Hunter x Hunter (1999, Italian)

Cast

 * }

Dubbing History
In Italy, the 1999 adaptation of Hunter x Hunter was licensed by Shin Vision and released on DVD shortly before it began airing on television. The series was originally planned to debut on Italia Teen Television, but it finally premiered on Italia 1 from Mediaset on January 23, 2007.

When it began to be airing on Italia 1, the series was aired uncut, but when episode 16 arrived, Mediaset stopped the airing and resumed the series from episode 1, this time with censorship and changes in the dialogue.

Two Italian audio tracks were included in the home release, the normal uncut one and the "TV version" with Mediaset censorship. The home release comes with the original openings and endings in Japanese, but for the broadcast on Italia 1 was created a new theme song sung by Silvio Pozzoli.

The OVAs were also dubbed and aired on Italia 1, but with a different cast and studio than the series.

Censorship
There are two versions of the Italian dub, the uncut version completely faithful to the original script, and the TV version with multiple censorships and changes in the dialogue made by Mediaset to make the series more suitable for a family audience. Both versions have exactly the same voice cast and only differ in the dialogue.

Among the changes made by Mediaset include eliminating terms and replacing them with softer ones. For example, "assassin" is changed to "mercenary" and "kill" is changed to "eliminate." A known case occurs in episode 16, where Leorio bets that his opponent is a man and he proves otherwise, which causes Leorio to inspect his body and Tonpa covers Gon's eyes so that he does not see, while in the censored version Leorio bets that his opponent wears a wig, making the scene of Tonpa covering Gon's eyes meaningless. During the broadcast on Italia 1 the bloody scenes were also cut.

Trivia

 * On the title cards and credits, the character names were taken from a translation of the official Japanese data book for Hunter x Hunter, whose transliteration is far from the original pronunciation. Because of this, several names are mistranslated, such as Kurapika becoming "Curarpikt" and Zoldyck becoming "Zaoldyeck".