On September 10th, 2005, the successful anime-series "Naruto" went on the air for the first time on Cartoon Network during their "Toonami"-programme. However, to receive a lower rating for the series they had to alter several scenes of each episode.
However, the changes are rather moderate. Even though several cuts and edits seem rather strange (especially for non-Americans who probably won't see the problem with scenes where one of the characters smokes) the American TV version is still quite watchable. The blood retouchings are also not that noticeable - most of the time they just reduced the amount of blood and if you don't know the original version you probably won't notice it. Other "problematic" things (such as "mean" slurs or mentioning death) didn't have to be altered.
However, they produced a separate opening as well as separate credits for the US version (which is quite the standard for anime-releases in the USA). They are quite different and in terms of music one could describe it as a mixture of Rock and Rap.

Altered Characters: After the first run in Japan several changes were made in order to make the characters look more like in the comics. This will be mentioned, however, not always that detailed. E.g. in Episode 41 Sakura and Ino were completely re-drawn for a flashback scene where you see them as kids. As you can imagine it would simply be too much footage to show if you were to illustrate all of these scenes. Therefore, edits like this will only be listed once (especially when the following edits are similar/identical to this one). Other edits/alterations - of course - will be mentioned.

The images will be shown as follows:
On left side: Japanese Version
On the right side: US Version


About this episode: In this episode there are only 3 small edits, however, there's no censorship whatsoever. In this version (ignoring opening and credits) there's no difference in time.

0:17:10
The actual scene where Gai hits Lee was replaced by a short close-up shot of the fist.

No difference in time.

0:18:44
The animation where Lee unbandages his arm was reversed so that it doesn't look like hes unbandaging his arm from back to front.
(Of course, at this point it wouldn't make sense to show 2 images since you can't see the smoothness of animation on still pictures.)

No difference in time.

0:19:25
This scene was re-drawn. Lee turns around way quicker than in the Japanese version and the background looks different.

No difference in time.