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There was an incidents about "Cowboy Bebop". At first, the director, Shin-ichiro Watanabe, wrote sinarios for 26 episodes and he presented them to a television station. It was early 1998. A bad time for animes. Since the previous summer, some kids brought knifes with them under the influence of TV dramas, and one of those kids killed a teacher in the junior high school. She was pregnant then. After this shocking affair, people critisized TV stations for putting violent scenes on air. In addition, Mr. Watanabe presented his new anime to the TV Tokyo -- the most sensitive station about anime. Although TV Tokyo puts many animes on air everyday, they worried about CB for it had violent scenes and scenes of sexy girls. In December '97, there occured so-called "Poke-mon problem". "Pocket Monster" was the most popular anime among the pupils of Japan. They watched a episode of "Pcket Monster" everywhere in Japan at the same time, in the evening of Tuesday. One evening, the boys and girls were so excited at one scene and some of them fainted. Even adult people felt bad at the scene. It caused by flash of colors. Since then, TV Tokyo became too cautious about animes. TV Tokyo didn't accept whole 26 episodes, but only 12 episodes. They censored the films and cut some scenes. Without such censorship, they wouldn't put CB on air. CB was on air since April til June 1998 at TV Tokyo. Soon after the start, CB became famous of its excellent work, impressive music and good sinarios. The anime company, Sunrise begun to search for some medias in which the whole CB anime would be able to be published. First, they decided to release Videos / LDs / DVDs of CB. Then they sign a cntract with a satellite broadcasting station, WOWOW and WOWOW put CB on air since October 23rd '98 till April 23rd '99 without any censorship. As the whole 26 episodes were broadcasted on a satellite channel, TV Tokyo hasn't re-broadcasted Cowboy Bebop. Then, people can't see Cowboy Bebop again without a Cable TV or a parabolic antenna? As far as I know, they broadcasted about a half of episodes of Cowboy Bebop on several UHF channels. It was August 2001, and it had been a promotion for Cowboy Bebop movie. All these happened in Japan, and in U.S.A., Cartoon Network shows Cowboy Bebop TV anime with some censorship in 2002. I hear that several episodes weren't shown because of violent scenes |