Can you tell me this funny story? Sounds interesting.
I seem to recall hearing other weird stories of the Japanese companies screwing distributors over. Like Castle of Cagliostro had its intro replaced with still images for one DVD release because they thought they were "helping," and the translation issues over Case Closed were at the behest of TMS supposedly.
Those of us in America can tell you about the translation nightmares of DBZ when it originally aired on television. That's because the Japanese execs didn't care about Dragon Ball's ties to the classic Chinese story or anything else important. I wonder if they even cared about Toriyama's vision at the moment. Basically, the execs wanted something that was made fast and was marketable to all the kids and teens out there. That's why so many changes and edits were made. And years later, even when FUNIMATION was trying to bring us a more uncut version of DBZ, the distributors didn't understand why. They didn't think it was necessary since America had all ready gone to a lot of effort to make their own music score and everything. The people at FUNIMATION had to tell them that fans KNEW about the Japanese soundtrack and that's what they wanted. They wanted a completely uncut version of DBZ. And as you pointed out, many titles from Japan have been screwed over from the powers that be.
In the end, even if we all somehow spoke a universe language, that wouldn't nullify cultural differences. Would make international relationships easier, but that doesn't mean we'd all be buddy-buddy with each other.
