Ah, the rancid joys of censoring young girls on the basis of them being young...
Ah, the rancid joys of censoring young girls on the basis of them being young girls. It's time to take a look at another time the staff stepped in to say "No Girls Allowed!"
Not too many people know this, but the most recent Doraemon series had a short-lived dub on Disney XD. The whole thing being so Japanese, it didn't last very long, and the joys of being able to watch Doraemon didn't last either, mostly because the whole thing was edited to heck and back. All Japanese cultural icons were removed, the script and music were changed, and heavier jokes were censored. It's practically as bad as the Saban/4Kids days, which is even worse because those days are long gone.
Case in point, in the episode titled in the dub "The Horizon Tape", Doraemon and Nobita, er sorry... "Noby" get lost in the endless horizon of their own creation. They stumble across Shizuka in a tub. That part was the same. In the Japanese version, she's taking a bath, as she tends to do. But... in the dubbed version, cowardice takes hold, as the bath is changed in dialogue to a hot tub, and "Sue" as she's called there is given a bathing suit. Because why would you want to do laundry and get clean separately when you could do both at once? Or not get clean at all because baths don't work that way, but hey, gotta protect the kids!
Now, to it's credit, I don't mind the edits too much. The localized tests are hilarious, showing the dubbers know all too well how ridiculous the prospect is. And if you're going to sidestep around nudity, changing the bath to a hot tub is a good way to do it. But my point is that you really shouldn't have to. Nick and Cartoon Network got away with this kind of thing all the time, and there's little in the actual episode that needed to be changed with regards to that. Not to mention Doraemon is already a kids show, and I mean for little tikes, and this is the censored Doraemon series after standards have changed and gotten stricter.
I'm just saying, censorship like this is unnecessary and should never have to happen under any circumstance, and if Japan realizes that, why can't we?