Trouble on Arlia: Got away due to early or aliens?

[Super Sonic]

Was recently thinking of the episode "Trouble on Arlia" from the old dub in 1996 and remembered it got away with things that some of the later episodes of the season 1-2 dub wasn't able to. There were no "evacuated" areas destroyed and the prisoner even clearly said that the King and royal guard were destroyed and not sent to another dimension. Think this happened either due to what tvtropes calls "Early Installment Weirdness" where things that wouldn't happen later in a series happen, or due to the Arlians' insect-like appearance they were able to get offed where a humanoid wouldn't have? With the latter that happens a lot as for example two years after that episode's premiere the PRIS finale had lots of guys in monster suits reduced to dust, whereas human-faced ladies got simply purified, due to Fox and Saban wimping out about killing them off. Think that was what happened with the Arlians?

[NitroEX]

Over the years I've noticed that violence in kids TV is often given a free pass when it's inflicted on aliens or robots, I guess since they're not human nobody deems it as inappropriate but if the same thing happened to humans then it's suddenly too much.

[Kakacarrottop]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RabLx96fdRE
As far as i'm aware the scene where Vegeta and Nappa kill the Arlian mutant and King is completely untouched. Also no mention of the "next dimension" (although Nappa does use that term later on when Arlia gets destroyed). If this episode aired a year later then i'm certain there would be numerous cuts of shots and ND mentions.

The episodes with Raditz were also largely uncensored in terms of death. I have a theory regarding this. I think after the first handful of episodes were produced and aired (on saturday morning television) Saban received complaints from angry mothers/conservatives about the show's violent content, and forced FUNi to start wussifying anything related to death.

[Metalwario64]

I've been watching G1 Transformers and a bit of GI Joe lately (I saw a few GI Joe episodes as a kid, but that's it), and I was surprised that, although they sometimes use euphemisms for death (especially Transformers, 'cuz, hey, robots!), they do say the occasional "kill" or "die", and GI Joe even had some fistfights (though, of course it never got too violent, and nobody ever actually died). I don't know what happened in the 90s to cause even the mere mention of "death" to become a taboo, and for Spider-Man to not be able to use his fists.

[Polyphase Avatron]

Over the years I've noticed that violence in kids TV is often given a free pass when it's inflicted on aliens or robots, I guess since they're not human nobody deems it as inappropriate but if the same thing happened to humans then it's suddenly too much.

If we have aliens and robots watching our TV shows a few hundred years from now this is going to be quite embarrassing

[Lord Beerus]

Over the years I've noticed that violence in kids TV is often given a free pass when it's inflicted on aliens or robots, I guess since they're not human nobody deems it as inappropriate but if the same thing happened to humans then it's suddenly too much.

And that is precisely why Samurai Jack got away with as much as it did. Just replace humans with humanoid-robots, blood with oil and organs with wires and bolts and the censors and network heads won't do a damn thing.

[TheGreatness25]

I'm not saying this applies for this particular episode, because I'm not really watching it, but it might depend on what version you watch. That's right, there are two versions of the old Ocean dub. If you watch the Rock the Dragon set, it has different dialog than the old school single releases. The single releases kept the dialog you know from watching it on Toonami and the Rock the Dragon set has the more "uncut" one. Or it's the other way around, I forget. But I realized something was weird from episode 1. Because I only saw it like 10,000 times on TV and then got a lot more mileage out of it from my old VHS that I used o tape the show a it aired, I noticed that Chichi's dialog was different. On the broadcasted version, when Goku goes off to look for Gohan, she says, "All this worrying is going to give me wrinkles." And that's how it is on the singles (I think, I could be mixing it up with the Rock the Dragon set). But in the Rock the Dragon set (or the singles... you know what I mean), she says, "I'm going to worry myself to death."

So I noticed that here were TWO versions of the old Ocean dub. Then in episode 2 (or 3), when Goku is planning on the attack on Raditz, he tells Kuririn, "You and Master Roshi already died once," or something to that extent, whereas on the broadcast version, he said "You and Master Roshi have already been wished back with the Dragon Balls" or something like that.

Anyway, MAYBE that's what happened? But ultimately, I'm not sure. But yeah, when listening to commentary for Batman the Animated Series, I learned that back in the day, the networks gave specific instructions to how they want violence to be handled and one of the things was that if it wasn't a human or an animal, they could go crazy. So aliens, plant monsters, robots, all that stuff, they just went to town on that.

[TheBlackPaladin]

Over the years I've noticed that violence in kids TV is often given a free pass when it's inflicted on aliens or robots, I guess since they're not human nobody deems it as inappropriate but if the same thing happened to humans then it's suddenly too much.

You guessed it. Aliens can still be censored a little bit since there's occasionally blood involved, but robots are allowed to be obliterated in (almost) any way possible. It also helps if the method of obliteration involves things that don't exist, such as laser guns or ki beams, because then it falls under a category that the FCC has labeled "fantasy violence," which necessitates a warning of the same name in the rating information, but doesn't necessitate any actual censoring.