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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> It was so obvious that many of those scenes were censored in the US.

> It steered far clear of sexual tones.

What are the tests or societal norms that censors employ for US releases?

What is censored or changed always seemed pretty arbitrary from my point of view, though I have no knowledge of CCS and don't know what specifically was changed there.

It feels like romantic, sexual, and violent themes are fine in domestic media, but are censored for imports.

As an extreme example take the previous God of War titles with their violence, gore, and literal sex mini-games vs. cartoonish violence and clothing getting censored in imports. Somehow one thing is fine for US publishers, and the other isn't.

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I can't speak to the censoring of Cardcaptor Sakura... I watched the unedited subtitled DVDs. The edited dubbed version that some people are referring to had the slightly different title "Cardcaptors".

But another example of censorship is how the relationship between Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus was changed from being lesbians to being cousins. If you search for "sailor moon cousins", you can read about how that turned out for them. (eg: "they certainly didn’t act like any cousins I knew" -- Sara Roncero-Menendez)

The show wasn't censored in the traditional way. The show was basically reframed as an action monster-of-the-week targeting a much more male audience than the original anime. They basically edited the shit out of it and turned it into a different show.

edit: for the record I would not recommend the US "dub", since it's terrible (I don't even think they did the whole series). The original, however, is wonderful.

An example of the levels they went to: Renaming the series from "Card Captor Sakura" to "Cardcaptors" wasn't just superficial, they reordered and cut up episodes to try and switch it from main-character-and-rival into duo-main-characters.

I did like the new opening they came up with, though it totally didn't fit the overall series aesthetic.

Seconded. They also censored out the explicit (or even mildly implicit) romantic relationships that late-1990s/early-2000s America considered inappropriate.

Which, as far as I remember, was most of them - multiple non-heterosexual relationships, multiple student-teacher relationships and multiple cousin relationships.

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