The first thing that I thought when I saw the DVD post without the censoring was “OH MY GOD, they censored THAT!?” I was just utterly dumbstruck by what they censored, it was so incredibly stupid. There are shows that do WAY more then this and don’t make a big deal about it at all. Including things with character’s at this age, so there really was nothing I could think of that would explain why they did this, it’s just absolute stupidity.
I only had the first episode to compare so I’m not sure if they censor anything that makes more sense to censor later on, but as far as the first episode it was just stupid. First off they didn’t just censor images, they bleeped out some words. The example from the first episode is when Kuro runs into the teacher’s room and yells something to Aoki to get his attention. They bleep out what she yells in the censored version but in the DVD release they reveal she yells out “Virgin” Seriously, “virgin”? Honestly with the bleep in there I thought it was something a lot worse. The censoring pretty much had the opposite affect.
The same is true for the image censoring. All three girls lift their skirts up to Aoki and they censor it, but you can tell they do it. I thought that they flashed their panties to him but they were actually bloomers, a lot less revealing and provocative. I thought it was their panties, so I thought it was a lot worse. The censoring completely had the opposite affect, its ridiculous. They did censor one other scene where Rin is shown naked, but you see her back and her hands and hair cover things up. I can understand that one, but as I said a lot more shows get away with a lot more.
Overall, like I said before, the censoring is just utterly stupid.
Picture of the censored version for comparison after the jump.
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Makes you wonder if it was more of a marketing ploy for the DVDs.
Or were the animators that scared of criticism from the rest of the media and the community? I don’t live in Japan at all, so I don’t know the social effect of all those incidents that caused censorship on TV. Granted, Kojika doesn’t have axe murdering in it, but they could still feel weird about it.
In America, after 9/11, existing TV shows and some movies and games were delayed in order to remove all traces of the World Trade Center from their scenes. Maybe Studio Barcelona just wanted to play it entirely safe, which — you’re right — sometimes make it worse, but now nobody can say anything about “illegal” stuff.
I have a feeling it was all just a joke seeing how instead of panties, it was bloomer. It just adds to more comedy that they put all those censors over little things. I myself found that brilliant (censoring virgin made me think the creators wanted to get people worked up finding it absurd).