Executive Meddling/Anime

Sometimes in the Anime world orders come from on high:

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• Executive Meddling by the editors of Shonen Jump resulted in some drastic plot changes to Dragon Ball. For example, they're the reason the Cell arc kept constantly changing villains (first it was Android 19 and 20, then 17 and 18, then Cell, then suddenly Cell had two more forms that looked completely different and quickly transitioned from the second to third). Both his current editor and his former one basically kept telling Toriyama the villains he picked for the arc weren't good enough, so he kept having to shoehorn new villains or new looks for the villains in. Honestly, in hindsight, the changes were probably for the better.
• Executive Meddling by the editors of Shonen Jump also took down Double Arts and Medaka Box -- the former was well loved by older readers (as seen by extremely huge omnibus sales), but younger readers (who fill out the survey cards) hated it. It attempted a retool into a more fighting based series, but the damage was done. Medaka Box pulled the Genre Shift off more successfully, switching from a slice of life series to a fighting series, to an over the top fighting parody, back to a slice of life series again once it was popular enough not to risk being canceled.
• Similarly, Yu Yu Hakusho was supposed to end with the climactic Chapter Black arc, but one last arc was created due to editorial request, and later ended prematurely by the author himself.
• Ikumi Mia blames part of the failure of Tokyo Mew Mew a la mode on her Nakayoshi director limiting her to two volumes and telling her not to focus on the previous series's characters.
  • Executive Meddling actually produced the original series as well; Ikumi-sensei wanted to do a horror series focusing on a much darker Catgirl, without a colourful cast of Kemonomimi friends. Ichigo's predecessor wasn't even a Magical Girl.
• In Digimon Savers, there is an episode where a bomb-shaped digimon called BomberNanimon attempts to blow up an amusement park by throwing bombs everywhere. When dubbed, its color was changed to orange, the bombs were turned into fruit juice and it was re-named "Citramon." English producer/writer Jeff Nimoy stated that he had to do this or Disney would cut the episode.
  • However, once you get past the utter randomness; it becomes a fitting Homage to Don Patch of Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo, which ended its dub a few weeks beforehand.
• Speaking of Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo, the anime was Cut Short because of complaints from a Japanese Parent-Teacher Association. The sequel manga, Shinsetsu Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, was also Cut Short due to lukewarm fan reaction.
• Rumor has it that Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was cut short because Yuki Judai's voice actor was fired and the show's developers didn't want to spend the extra cash to replace him in the middle of a season; as a result, the show was forced to wrap up half-way through its run, and its successor, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's was rushed to air to make up the difference.
  • The Yu-Gi-Oh! GX manga suffers the same fate as the anime, as it had to rush its ending to make room for Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal's manga, despite how well the GX manga series has been received by the fans.
  • At the beginning, Yu-Gi-Oh wasn't about the infamous card games, but since the game was quite popular (not to mention conveniently marketable), Kazuki Takahashi had to continue with the card games.
• The translators working on Initial D originally wanted a straight translation, but Tokyo Pop executives demanded various changes, resulting in the translators writing an open letter to the fans in which they joked about releasing the manga shrink-wrapped with White-Out and a felt-tip pen.
  • The big, big beef was the "Fast and the Furious"-ization. You can see it in the hip-hop dialogue and cheesy nicknames (gradually done away with in the later volumes). Given the Love It Or Hate It nature of FaF, this is understandable (although still a bit extreme). Strangely enough, without this executive meddling, it's unlikely that any American manga company would've taken a chance on a title as unusual as Initial D at all.
• Code Geass suffered this from Day 1. Sunrise initially had little to no faith in the show because of director Goro Taniguchi^[1], giving him 25 episodes rather than the originally requested 50 and severely limiting the staff's resources, forcing them to piggy-back off of other Sunrise shows being made at the same time. After it became a runaway success, Sunrise gave the staff more leeway, but still interfered in other ways.
  • The initial series plan involved an idealistic rookie soldier and his ideological conflicts with his battle-hardened C.O. (which was recycled as the base for the idealistic Suzaku vs. the hardened Lelouch conflict); when Sunrise rejected this concept, the creators took it back to formula and after some retooling (introducing new elements like the Geass power and C.C. herself) made it the show it is today.
  • According to Word of God, the show being moved to an earlier time slot screwed the staff up in two ways, firstly by forcing them to tone down the content and secondly by making them feel like they had to take time out of the plot to get new viewers acquainted with the premise, which is usually blamed for the first handful of episodes feeling like rehashes of parallel episodes from the first season. This also forced the staff to essentially throw out their original plans for the show's second half, adding in a one-year Time Skip and starting from there.
  • For the American airing, Adult Swim didn't give Geass much love either. [as] gave the show very little advertising and kept shifting its time slot around, which made viewers stop caring and ended up with their rights to the show expiring after only two runs. To be more specific, the show was eventually shoved into a dead early-morning time slot where next to nobody would be awake. Since this was a time before DV Rs became commonplace in cable and satellite hook-ups, the show suffered agonizingly in ratings, and was booted from the network after one rerun, which began at a reasonable time slot, but was pushed back to the same early-morning slot as its premiere run had suffered.
• The entirety of the "Blue Knight" saga and the subsequent story arc in Astro Boy were the result of executive meddling. Apparently Astro's willingness to work with the police and try to change the social order from within made him unpopular with the new generation of student radicals in the late 60s who believed that modern society was corrupt beyond all redemption and called Astroboy a hopelessly idealistic anachronism. Tezuka's editors at Shonen magazine noticed this and ordered him to make the series Darker and Edgier and have him fight against the forces of law and order. Tezuka handled this fairly well, however. Instead of simply turning Astro into the sort of violent, twisted, anarchic Anti-Hero that was popular at the time, he created an engaging story driven by a charismatic Anti-Villain antagonist and gave Astro reasonable motive for his actions. Tezuka had him waver back and forth between accepting and rejecting Blue Knight's extremism before denouncing him once and for all. In the subsequent "Astro Reborn" story, however, he becomes a more destructive Anti-Hero due to losing his memories, but eventually reverts back to his old self, partially due to the Darker and Edgier Astro Boy not selling well after all. This may be one of the rare cases where Executive Meddling actually did some good, as the Blue Knight saga is one of the most well-liked stories by modern fans and was highly influential in later adaptations; then again, Tezuka himself always regretted letting Astro abandon his pacifist ideals to embrace the Blue Knight's extremism, however briefly.
• Saint Seiya ended prematurely because of this. It was planned to have two more big story arcs which would focus more on the Gold Saints, but the series was canceled and it took the anime more than ten years to finish afterward.
• The executive meddling in the English dub of Sailor Moon resulted in the transformation of the lesbian couple Haruka and Michiru into the implied incestuous lesbian couple Amara and Michelle by making the two cousins in an attempt to get rid of any homosexuality. The dubbers did make them cousins, but didn't bother to remove any of the romantic implications between them, possibly as a Take That to the executives.
  • On the other hand, Sailor Moon owes its very existence to executive meddling. When creator Naoko Takeuchi was trying to think of a new series, it was her editor who suggested the heroines wear sailor suits (he had a thing for them) and thus began Codename: Sailor V. However, they had a fight over the length of the skirts -- her editor wanted longer skirts, but Takeuchi fought for the short length they have today.
  • Also, on the Topic of Sailor V, it was meant to be a 1 shot comic that became popular and was continued. When Toei got wind of it and wanted to make it into an OVA, she was asked to expand it into a team format. Sailor Moon was soon created and V was made into a member of her team under the name Sailor Venus. Due to Moon's quick popularity, the OVA starring Sailor V was never made and her series was wrapped up after Sailor Moon's despite being much shorter.
    • Moreover, Takeuchi originally only planned the manga to last one year, and the anime was also intended to only be a 46 episode series, ending with the deaths of the main characters at the end of the Dark Kingdom arc. The popularity of the franchise led to the anime getting more series and naturally, Takeuchi being required to keep stretching out her storyline from series to series.
• One might consider the entire post-Raoh Fist of the North Star story, as covered in the manga and the Hokuto no Ken 2 anime, a product of a desire to keep the story going. Unfortunately the result couldn't keep up to the legendary status of the original, and almost all subsequent licensed works (with the possible exception of a single PlayStation game) have been set in the first half of the manga.
• Ken Akamatsu got hit with this hard while writing Mahou Sensei Negima After Love Hina, he wanted to try something new and do a Shounen series, but the executives wanted to capitalize on the success of Love Hina with another Unwanted Harem series. As a result, Mahou Sensei Negima looks like an Unwanted Harem, but starts adding Shounen elements around volume 3, which increase in frequency until it pretty much is a Shounen series with some Unwanted Harem and Fan Service elements still hanging around. According to some fans, the combination of genres actually benefits the quality of the series.
  • The abrupt ending of Negima is also a result of this. Japanese publishers were attempting to pass a bill that would allow them to effectively steal ownership rights from manga writers, and the sudden ending was Akamatsu's way of protesting this. (Fortunately the bill failed to pass, and Akamatsu felt confident enough about keeping his rights that he started the Sequel Series UQ Holder!
• In a minor example, the author of Skip Beat! wanted a minor character to be a middle-aged man, since the character was a successful director and therefore logically should be of a respectable age. The editor said no, "This is a Shojo manga, dammit!", and the character ended up about 30.
• Another minor example: in Death Note, the editor confused Near and Mello's character designs, so Near became the deceptively young-looking man with Shonen Hair and Mello the androgynous youth.
  • Not to mention that due to this error, it lead to their personalities (as Ohba and Obata first envisioned) being rewritten for the plot with the design swap: The one who became "Near" was meant to be the darker and more vengeful one (and be the elder), while the one who became "Mello" was originally envisioned as being calmer, younger, and more effeminate.
• Weird example: Originally, Clefairy was to be the mascot of Pokémon, but Pikachu was chosen because of one of the editors' personal preference for it over Clefairy.
  • Interestingly, Clefairy is the protagonist's partner in the obscure ^[2] Japanese gag manga "Pokémon Pocket Monsters", making it something of a Canon Foreigner. It also makes a brief cameo in the anime.
  • Throughout the first 22 episodes of Pokemon: Best Wishes, a Story Arc develops concerning the new and improved Team Rocket seeking out a meteorite with special powers. It was all set to conclude with episodes 23 and 24, a two-part event where Team Rocket obtained the meteorite but became engaged in a fight with Team Plasma over it, causing earthquakes and destruction to Castelia City. Episode 22 aired, the two-parter was all set to air...and the Tohou earthquake and tsunami happened. Thus, the two-parter was pulled from the air due to being considered Too Soon by the TV executives. While this is understandable, a whole year has now passed and, despite promising to air it eventually, they still have yet to air it, perpetually leaving the audience without payoff for the arc.
• Ironically enough, one could say that Sasuke owes his existence to this status; when Masashi was working on Naruto, the Editor told Masashi that Naruto needed a rival, thus creating the spotlight-stealing divisive character we all know.
• Shaman King was hit hard by this. Apparently, due to a decline in popularity, Hiroyuki Takei was ordered to HURRY IT UP. So he ended up rushing through the later chapters, resulting in a convoluted mass of plot points and character deaths (which is meaningless as the characters in question usually come back to life shortly thereafter or immediately come back as a ghost), and culminating in a cliffhanger ending. Fortunately, due to fan outcry, Takei eventually finished up the series properly and fixed the rushed chapters.
  • Of course the ending we got, in a way, we got due to a case of meddling that got fans involved. Rather than just release it in volume form, the executives decided to first hold a survey for fans to request the final volume. This final volume was made, and was just the chapters they hadn't collected. The executives then told fans that they had to rebuy the series in new volumes to get the ending, and that if the sales even began to fall they'd be canceled. Let's just say fans were not amused....
• Somewhat surprisingly, the opening theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion is the result of this. Originally, Anno intended to use a piece of the Polovtsian Dances for the opening, but the studio came to the conclusion that it would be too confusing for the viewers and thus had "Cruel Angel's Thesis" made to replace it with modern J-Pop.
  • The series infamous Gainax Ending was caused by executive meddling as well, mainly because of budget restraints, among other things, causing the entire final two episodes to be mostly stock footage. "Congratulations!!!"
• Want to know why Nozomi from Elfen Lied didn't make it to the anime version, despite being so important in the manga? Because the anime director hated her, thought that "it doesn't make a difference whether she's there or not" and refused to put her in the anime cast. Which is fairly hilarious, considering she's the reason the series is called Elfen Lied.
• Angel Beats! was originally supposed to be a 26 episode anime. However, executives inexplicably cut down the number of episodes from 26 to 13, forcing a lot of subplots to either be cut off or rushed.
• The Gundam franchise has had to deal with this from the very beginning:
  • The original series got it on both sides of the Pacific. In Japan, it got poor ratings in its first run and the sponsors tried to cut it down from 49 episodes to 39, but Tomino and the staff begged for an extension to wrap things up, giving it the highly unusual 42-episode run it ended up with.
  • In America, the original series was massively unpopular (presumably due to their following the insanely popular Gundam Wing with the much older and rougher original), leading to rumors that Cartoon Network used 9/11 as an excuse to quietly cancel the show before it had even run once.
  • Yoshiyuki Tomino wanted Victory Gundam to start off slow and with Character Development, not even introducing the titular Gundam until episode 4. Sunrise refused, and forced him to make the show action-packed from the start.
  • When asked to make the Japanese guy the hero of G Gundam (against original planning), they gave it to them - Domon Kasshu, colossal Jerkass for half of the series.
    • G Gundam is a rather famous example overall, because at times director Yasuhiro Imagawa was practically in open war with Sunrise over the series. Sunrise wanted a Tournament Arc, so Imagawa introduced it and then quickly shoved it to the side to focus on the Devil Gundam plotline.
      • And let's not forget the Dub Name Changes, which were mandated by the bigwigs at Sunrise and had nothing to do with Bandai America. This has carried on for years, as any time Domon appears in a video game like Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, it'll be called "Burning Gundam" instead of "God Gundam".
    • On the other side of the Pacific, the Bluewater voice actors wanted to go back and redub the first 20 episodes after they finished the series, saying that their performances weren't as good because they didn't have a feel for the characters yet. However, Bandai wouldn't let them.
  • Like the original series, Gundam X was chopped down to 39 episodes, due to the series being tossed around the schedule.
  • For the dub, the iconic salute "Sieg Zion" was changed to the more generic and boring sounding "Hail Zeon". All other references to the Nazis or Hitler were also covered with references to fascism instead.
  • Rumors claim that Tomino wanted the protagonist of Turn a Gundam to be a woman, but was shot down. As a result, we got the Bishonen Loran Cehack, who keeps getting shoved into dresses and forced to pretend to be "Laura Rolla".
• Executive Meddling gave Macross its name. Originally to be called Megaroad (or, to give the sponsor-imposed tag, Super Dimension Fortress Megaroad), one of the producers from Big West suggested changing the title to Macbeth, as he was a huge Shakespeare fan. Kawamori and the rest of the staff weren't keen on the name, but didn't feel they could really outright oppose the man who authorized the checks for production money. So, instead, they suggested a compromise name -- Macross. And The Rest Is History.
• Warrior Cats: Graystripe's Adventure was originally meant to be a single volume manga called The Lost Warrior. Then somebody had the idea to release it on the same day as The Sight. The artist was only a third of the way done, so it ended up being split into three volumes, and further manga in the series have followed suit.
• Gunnm / Battle Angel Alita: The author was working on a special celebration chapter -- chapter 100 -- which would be the headliner for the phonebook sized Ultra Jump magazine in Japan. It was around this time that his publisher's legal department approached him with censorship demands for the reprints, demanding he change a line using the word "crazy" as it "may offend people with incurable mental disorders." The suggested changes were "mad" or "angry" instead. He caved in because they also cited a part of his contract stating that if he missed the deadline on chapter 100, they would prohibit all future reprints of Gunnm, effectively ending his career. He later regretted it, especially when he discovered they had made similar changes without his knowledge. He approached them with an ultimatum -- either the legal team apologize to him for overstepping their bounds and recall the edited versions, or he'd switch to a different publisher. They didn't, so he did.
• A fourth anime season of Slayers was due to follow immediately from the third, Slayers TRY back in The Nineties, but Megumi Hayashibara, the actress for the female lead, was bogged down with work, making everyone else virtually lose all interest. It wasn't until eleven years later that a new television series was actually released. Now there are no hopes for a new season due to the fourth and fifth season's mediocre ratings.
  • Speaking of the third season, the Light Novel writer pretty much deemed it Canon Discontinuity because he disliked how it came out (not that it stops its popularity with the fans, though)
  • And now the prequel light novels are ongoing because of obligations from the magazine they're published in. As of this writing, they're on hold, but the writer made it clear that he has absolutely no intention to continue the regular series.
• THE iDOLM@STER - An In-Universe example. The show Are We Live? is canceled despite good ratings to free the timeslot for other shows.
• Transformers Armada was rushed through all stages of development (Especially the animation and dubbing) due to Cartoon Network wanting to sign off on a certain amount of episodes before airing. The result - Numerous pissed off Transformers fans.
• The You're Under Arrest Manga's quite possibly one of the shortest (and rarest) licenses that Dark Horse Comics ever published stateside. This was because creator Kosuke Fujishima only wanted a select amount of stories (sixteen in total) released correspondingly with the Anime. The chapters in question were all made towards the end of the run.
• Bleach creator Tite Kubo mentioned in an interview regarding the conception of his character Shinji Hirako that he'd originally planned for Ichigo's friends to develop powers, but Shueisha ordered him to hurry up the schedule and introduce the Shinigami.
  • Tite Kubo also mentioned in an interview that he had never planned for the Arrancar to become so developed or long-running, but the editors requested an increased role due to their popularity, resulting in the Arrancar Arc running much longer than the author had originally envisaged.
  • And much later, the anime was cancelled when the Fullbring arc ended to make room for the new Naruto spinoff series Rock Lees Springtime of Youth rather than develop yet another filler arc. This has currently had no impact on the manga, however, which is still releasing on a weekly basis.
• Tropes Are Not Bad, not even this one. Executive Meddling removed a major source of squick from the anime adaptation of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, changing the ages of Tylor and Azalyn (who has a serious crush on him) from 30 and 10 respectively in the novels to 20 and 16 in the anime.

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1. ↑ Reports variously blaming his being relatively new and untested or his perfectionism
2. ↑ For English fans anyways, the manga is considered impossible to really translate as it relies heavily on cultural humor and puns in Japanese, but in Japan it is well known, and remains fairly popular, and is the only manga other than Adventures to last from the beginning of the series.