Trivia / Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics

• Banned Episode: For various reasons (typically violence, blood, or Nightmare Fuel), a number of the episodes in the Saban run did not air on Nickelodeon although every episode was dubbed. See Missing Episode below for details.
  • Complicating things, Saban often released these episodes on VHS, making them technically available in the English speaking world, just not on television.
• Dub Induced Plothole: In the Spanish and Portuguese dubs, the narrator assures us that Snow White's Wicked Stepmother was banned from the kingdom... ignoring how viewers just saw her get eaten by wolves.
• Dueling Dubs: There are two English dubs. One of which was done by Saban in 1989, which aired in Western countries (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia). The other English dub was done by Ziv Sidi, who founded two recording studios in Israel, in 1993 in the Zound Studios recording studio, which was distributed by Israeli company Mega Entertainment. The Ziv dub was aired in Eastern European countries, which also had their other language dubs based on the Ziv dub. There are noticeable differences between the dubs; The Ziv dub is uncensored, while the Saban dub isn’t. The Ziv dub retains the music from the original Japanese version, which the Saban dub changed. Both dubs, however, have an Alternative Foreign Theme Song. While the complete Saban dub has been found and remastered, the Ziv dub remains lost, with exceptions for the theme song, opening, and ending credits of the dub.
• Missing Episode: The anime did have dubs for all the episodes, but many were unaired in the U.S., or were pulled from syndication. Limited dubbed episodes were released on DVD in the UK as part of a newspaper promotion back in the mid 2000s. However, it's difficult to track these DVD's down now, and they're also region locked. Years later, Discotek Media finally released the complete series on SD-BD, which includes both the English dub and the original Japanese version with English subtitles.
  • "Bluebeard" opens up with the title character impaling his sixth wife with a sword, and the climax of the whole story is the heroine (his seventh wife) finding the mutilated corpses of the previous wives. There were also magic roses that turned into blood. Although this episode apparently did not air on Nickelodeon, a YouTube blogger documenting the channel's history did an in-depth review of Saban's dub of this episode here and notes it reflects a typically Japanese approach to horror filmmaking.
  • "The Crystal Ball" focuses on a decaying old witch who imprisons a beautiful princess in her castle, and every night performs a demonic ritual where she bites said princess, and drains all her blood. This restores her youth for about a day, and the princess is left a decaying corpse, but regenerates in about a second. What makes it worse is that this happens every night.
    • This episode actually aired, but was never released. The dubbed version cut out the biting scenes, and had the witch use her magic to make the princess switch ages with her.
  • "Godfather Death" has a lot of on screen deaths.
  • If Wikipedia is to be believed, despite being some of the first episodes to surface online, "The Demon and the Devil" and "The Faithful Watchmen" were also probably skipped on Nickelodeon. Both stories reference Satan and demons. Interestingly, "Bearskin", which features a Deal with the Devil, did air.
  • Allegedly, the version of "The Coat of Many Colors" that aired on Nick was edited so that the princess was fleeing the burning castle. The surviving dub of the episode keeps the subplot of the princess' father wanting to marry her.
  • In addition, all original English episodes of the Ziv dub.
• Out of Order: Nick did not air the series in its original Japanese order. Granted, this isn't too much of an issue for an anthology series. Notably, "Cinderella" was the first season finale in Japan, but part of the series premiere, if not the first episode, on Nick.

---