Movie And TV Moments You'll Never Get To See In America

America's changed a lot since the 1940s, and we can't imagine what it would be like to be dumped into the 21st century with no warning or background whatsoever. Some things would just be impossible to explain, like why we could think of nothing better to do with the possibilities of television than reality shows. The Kardashians? Try explaining them.

When Captain America makes it out of deep freeze, we see a glimpse of a notebook where he's written things that he wants to find out more about. It's stuff like I Love Lucy and disco, and honestly, we're kind of curious about what those things were, too. If you're watching Captain America in another country, though, you see a different list.

Some things—Star Wars/Trek, the Troubleman soundtrack, Nirvana, the Rocky movies, and Thai food—stay the same. Otherwise, Spanish viewers saw him add things like Chupa Chups, the 1978 Constitution, and Camilo Jose Cela on his list, while in France, he was curious about Daft Punk and The Fifth Element. In Australia, it's Steve Irwin, AC/DC, Tim Tams, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. (For the record, we'd pay to see a movie that's nothing more than Cap watching Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.)

The UK took things into their own hands a bit, and the Radio Times even ran a poll to let viewers vote on what television show made it on the list. The winner was Sherlock (and it appeared alongside Sean Connery, The Beatles, the Moon landing, and the 1966 World Cup Final), but it could have been Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, or The Only Way is Essex. We're glad it wasn't the last one, or he would have gone right back into deep freeze and left us to sort out our own problems.

There's not much that says "family-friendly entertainment" like monsters, alien monks, and fighting to the death, and that pretty much sums up everything you need to know about Dragon Ball Z. When it came to the States, three companies—Funimation, Ocean Productions, and Saban Entertainment—were tasked with making it viewable by American audiences. Ocean received 67 episodes to polish it up, and by the time they were done, they had 53 episodes' worth of material. The rest? We're sorry, you can't handle the rest.

Hell was changed to the Home for Infinite Losers, which can be interpreted a couple of different ways, and seriously, suggesting that anyone who dies and ends up there is nothing but a loser, well, that's just insulting. The afterlife is turned into another dimension, Mister Satan became Hercule, and characters weren't drinking alcohol anymore, they were drinking water with a really nice, foamy head. One character's tears were removed, and he just seemed to cry without them. No one knows why.

Some things were a bit more understandable, like the addition of clothes and conveniently placed foliage to conceal some bizarre child nudity. We get that. No one needs to see that. We also get why there was one particular scene cut out of Goku's showdown with Princess Snake, where her minions are sitting around playing Russian Roulette, as you do when you're minions. Just in case viewers didn't know what the stakes were, one of those minions loses in a very graphic way ... so we get why that was cut, too.

What, you mean you don't remember the lesbian couple in Sailor Moon? There's a reason for that, and that's because Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus were turned into cousins for the American release. Makes more sense that they're a couple, we know, but when Sailor Moon came to the States, that was one of the things that censors thought just weren't going to fly in the West. (Some countries avoided the "problem" by just making Sailor Uranus a guy. Check your jokes at the door, please and thank you.)

They're not the only ones that got heavily edited for America, either. The West got a Zoisite that was a woman, because of the villain's relationship with a man. Yep—in Japan, Zoisite was a guy. The exact same thing happened to Fisheye, who was turned into a woman for the English-speaking market.

That's offensive on so many levels, we're not even sure where to start complaining about this one, so we'll move on to a couple of other things you're not going to see if you're watching this in the States. The episode where Usagi gained a bit of weight and started starving herself in a panic to lose it was heavily edited, too. As with other anime, Sailor Moon's references to death and the afterlife were cut, and instead, the Negaverse was invented. Bet you didn't think Sailor Moon could be considered that offensive, did you?

When Pokemon went global, there were a lot of changes that needed to be made. Some—like swapping out Japanese text for English—are common enough across most anime imports. Others don't make as much sense.

In some scenes where adults drank alcohol, glasses were changed to make it less clear. Wine glasses became ... the tops of wine glasses, and who knows, maybe super villains like orange juice. It could happen. Food was another big thing that changed for American audiences, and they were so aware of it that Brock's preference for "jelly donuts" became something of a "All your base are belong to us" sort of joke. In some places, it's just the voices that are changed, but in others, American versions have sort of stickers of American food pasted over Japanese dishes, as though no one in America could possibly understand rice balls.

American audiences also won't be seeing Team Rocket's Nazi-esque salute any time soon. There've been at least three times that the Pokemon franchise has gotten a little Nazi-ish. That means you're unlikely to see the original version of a 2003 episode that has the team in what looks like a very enthusiastic salute to Hitler. And one card—for Golbat—was edited because it had a swastika on it. It wasn't even a Nazi swastika, though, and when you're trying to catch them all, you need a little extra luck.