Missing Episode/Anime and Manga

• Common in Anime which has been imported for broadcast.
• Dragon Ball GT lost several episodes when first shown on Cartoon Network, to pick up the pace of the storyline. The missing episodes were replaced for its second run, which was advertised as Dragon Ball GT: The Lost Episodes. It's worth noting that fanboys had been trashing these episodes since 1997, but the second they were "lost", they were in hot demand.
  • The real reason is that the first 16 episodes of GT were lighthearted comedy in the vein of the original Dragon Ball, which wasn't nearly as popular in the West. Cartoon Network chose to skip these in favor of the more action-packed, DBZ-style episodes, clearly knowing their audience. Of course, this was also the era when GT had a Theme Tune Rap.
• In the original run of the edited version of Dragonball Z, two episodes were pulled. One was early on; a young Gohan gets lost in a cave during his wilderness training and encounters a grouchy robot, who ends up becoming fond of him and sacrifices his life to save Gohan. The reasons for pulling this episode are unknown. The other occurs after Frieza impales Krillen on his horns; in the first half of the episode, Frieza continually tortures him until he's lost nearly all the blood in his body. However, more material would end up being cut later on. At the moment, fifteen episodes' worth of material has been edited out, including most of the first episode and Tenshinhan's Z-era introduction to name a few. In addition to that, an episode created for the edited broadcast (Episode 10: "Escape From Piccolo") was skipped over in '96 due to objectionable content and only reinstated on the home release and on television in '98 after making the jump from syndication to Cartoon Network.
• The DIC dub of Sailor Moon threw out numerous episodes entirely. These were not seen (legally) in the US until the uncensored, subtitled ADV release. Even that did not include Sailor Moon R episode 67, a Beach Episode with no relation to the rest of the plot or the setting of the show; it has Chibi-Usa befriending a baby dinosaur on an island off the coast of (then) current-day Japan. The director supposedly hated it, and it's been said that Toei refused to license it.
  • Episode 89 was skipped in several countries, but not in the Dic dub. That and the fact that it was a clip show lead many fans to think it was made by Dic, even though it was part of the Japanese run.
  • The Swedish dub skipped episodes with "too much music". They also only aired the first two seasons.
  • The Albanian dub skipped the third and fifth season entirely. Aside from Rini's returning in the third season, and already being a Senshi, there were really no plot holes.
  • In Poland, three episodes were skipped: 45 and 46 were skipped because Polsat (the station that aired Sailor Moon in Poland) got the package that excluded these episodes, and 133 was skipped to avoid possible offense to Catholics.
  • The last season has never been shown in the US. Depending on who you ask, either Toei has refused to license it in North America (knowing that American audiences would complain about the Sailor Stars, who are men who transform into women when they become Sailor Scouts) or it's a separate license that would cost more ^{[dead link]} .
• The Hot Springs Episode of Outlaw Star was dropped from the dub on Cartoon Network, since it'd take too long and cost too much money to digitally cover the sheer number of naked breasts and crotch on the female characters and tone down some of the sexually suggestive lines. There does exist an edited version for pre-watershed screening, but due to the adult content of the episode, the edit has a vastly shorter run time. The episode was shown, although with some apparent cuts, on the short-lived CNX Channel in the UK and is available on DVD uncut and uncensored.
• Black Jack examples:
  • The third episode of the new Black Jack anime was left unaired because part of the plot dealt with an earthquake, and a real earthquake struck Japan hours before it was to air.
  • The Black Jack manga has a number of "sealed chapters" that were cut from the collected volumes for being too morbid, too controversial, or just not very good.
• Pokémon is notorious for this among the fan community. Most of these are only missing from the US dub, but there are a lot of examples:
  • "Beauty And The Beach" was a Beach Episode, for one, but it really got itself banned for the scene where James cross dresses to enter the swimsuit contest with fake breasts, and then taunts Misty that his boobs are larger while inflating them. (A clip from this episode actually appears in flashback form in a later episode, confusing the hell out of viewers for years.) A heavily-edited version aired three years later in 2000, but even that one was never shown again. This caused severe dialogue changes in the next episode, which featured a twin of one of the characters from this episode that in the original vehemently objected to confusion with her twin. Of course...
  • That next episode was "Tentacool and Tentacruel". It aired just fine then and years afterward, until 9/11. It was taken out of rotation as Too Soon for a scene where a giant Tentacruel smashes up a building, even though the building didn't look anything remotely like either of the Twin Towers, and even though that very scene was (and remained) part of the opening titles. It didn't come back until the Channel Hop to Cartoon Network a few years later.
  • "Tower of Terror" was banned as Too Soon after 9/11 solely on the basis of the name, and Cartoon Network couldn't pry the rights for it until late 2007, which is an extremely loose definition of "soon". It was the middle part of an important three-episode mini-arc, to boot.
  • "The Legend Of Dratini" was banned because of a metric fuckton of gun play, including two characters getting guns to their heads and one character shooting off about a hundred rounds at Team Rocket from two revolvers to interrupt their motto. Extra fun when in later episodes, Ash suddenly has 30 Tauros we never saw him catch, because he caught them here. Also could have been trouble since this is where the gang gets to the Safari Zone they had been searching for for a couple of episodes, but luckily the previous episode just happened to feature a nature preserve that just happened to be right next door to the Safari Zone which is also supposed to be a nature preserve. It was pretty easy to edit dialogue to make that episode the Safari Zone and actually make things more logical than they were before.
    • Ironically, the episode with the Squirtle Squad has a scene where a store full of people all point guns at Ash thinking he's there to rob the place.
  • "Electric Soldier Porygon", the infamous episode that gave its viewers epileptic seizures. It was only aired once in Japan, where the strobe effect employed caused seizures in the Japanese populace. And then a whole lot more Japanese people got some when the news reported on it by showing the clip that was giving people seizures! This wasn't the only episode where the effect was employed, but while the previous episodes had the strobe effect removed, this episode was simply banned. The episode can be found on YouTube, where it can (reputedly) be watched safely due to the lower frame rate. In fact, anime had been like this for years and it wasn't until the Porygon episode that this kind of thing stopped.
    • 4Kids had actually fully dubbed the episode, and even modified the strobe effect by dimming it and slowing down the frame rate, but ended up scrapping it anyway. The incident also forced them to go back and dim the flashing effects on earlier episodes.
    • The delay caused by Electric Soldier Porygon caused two episodes to be delayed and run as specials (Holiday Hi-Jynx and Snow Way Out!), with one being canceled altogether (a New Year's Eve episode).
    • Ironically enough, the fallout from this episode caused Porygon to effectively stop existing as far as the anime was concerned, even though it was Pikachu's attacks that caused the seizures.
      • This is untrue. Porygon'll appear as a cameo or very, very, briefly sometimes. A good example would be at the start of the fourth movie. Porygon-2 and Porygon-Z, however, have never appeared in the anime at all, and it doesn't look like that'll change.
  • After all this Season 1 madness, things ticked down a lot, but a few more missing episodes turned up. Besides the aforementioned earthquake episode, the two episodes depicting the first-generation Jynx have been pulled from rotation in the US (see that article for more details). Clip Show episodes in later seasons were skipped because, really, who wants to watch a Pokémon clip show?
  • To add to this list, there were four episodes from Pokémon Advanced, one of them being Wattson's Gym battle, where they only aired twice overall. This was after the massive three-month hiatus before the next season began after these episodes aired. Though it's considered "missing" for a completely different reason.
  • And the two-part episodes in the Best Wishes! series that would finally introduce Team Plasma. According to some previews and Word of God, a lot of scenes showed a city being severely damaged. Then the 2011 Japan earthquake happened, and you have to take out these episodes from the grill. The producers promised that they will in fact air sometime, most likely re-edited and re-written to fit into a different time frame all together.
  • Another episode (revolving around Cilan fishing) was removed. It was originally made to set up the arc in which Bianca joins the group and Iris catching Emolga. When the episode aired, it was edited to retcon the episode's placement in the story, and the ending was changed to have Bianca leave the group.
• Cowboy Bebop was aired in America almost immediately following 9/11, leading two episodes about terrorism to be pulled (including, eerily, one about a man who bombed tall buildings). Pulled for presumably unrelated reasons was an episode where Spike shoots an Enfant Terrible between the eyes.
  • Also pulled for a short time after the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was an episode in which the shuttle plays a key role.
    • In the Remix collection, the space shuttle is renamed Challenger in that particular episode. Which when you think about it isn't really that much better...
  • It should be noted that Cartoon Network did air the episodes in later re-broadcasts of the series.
• The finale of Excel Saga was never broadcast in Japan, and many other markets, because it was intentionally made too indecent for broadcast. Even the length of the show (a full minute too long) was unsuitable for broadcast.
• Moetan's sixth episode, "The First Date", never aired for "various reasons". Until it hits DVD, these reasons have yet to be seen.
  • The "various reasons", given the evidence, appear to be "hype up sales for the DVDs." It worked, at least.
• Whenever the original Astro Boy series is shown in Japan the episodes are not from the original recordings, but actually redubbed American edits of the episodes. This is because all original records of the series had been destroyed, because of financial reasons. (In short, the masters were destroyed by NBC, who hadn't the room to retain them, and when they offered to return them to Mushi Productions, Mushi, which was going through bankruptcy at the time, told them they were unable to accept them back and to do whatever they normally do with unwanted masters.) In fact, the practice to destroy copies, line arts, voice recordings or never aired episodes was very common in the past. Only god knows how much of such priceless original material had been destroyed.
  • One episode never aired in Japan at all, because series creator Osamu Tezuka hated it so much he had the master destroyed. As it turned out, though, a copy had already been sent to America for dubbing. Only the dubbed version was ever aired, and in the 1990s was even released on VHS as "Astro Boy: The Lost Episode."
  • For unknown reasons, the first two episodes of the 1982 Astro Boy remake were cut down into one single episode. Because all of the material about the creation of Atlas was cut, it made subsequent episodes about Atlas (some of which actually contained flashbacks to the cut material) somewhat baffling. It was only when the original episodes were released in subtitled form on DVD that most English-speaking fans finally understood Atlas' origins.
• An episode of the anime Ghost Stories was banned before it even aired in Japan, due to complaints from viewers about the Kuchisaki-Onna, based off a Japanese folktale, being insensitive to those with cleft palate disorder (as in the myth, she had a deformed mouth). The episode has never been released to DVD or broadcast anywhere, as a result of this.
• Yoshiyuki Tomino had episode 15 of Mobile Suit Gundam ("Cucuruz Doan's Island") removed from both broadcasts and DVD/Bluray collections. The reasons cited are particularly Off-Model animation and an unspecified beef Tomino had with the episode's director (All he'll say is "He knows what he did.")
  • For the US broadcast, the penultimate episode ("Space Fortress A Baoa Qu") was never aired, because Cartoon Network took the show off the air two episodes from the end due to the events of 9/11.^[1] The final episode ("Escape") was eventually run as part of New Year's Evil, a special marathon celebrating the villains of Toonami.
• Nippon's "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" did have dubs for all of the episodes, but many were unaired in the U.S., or were pulled from reairing:
  • Bluebeard (based on the Grimm's "King Bluebeard", not Perrault's) opens up with a man impaling his wife with a sword, and the climax of the whole story is the heroine (the man's seventh wife) finding the mutilated corpses of the previous wives. There were also magic roses that turned into blood.
  • The Crystal Ball focuses on a decaying old witch who imprisons a beautiful princess in her castle, and every night performs a demonic ritual where she bites said princess, and drains all her blood. This restores her youth for about a day, and the princess is left a decaying corpse, but regenerates in about a second. What makes it worse is that this happens every night.
    • This episode actually aired, but was never released. The dubbed version cut out the biting scenes, and had the witch use her magic to make the princess switch ages with her.
  • Godfather Death has a lot of on screen deaths. Do I even need to go into this one?
• There are missing chapters of a manga version of Batman from the 1960's.
• Various Hentai have missing episodes that don't make it to overseas releases. This is usually due to the presence of underage female characters who can't be explained or excused as actually being of legal age. See episode 2 of The Maiden Diaries, among others.
• The Transformers Energon episode "Scorponok's Scars" was not only never shown in the west, but never even dubbed into English. The episode is important to the plot, and there's nothing particularly objectionable about it, so its absence is a complete mystery.
  • The fact that "Scorponok's Scars" is the AMERICAN title of the episode "Return! Our Scorponok" just makes it that much more confusing.
  • Several episodes of Robots in Disguise were only aired once in the US or not at all due to September 11th.
    • The series premiere was three days before 9/11. The actual episode has not been re-run since due to a scene of Megatron smashing through a skyscraper... though in his Giant Hand mode instead of his Jet mode.
• Code Geass had two Clip Show "half" episodes, outright labeled X.5; the staff openly admitted that they threw together these episodes to give them some "breathing room" because they weren't as far ahead in their scripts as most anime are. Bandai didn't even bother dubbing these episodes for the American release, resulting in a couple of Missing Episodes that nobody will miss all that much.
• One episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross was briefly literally missing, as in a courier accidentally left the master reels of the finished episode on a train. Fortunately, they were able to recover the film, rather than have to reshoot the episode all over again.
• The episode Someday in the Rain from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was adapted to prose form in an issue of The Sneaker, but so far has not been included in any volume of the novels.
• The 13th episode of Green Green is missing from the English Dub release due to its graphic sexual nature.
• The entire final season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was "lost" to American viewers, leaving the series to end on the depressing note of Jaden/Judai never returning from the alternate dimension.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's dub skipped about a dozen episodes, jumping from Yusei's duel with Placido straight to the setup for the duel with Team Ragnarok and skipping over the Crimson Devil arc as well as the duel with Team Taiyo. Don't know if those episodes will be released at a later date...
• The Hungarian broadcast of Transformers Cybertron was all about this. For starters, the pilot episode was out-right omitted from the start. The series went on 'till about episode 16, after which the whole thing was constantly repeated multiple times. Finally, Cartoon Network got a hold of the rest of the series, and it aired further, before all of a sudden stopping at some point during the final arc. It went on to be repeated again, this time including the pilot. However when only a handful of episodes were left, guess what? The 1 year run of the show had come to an end, meaning it had to be pulled off the screen with only the last few episodes missing. The show was never re-aired or released on DVD.
• Again from Hungary, both Dragonball Z and Inuyasha have had a very troubled past, as neither series got to be aired in their entirety, nor have they been released fully on VHS tapes or DVDs. The reasons for this are difficult to decipher, and tons of Urban Legends have come into being because of them. However the real reason goes along the following lines: one of the country's main commercial TV stations, RTL Klub, had exclusive rights to airing the shows. Due to their violent nature, however, they were forced to push up the rating to the whopping 18+ age-range. The channel started protesting, which eventually lead to a lawsuit. Long story short, RTL decided to just cancel the shows, as a late night time-slot would have destroyed the ratings. Animax also held broadcast rights for Inuyasha, but only for episodes that have already been shown on RTL. And, as their luck would have it, the final 63 episodes have never been aired.
• Sazae-san has only aired most of its episodes once, and never released them to home video. It was due to a request the creator made before her death. But during the 40th anniversary show, they aired some 1970's episodes, which is why it was a special event.
  • Another hard to find thing about Sazae-san is a Running Gag that appeared at the end of each episode from 1969 to 1991, in which Sazae would toss a bean or rice cake in the air and would catch it in her mouth at the end of each show. The stunt was imitated by viewers. In 1990, a child choked to death doing this, and just like the Hawaii Five-0 episode "Bored She Hung Herself" (which was also banned when someone in Real Life tried to imitate the stunt shown on TV, though Hawaii Five-O's didn't involve eating tossed food), it vanished off the face of the earth, and was replaced with a rock-paper-scissors game between Sazae and the viewers at home.
• After that whole defamation controversy, add Gintama episode 232 to the list; also counts as No Export for You Inverted because it's still showing on, guess what, Crunchy Roll.
• The third episode of the second Lupin III TV series was not broadcast by Adult Swim and had its release delayed until the fifth DVD volume, due to adventures and humor involving Those Wacky Nazis.
• It's a common belief that Phantom Thief Pokémon 7 ended on a Cliff Hanger. In reality it had more chapters however the chapters were never put into volumes.

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1. ↑ Though many fans suspect that this was just a convenient excuse CN used to get out of their contract when the show performed poorly