A Farewell to Katyusha
No, I’m not bidding farewell to the character Katyusha, who appears in the most recent episode of this seasons not-so-secret best show Girls und Panzer, but rather the Russian wartime song of the same name, sang by the character who shares it’s name in the same episode of the same show.
Or maybe not, depending how and when you watched it. You see, not just the song, but the entire scene in question was removed between it’s initial Japanese TV broadcast earlier in the week, and it’s streaming on Crunchyroll this morning – the episode up on Crunchy at the time of writing is in the region of fifty seconds shorter than the average anime episode. Which is kind of annoying for those of us who wait to watch things the entirely-above-board way, particularly when it’s the one scene that everyone else had been highlighting as, well, the highlight of the episode. Ho-hum.
They removed all reference of it from the ending credits, too, suggesting it was done at the Japan end of things…
There’s no official word on this yet, but presumably it’s down to some kind of rights issue, as is often the case with music disappearing from English versions of anime shows – it’s not like this is the first time that a song has ever been excised from an official English release. Girls on Film was removed from the English releases of Speedgrapher, and Falling Down was removed from all but the first episode of Eden of the East. It wouldn’t surprise me if the complexities of clearing tracks by Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were behind the lack of streaming Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, despite the fact that it’s being subtitled in English for the Japanese BDs.
Saying that, you’d have thought that clearing the rights to a 74 year old song would be considerably easier than something by Duran Duran and Oasis, though to be honest, it’s less the specifically the song being removed from the episode, more that the entire scene was removed, that bothers me in this situation. It’s one thing to change the song for an OP sequence, it’s another thing entirely to remove mid-episode content, effectively changing the impression given of an entire set of characters.
2012-12-06
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thanks for pointing it out, I was thinking about how I didn’t see it when i watched the stream last night, and didn’t quite thought about it when i was awake enough to make the connection.
2012-12-06
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basically, its a US Copyright Issue. a 1990 treaty backdated all copyrights from the Soviet era not covered by a 1974 treaty as being in copyright. the US’s current Life-Of-Author + 97 year copyright laws place Katyusham written 1938, in copyright. In Japan, this copyright has already expired. Basically, Crunchyroll couldn’t get US rights.
2012-12-06
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Many thanks for the clarification on that.
Hopefully it’s not something that’s insurmountable to rectify by the time Sentai (who I think licensed the show?) release it on physical media – unlike Crunchyroll, they aren’t running on a tight streaming schedule. I can understand not clearing something like this when you might be on short notice, but not trying when you’ve got months of lead-time is rather less forgiveable.
2012-12-07
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Katyusha rockets rain down
2014-02-07
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You know what? Good! I feel that this is a better result than replacing it with an instrumental only version of Korobushka like sentai did. I’ll be honest I liked the scene, and hell the GuP version of Katyusha is what made me discover GuP to begin with, but I think the removal of that part entirely was the better choice here. I mean hell, maybe if sentai had them SING Korobuska instead of a two minute instrumental with no other sounds, then it would be more understandable.