Censorship

As animations in the western world are primarily made for children, there are always concerns for what exactly you can and can't show them. Among these are violence and sex/sexuality which are legitimate concerns when it comes influences on the children who may be watching the show.

The anime One Piece was censored quite a lot when editing for American viewership, with some of the changes being quite entertaining in the end.

It makes sense that blood, guns and cigarettes would not be something that people do not want children to see, but that ended up with some scene of One Piece having rubber knives, fighting someone off with sweat instead of blood, and lolly pops at dramatic moments.

Other shows, like Tom & Jerry even end up banned because of the violence in them. Looking back, it does have a lot of violence for a 20 minute childrens's show, but it is still dubious whether it actually affects childrens' views - this is a cat and mouse, which automatically makes it more objective, and less realistic, but it can be argued that children would ignore that since the animals generally act like people.

Censorship can also be used for humor as well- for example, in the Simpsons, this scene used censorship very well for some funny moments.

even if the censorship itself wasn't a part of the funny moment, it would still be needed because it airs early enough for viewers to catch; despite the humor, the Simpsons is still considered to be a family show, and they may get away with a lot more than kids cartoons do, they still need to be careful, as opposed to later shows for an exclusively older audience such as South Park and Family Guy.

People will always have different ideas on the topic on censorship, and it is important to think over every aspect of it. What one person may think children will be influenced by, another may completely disagree, making it more important to consider what exactly is airing.

Despite the amount of violence still in children's show though. there is still a lot of dispute on the topic of sexuality (although Legend of Korra, Adventure Time and Steven Universe slowly seem to be changing that). It is controversial when any characters display some slightly more obvious act of being not-straight, claiming that children do not need to be shown any aspect of sexuality that early, yet many, many shows show children having crushes on and even kissing other characters of a different gender. Another point is that it does make shows harder to air at time in other countries (i.e Russia) that could potentially be a big source of income for the company, there there a lot of conflicted feelings and interests there especially for companies wanting to promote diversity. Legend of Korra ended up airing on the internet instead of on TV for it's final episode showing hints of bisexuality for two of the main female characters, and whether that was because of the controversy or not is unknown, but it is still a topic that needs considering when thinking about what to show children.