It's easy to place sole blame on Japanese companies for not being able to carry out a direct export of their shows to U.S. television without making strange changes to their properties, but they were only following the example set by Sandy Frank with Battle of the Planets. Battle of the Planets was a heavily reworked version of the first Gatchaman series that by that point was already some six years old - and even then the original 1972 version was deemed unsuitably violent for U.S. television. Yet the changes made to create Battle of the Planets worked - the series became a success.
Subsequent moderately successful anime imports were likewise subject to notable modification by U.S. producers in order to get the series on the air, like the truncated Force Five series, any nuraber of productions brought over by Harmony Gold, or even Saber Rider, which had new episodes animated for it to replace episodes deemed unsuitable in the Japanese original. A common trait of most of these series was that the U.S. producers often went out of their way to disguise the original productions' Japanese origins by removing all instances of Japanese text, etc.
This wasn't quite the same situation in most of Europe, parts of Asia and South America, where many contemporary anime series were imported into those countries in the 1980s just like any other series. True, imported anime in those countries may still have been subject to some simple censorship, but in essence the series were just dubbed and put onto TV with little further modifications, and no real obfuscation of their Japanese origins. And this happened with a lot of series at the time, especially in Europe. Yet the lucrative U.S. market remained very resistant to simple straightforward dubs of anime (since they had plenty of home-grown shows), and eventually some Japanese companies tried their own hand at modifying their properties to make them an easier sell.
Sunrise's DoozyBots is probably one of the worst examples in this regard, but there are other similar productions out there as well. TMS were rightfully very proud of their Space Cobra series and really wanted to sell it to the U.S. - but they knew it would be an uphill struggle. So to that end they simply made a new episode to sell a modified version of the concept. In that particular instance, the results weren't bad (although ironically to this day the Cobra series was never officially released in English), but it was an exception.
If there's anyone to blame, it would predictably U.S. TV producers who were never adventurous enough to put out unaltered anime, or run the risk of syndicating series less than 65 episodes long. Little wonder Japanese companies became as desperate as they did, as no matter how popular their series may have been in Europe, etc., they would have made much more out of them if they'd made it to the U.S. But in many cases that simply didn't happen at the time, and that's a large part of why so many popular 1980s anime series have no real fanbase in the U.S. - because they weren't dubbed and shown on TV back in the day.
