This is quite the story of a movie you never heard that is a butchered version of a much better film. (No it’s not the Blu-ray cuts of Star Wars)
You may or may not be familiar with director Hayao Miyazaki but you might recognize some of his films such as Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and his most famous My Neighbor Totoro.These movies are all apart of his animation studio in Japan Studio Ghibli.
In 1984 Hayao Miyazaki released what his first major animated film Nausicaa Valley of The Wind which tied in with a manga of the same name that Miyazaki wrote and illustrated, he had to do this so that way the movie could get made. And when it was released in Japan in 1984 it received large critical acclaim and grossed 1.48 Billion Yen at the box office.
from http://wikipedia.org
With the popularity of the film in Japan it only made sense to give it a release in North America and Europe. While today we have a proper english dub of the film done by Disney which even features celebrity’s like Uma Thurman, Patrick Stewart, and … Shia LaBouf. (Just Do It!) The movie had another english dub back in 1985 done which had small theatrical release and a its own Home Video release on VHS. This dub was sone by a company known as New World Pictures. However this dub was a completely butchered, poorly done dub of a fantastic movie. First of all they cut a total of 21 minutes and 50 seconds from the original version. The environmental themes of the movie was dumbed down. And a sub-plot involving the film’s creatures the Ohm were was changed to make the creatures nothing more but brute, evil beings.
This dub also changed most of the names of the characters such as changing Nausicaa to Princess Zandra. New World Pictures ended up dumbing down the movie was so that way it could be more marketable towards children. They also gave a VHS box art that would be good for any other fantasy movie except for this one.
from http://wikipedia.org
With this box art we have Nausicaa shoved off to the far right with two other characters who aren’t even in the movie on the left one of which looks a cross between a Doctor Doom and and a T-800 Terminator. As you can imagine obviously Miyazaki was very upset with how this dub of the film turned out. Afterwords he enforced a strict “no-cuts” policy on the dubs of his films. At one point in 1997 Miramax Studios was thinking about trying to cut Miyazaki’s newest movie Princess Mononoke to make it more marketable. So as a response Studio Ghibli sent Miramax a katana that sent the message “no-cuts”. Today all of Miyazaki’s movies remain uncut on home video with proper english dubs.
Inside the Film 