The 11 Most Grating American Anime Openings

Let’s say you’re a TV producer, and you’ve just gotten your hands on one of those anime series that all the kids are watching nowadays. It’s sure to be a hit with young American cereal-gobblers, but you’ll need to do a few things before this show’s ready for the airwaves. You’ll need to dub the voices into English, and you’ll need to tone down the violence and sexuality that are apparently permitted much more freely in Japanese cartoons. One more thing: you’ll have to change the show’s opening number from Japanese pop into a song more in tune with mainstream America. And in doing so, you might just create something beautifully horrid.

As we round up the greatest disasters in revamping anime intros, we should point out that we’re sympathetic to the men and women who had to devise new songs for Japanese shows. Most Americanized anime intros are modestly upbeat kid-show jingles like the original Pokémon theme or that delightful Speed Racer ditty. We also shouldn’t let the Japanese originals off the hook. Heaven knows anime has plenty of opening songs that don’t need extra meddling to be terrible. For the moment, though, we’re taking on the most memorably bungled cases of American anime openers.

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