There's something I've been wondering about, and this seems like a good place to ask.
In the 1980s when they were bring over anime like Macross and Beast King Go-Lion to the US why did they turn them into totally different shows like Robotech and Voltron, instead of just doing straight translations like we get with most anime now? I'd apply the same question to Tokusatu shows like Super Sentai/Power Rangers, Big Battle Beetleborgs/Metal Hero, and VR Troopers/more Metal Hero series.
In both situations wouldn't it have been easier and cheaper for everyone if they just translated them, and dubbed and/or added subtitles to them? Rather coming up with a new story and everything.
With
Robotech, it was because they needed to combine three shorter series to get over the 65-episode run you needed for weekday strip syndication (it was 85 episodes in all), so they had to invent an overarching narrative combining the three separate shows into a single generational saga.
As for
Voltron, I think it was a fairly straight dub of the original, aside from toning down the violence and such to suit American kidvid standards. It wasn't as radical a change as, say, the Earth-based
Gatchaman being turned into the space-based
Battle of the Planets with new framing animation, which was done to capitalize on
Star Wars.
With the tokusatsu adaptations, the reason is that the producers wanted to use American casts rather than dubbing the voices of Japanese casts, and to have the freedom to tell new stories that were more relatable for American audiences and that conformed to America's much stricter censorship on kids' TV. They wanted to save money by reusing existing FX footage and costumes, but they didn't want to do straight adaptations, although some of the later
Power Rangers seasons were quite faithful to their originals (e.g.
Time Force, Wild Force, much of
S.P.D., the villains' storyline in
Jungle Fury, and
Samurai/Super Samurai, although
Samurai somehow managed to do a slavish adaptation of one of the very best Sentai series and turn it into the very worst
Power Rangers series).
Before
Power Rangers, USA Network did a comedy dub of a handful of episodes of the Sentai series
Dynaman, but it didn't go over well. Maybe that was a factor in why Saban chose a different route.
In addition to the Saban shows, there were some other knockoffs like
Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, an adaptation of Tsuburaya's
Gridman, although it was basically just a high-school sitcom with action scenes tacked on. I thought it was terrible, but when I finally saw
Gridman, it turned out to be almost as terrible, and not as different from SSSS as I expected. It's had a few anime sequels,
SSSS.Gridman, SSSS.Dynazenon, and the movie
Gridman Universe, which are much better -- and
SSSS.Gridman is a strange approach to a sequel, because its story arc depends on the gradual revelation of mysteries that are immediately obvious to anyone acquainted with the original show, so it would actually be more enjoyable if you've never seen the show it's homaging.
Then in 2008-9, there was
Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, which took footage and costumes from
Kamen Rider Ryuki and created a whole new story around them. Unlike Saban's much-reviled
Masked Rider,
Dragon Knight was actually pretty good (after an uneven, slow, and overly sitcommy beginning) and felt like a real
Kamen Rider series (although one of the later ones without the death tolls of the early-2000s series).
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