An interesting example is the magic roundabout (wikipedia) which I don’t think ever made it to the states.

This was a French animation, and when it was picked up by the BBC it was redubbed with completely different stories. The original scripts were not looked at whatsoever and the stories and characters were entirely based on the animation.

The English version became one of the most popular shows of its day and continues to be an immense cult classic.

In Belgium, tv stations don’t dub movies or tv-shows from other countries / languages.
So when you’re watching, you can have the convenience of being able to follow the show with the subtitles.
And when you speak the original language of the show, the finer language humour is still preserved.

Subtitles don’t bother me or most of the Belgians (anymore), because we even subtitle our own tv programs. Reasons for this is that some are in a dialect which is not comprehensible for people who speak another dialect (Belgium, and more Flanders, has a lot! of dialects).

this is a very interesting topic. Some 15 years ago I stopped reading the german translations of Terry Pratchett because they lack so much of what makes Pterry unique, and thanks to amazon I can conveniently order the original english books. And I even get them earlier since the translations usually lag a year or so.
On the other hand I’m impressed by the german translation of M*A*S*H. I recently bought most of the DVD releases and my wife doesn’t like to watch it in english language, so I switch on english subtitles when we watch it together. The translation is really good, and as you noticed, it replaced puns and references with german ones, but the translator(s) could keep 99% of the meaning. That’s quite impressive and far beyond my capabilities (I sometimes try to translate pieces of Pterry to my wife when I find something especially funny or thoughtful).
Another example that comes to my mind is a british TV series that was quite unsuccessful in english language but was rated very high in Germany due to the translator changing nearly all of the dialogues to be funny instead of serious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!).Wikipedia calls this “radical dubbing”.

@Jakob: I believe that Naruto is show on Cartoon Network during the day here, in fully Bowlderized format where they edit out all the blood, and replace sharp objects with chopsticks and hamburgers and whatnot. Or something like that.

I think I watched an episode or two back in the day, but it was a bit boring. So I never got into it. Especially since [adult-swim] was airing stuff like GiTS, FMA, Evangelion, Bleach, Death Note and many others without censorship.

Man, I wished we Danes had something like AdultSwim. Sometimes, you can get lucky and see some anime, tough they crop up rarely. We just got to see Naruto on the telly tough, and I guess more will pop up in the coming years.

But they were faithful to the original anime. Every sunday morning, the american child version would air, dubbed with danish. However, older audiences got to see the original japanese version every thursday night :)