Warning: Spoilers for Trigun Stampede, Episode 4The arrival of Trigun Stampede‘s chain-smoking new character, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, was first heralded by a joke that may have had older anime fans worried, since it played with a censorship trope that hasn’t seen much use since the early 2000s.
In the 1990s, when anime was first being localized for American audiences, animation was often seen as a medium exclusively for children, and as such anything felt to be inappropriate for children was censored. Perhaps the most notorious case of this was 4Kids Entertainment, who originally localized both Pokémon and One Piece. 4Kids would make major changes to releases sometimes, painting over frames to make Sanji’s cigarettes look like lollipops, or just eliminating references to Japanese culture, like with Pokémon‘s infamous “jelly donuts,” which were actually rice balls. Eventually, these practices fell out of favor, and more authentic localizations were used, maintaining as much of the original as possible.
Trigun Mixes Lollipops and Cigarettes
In Trigun Stampede, Wolfwood first appears in the desert and gets hit by Meryl and Roberto’s car. They rush him to a refueling station in hopes of finding first aid, but instead discover the attendants slaughtered and a scared child hiding. Wolfwood, as a priest, gives the deceased their final rites, and looks at the child, who seems sad. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a lollipop, and puts it into his mouth, then grabs another for the kid. Fans familiar with the censorship trope of turning cigarettes into lollipop sticks no doubt groaned at the sight, worried that Wolfwood’s smoking habit had been ditched for something more family friendly. However, as the group immediately gets swallowed up whole by a massive sand worm, Wolfwood pulls out the real cigarettes and gets smoking, going through a phenomenal amount of them before the episode ends. Trigun Stampede wasn’t afraid of cigarettes after all, but instead used them to show the stress of the situation on Wolfwood.
The reason that older series were so often censored was that anime was being aimed at children in the US, even in cases where the original series really wasn’t all that child-friendly. The 1998 Trigun anime was a victim of this censorship itself, with a lot of cursing, blood, and gun-related violence trimmed or cut for its original airings on Cartoon Network, even though it was part of Adult Swim. While Trigun managed to avoid the cigarette/lollipop censorship trope in particular, that specific example has become an iconic representation of the kind of censorship that went on for anime through the 90s and into the early 2000s.
Trigun Stampede, thankfully, no longer has to worry about such censorship, so it can afford to play with these ideas and have a bit of fun at an old American localizer’s expense.
Trigun Stampede debuts new episodes on Saturdays, via Crunchyroll.
