ADV announced at Otakon this weekend that it will issue the previously announced Ghost Stories anime (Ghost Stories in School) with a new story improvised by the English voice actors. The team on the American version includes ADV director Steven Foster, and voice actors Monica Rial and Greg Ayres, who helped make the announcement at Otakan. The scenes for the American version will be blocked, but the seasoned team of voice actors will be allowed to improvise every line, in coordination with the mouth movements of the animation.
The new version will be totally Americanized, and is raunchier and hipper than the original. It will probably be extremely controversial with hardcore anime fans, who view any tampering with the original Japanese versions of anime with great distaste. But most such 'tampering' has been done in a relatively incremental way to bowdlerize Japanese releases to make them acceptable to a broader audience in the States. This is the first time such wholesale re-crafting of a series has been undertaken as a new artistic work. Whether or not is successful as an artistic creation (and early indications are that it will be better received than the original would have been), it will certainly receive a great deal of attention and will probably sell better than it would have if released in its original Japanese version. And if successful, it may engender a new art form, with anime visuals and new scripts. 
