I am thinking specifically of Katy Perry. Her song “Hot and Cold” comes with a delightful music video, but in the line “Like a bitch – I would know,” the word “bitch” is bleeped out in the MTV video. It is NOT bleeped out on local Thai radio. We have MTV Taiwan piped into our unit, and they seem to be the ones doing the censoring, not Thailand. When the song is played on local radio, the word “bitch” is not deleted.
But what I find especially funny is I just listened to an MTV (Taiwan, remember) music-video award ceremony – they have SO many awards – and any time her song “I Kissed a Girl” was mentioned, the word “girl” was deleted. What the …? It was just “I Kissed a (silence).” This was made funnier by the fact that not only did Katy Perry’s song actually win whatever award in it’s category (and it’s a good song), but she was the host of the ceremony. And they bleeped the word “girl”!
There seemed to be at least an informal censorship of the word “flick” under the Comics Code. It may not have been part of the code, but there are cases of writers being told not to use the word. The reason? Comics dialog is written in ALL CAPS: FLICK. And if there’s not enough space between the second and third letter . . . .
The first time I saw The Breakfast Club, it was U.S. broadcast TV, in one of those awful dubbed-for-U.S.-TV-sensibilities versions, where you automatically “correct” the weirdly-substituted profanity in your head as you go along.
One of Bender’s line was redubbed as “Eat my [socks]!” so naturally I imagined that the censored word was “shit.”
Imagine my surprise when I saw it on video years later, and found out that the offending word was “shorts.”
I recall an adult-movie theater in Lubbock, Texas, called the Flick way back when. The local news outlets would feature it from time to time during Christian protests or censorship stories or what have you, and the cameramen always seemed to shoot the Flick sign enough from the side that it looked like the Fuck.
But with this Katy Perry song/video, they’re bleeping the word “girl’.” What the … ?
Side Memory: I recall driving past the Flick years ago and seeing Upright Christians picketing the place. It being summer and my car window rolled down, I spontaneously belted out: “Your mothers suck cocks in Hell!” (Perhaps you can see why I left West Texas.) It was not until after my spontaneous scream that I even noticed some police officers keeping watch on the proceedings. They did not come roaring after me, but in my vivid imagination I envisioned myself having to explain to a cop: “No, officer, I didn’t mean YOUR mother sucked cocks in Hell. It’s all those other people, their mothers all suck cocks in hell.”
In Singapore Mr. Bean was censored for TV. The scene (Back to school) where you can see the back of a nude female model (waist up) was apparently too shocking.
Before Bethesda modified the game, it was going to be a crime to sell or import Fallout 3 in Australia, with a penalty of up to 10 years in jail. The reason? Depictions of drug use.
I could talk about how my Christian elementary/high school routinely stapled/glued shut sections of books that discussed science that hinted at an earth older than a few thousand years, and inked over smut like photos of the Venus de Milo, but that seems a bit off the path of the thread.
I thought the censorship of the word “suicidal” on Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girl” was pretty lame, since it’s a pretty integral part of the chorus (again, only on MTV, radio stations had no problem with it). Not sure if it’s extreme, but considering how the chorus is sung relatively slowly, it sounds ridiculous to have long stretches of silence. (Wikipedia’s article on MTV censorship claims it was replaced with the words “in denial,” but everytime I heard it, it was just nothing.
The local “RAWK” station loves to play Everlast’s “What It’s Like,” but the song’s cut to ribbons: the vulgarity gets snipped, references to drinking or doing drugs are gone, anything hinting at violence gets replaced with sound effects. Thing is, the entire song is about people who drink, do drugs, or have violence affect their lives, so you get a little unlistenable bleep/sound-effect-fest, some of his lecturing chorus, and then some censored chorus lines to segue into the next bleep/sound-effect-fest.
I am suddenly reminded of A Bridge Too Far. I recall seeing the original version on HBO way back when, with Elliot Gould sent up ahead to make sure a bridge was still intact during WWII. It was. But suddenly, right before him, it was blown up real good by the Nazis. He was hopping mad: “Fuck! Shit! Motherfucker! Bastard,” etc., he said.
At about the same time, one of the major US networks also ran it, and suddenly Elliot Gould was saying: “Gosh! Darn! Golly!” Etc.
One of the most popular songs on Doctor Demento’s show in the late '70s was Frank Zappa’s “Titties and Beer.” He started out playing it with, IIRC, four bleeps in it, censoring out only the particularly rude words. The radio station management must have slipped him a memo, though, because he switched to a version that was bleeped to within an inch of its life, including a bleep of the word “whore,” and every instance of the word “titties,” which accounts for a couple of dozen bleeps right there. The good Doctor couldn’t even say the name of the song on the air, and took to announcing it as “Beep-ies and Beer.”
In the Big Lebowski, John Goodman’s character, Walter, gets enraged at a kid, Larry Sellers, and screams “This is what happens, Larry, when you fuck a stranger in the ASS!” John Goodman bellows this over a dozen times, breaking what he believes to be Larry’s car with a golf club, repeating over and over “This is what happens, Larry! This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!”
In the censored version they play on TV here, he instead screams “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!”
Dinah Shore wanted Tennessee Ernie Ford to appear on her show, but the sponsor, Chevrolet, refused, due to the fact that his last name was also the name of one of their major competitors. Ford was eventually allowed to appear on the show, and Shore had a bit of fun at the fears of the sponsors, jokingly introducing him as “Tennessee Ernie Chevrolet.”
A similar instance involved a made-for-TV adaptation of Judgment at Nuremburg. Due to the fact that the show was sponsored by the American Gas Corporation, references to gas chambers were not allowed in the program. MAD Magazine poked fun at this with a feature about what it would be like if similar historical instances were overseen by corporate sponsors in the same way, leading to such occurences as Galileo discovering the Baby Ruth and a show about the FBI introduced by J. Edgar Electrolux (the latter of which got MAD in trouble with the real humorless director).
iTunes has the word “suck” swapped out with asterisks in their descriptions.
Here’s the synopsis of the Mythbusters episode, Sinking Titanic:
Glad we’re protecting the young (who wouldn’t even be aware that something “sucking” means “sucks dick”, and simply think it means that it’s “not good.”)
