Opinion - Now did anyone seriously expect the nurse scene to make it into the censored version? Even the English dub cleaned up the scene a lot (in the Japanese version, Washu suggests several saucy ways to extract the sperm sample she wants). She's an angel of mercy, Tenchi!

Opinion - This one really went through the mincer. It would appear to be fine to leave the incest references in (Ayeka betrothed to her half-brother), but the tender scene between Ayeka and Tenchi became another victim of the whirling blades of censorship.

Comment - This alteration is hardly surprising. Although the most prominent world-wide case of photoepilepsy from a TV show is the Pokémon incident in Japan in 1997, the UK has its own history of similar cases. In 1993, the media got hold of a few stories about people suffering epileptic seizures while playing video games, leading to a spate of scare stories (the most notorious of these being the infamous "Nintendo Killed My Son" headline in the red-top tabloid newspaper The Sun). Even today, warnings are broadcast before TV programmes and news reports that contain strobing effects. This can go quite some way to explain why the UK broadcasters baulked at the amount of flickering in this episode.

Opinion - Personally, I loved this little moment; it was cute, funny and showed a delightful naïvety on Sasami's part. Of course, we can't have such lines confusing the younger viewers over where babies come from, so we'll leave them with the far less damaging stork / cabbage patch / gooseberry bush explanations of parenting tradition.

In the scene where Ayeka discovers Tenchi and his grandfather practising swordplay in the woods, she falls from a tree and hurts herself. In this shot with the humiliated Ayeka lying sprawled on the ground, the shadow on her leg has been repainted. Her movement of trying to cover herself up is also repeated, this time without the bigger shadow, but can be put down to poor editing rather than an intentional extension of the shot.

(NB: These screenshots have been zoomed in on the affected region of the image to illustrate the change more clearly)

Sasami: You're a bad boy, aren't you Tenchi?

Opinion - It goes without saying that the infamous changing of "sake" to "tea" throughout all the Tenchi series is pretty insulting to the viewers' intelligence (whoever heard of getting drunk off tea?), but this is amongst the most ludicrous of re-dubs. Quite why they changed "naughty" to "bad" beggars logic, but it is not an isolated incident. Perhaps they wanted to get the most out of rehiring the actors for the dub sessions by making them redo perfectly broadcastable lines. To add further to the confusion, the original line still went out on one of the US trailers for the series.

Opinion - Clearly the censors were out to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and just about every major daily snack to let this scene slip through. Considering that other scenes containing even implied lewdness were cut (even within the same episode), it's hard to imagine what must have been going through their minds. Strangely enough, the scene with Mihoshi and Ryo-Ohki playing catch remained in one of the US trailers, but was cut from the actual episode.