don't know. Creative cutting? There is someone I know online that mentioned that the show did air on a few local stations, possibly in a test run, but I'll have to ask him for his sources.

Also, I believe Jason DeMarco mentioned that Toonami was once interested in running the show, but I don't remember where or when.
 
Jun 6, 2006
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#18
What about the episode where Him licked Professor Utonium?
Here's the thing, there has always been a double standard for Western animation and anime. There are plenty of characters in Western animation that are seen smoking, yet it almost always got edited from anime. Just look how Cartoon Network skipped an episode of SuperS because of a Lemures shaking her butt, when they literally had a show that focuses on a baboon and his butt. Editing standards for anime have always been weird, especially around that time.
 
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#20
Here's the thing, there has always been a double standard for Western animation and anime. There are plenty of characters in Western animation that are seen smoking, yet it almost always got edited from anime.
I’m drawing a blank of a western cartoon that had characters smoking anything other than a tobacco pipe unless it was some weird psa thing.


BS&P can be hella inconsistent for sure For example Fox Kids had a weird hang up with vampires that prevented an episode of BTAS from getting made and neutered a vampire character in Spider-man so that it only sucked plasma from suckers on its hands but then totally allowed Myotismon to suck a woman’s blood on Digimon with only mild editing done.

But this whole double standard of anime vs western cartoons? It’s basically non-existent.

Just look how Cartoon Network skipped an episode of SuperS because of a Lemures shaking her butt, when they literally had a show that focuses on a baboon and his butt. Editing standards for anime have always been weird, especially around that time.
Because it was comparatively more realistic and humanlike than I R Baboon’s.

It’s a weird thing to for cartoon network broadcast standards make a distinction about but its not an anime vs western cartoon double standard. You don’t see
Realistically drawn human butts on western kids cartoons either.
 
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