Back in 2000, anime producer Animax released a children's show called Gakka no Kaidan, "Ghosts at School". The twenty episode series didn't reach American shores until five years later, but the first English dub was, needless to say, quite a bit different from the original script. The American distributor, ADV Films, took significant tongue-in-cheek liberties with the overall tone of the show, renamed Ghost Stories. Using a stable of Houston-based voice actors, ADV and its resident writer Steven Foster took what was a fairly straightforward supernatural kid's program and turned it into a snarky, politically incorrect parody of anime. It fits better alongside South Park than most of what you'll find on the anime shelf.
So, why would ADV Films decide to take a popular show and turn it into a comedic ringer? Well, it all has to do with the surprisingly complex anime market as it exists on both sides of the Pacific. Whereas anime has been mostly lumped together into a single, amorphous category in the States, the incredibly large Japanese wing of the industry has necessitated a series of niche classifications. There's a variety of anime for practically every demographic under age 40, many of which have never been targets for the US market. There are shows designed exclusively for young professional women, at least two subsets of teenage boys and, among others, several tiered genres for various ages of pre-teens. The anime that makes it to America comes from all of these categories, but there's practically no marketing difference between a tween-age girl's show like Sailor Moon and middle-teen boy's fare like the Gundam series.
When it comes to anime aimed at little kids, there's a lot of competition on American television with domestic properties. A few smash hits have defied the odds, RE: Pokemon, but that has more to do with the ease of commoditizing and merchandising than it does with any Japanese cultural analog. Ghost Stories is in a bad position to hit in America unedited. The characters are all elementary schoolers, but there's plenty of violence and scary content that wouldn't ever have a chance of playing to its target demographic in the States. ADV Films decided to tap into a different market altogether, doing extensive re-writes of the script to include pop culture references, sex jokes and loads of comic irony. Only the central structure of the story remains. Everything else changes for the sake of devilishly crude humor.
For anyone who might be interested, Animax later released their own English dub that more or less held true to the original, but ADV's cheeky take remains the favorite among American anime fans. Sadly, ADV Films has effectively disappeared since 2005. All of the company's properties have since been sold to other entities and every offshoot, like PiQ Magazine, has dissolved. ADV may not be around anymore, but at least they gave us a classic English dub for an anime series that likely wouldn't have even come to America without their creative meddling.