Caught some of The Big Lebowski today on Comedy Central, the point where they visit the kid and smash up the sports car. The part where Walter yells “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass.” The part where Comedy Central dubbed it as “This is what happens when you fight a stranger in the Alps.”
Needless to say, the part where I cracked up laughing louder than I ever have in the unedited version of the movie (except maybe during the first viewing).
The Breakfast Club is hilarious on TV because of the creative censoring. I can’t think of any examples at the moment, but some of it is quite… creative.
When I was a kid I watched Smokey & the Bandit on network TV and was wondering why Jackie Gleason kept yelling “I’m gonna bah-be-cue yo’ head in molasses!” (the line is “barbecue yo’ aaaaassssssssss!”, so the “head in molasses” phrase had to be said much faster than the rest of the sentence).
To me there’s only one acceptable way of editing speech for TV and that’s too delete (or bleep) the offensive word. Everybody knows what they’re saying, you’re not fooling anybody, and it’s much more natural to call somebody a “motherBLEEPer” than a “mother DUCK LOVER”.
In The Usual Suspects, during the police line-up scene, the line “mother fucking cock-sucker” was changed to “grandmother loving brother bugger.” That sounds dirtier than the actual line!
My favorite was the ABC version of Mallrats. It was butchered to death, as you can imagine if you’ve seen the original. The one that stuck in my mind the most was Jay’s line toward the end of the movie when he subdued two game show contestands with marijuana. Standing over the two guys laying on the ground he originally says:
Bullett Broof with Damon Waynes and Adam Sandler is worth watching once on VHS/DVD, and twice on TV just to see how much has been edited. About 1/3 of the dialogue is changed.
On TNT (TBS?), Bruce Willis’ line in Die Hard became “Yippe-kai-yay, Mister Falcom!”
Hilarious.
The changes in Fargo are awesome, too (“Frosted snow demons!”). I understand that the Coen brothers intentionally come up with weird alternative swear words, Only Mostly Dead. (BTW, “fight a stranger in the Alps”? Totally cracked me up.)
My all-time favorite is in “Major League.” But it’s not so much that the word choice of the dubbed line is particularly amusing – Corbin Bernsen’s “Strike this motherfucker out!” becomes “Strike this guy out!” – as it is the hilarious mismatch in tone between Bernsen and whoever they brought in to say “guy.” It REALLY sticks out. Honestly, whoever they brought in sounds black, and Bernsen’s a white dude. That’s not to say that black people can’t do impressions of white people, because Jamie Foxx does an impression of Ronald Reagan that is stunning, but if you’re going to bring in a black dude to dub for a white person, be sure to tell the black dude to do his best white-person impression!
Simply erasing the “fucker” half of “motherfucker” probably would have sounded a lot smoother.
I wish they’d release a “super-deluxe-extra-special-extended” edition DVD of Repo Man that includes both the theatrical and the editied-for-television versions. They’re both great, each in their own way.
The first time I saw Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing on TV, the part that launched me right from suspension of disbelief is where some brainless network twit decided that “Mickey-fickey” should be dubbed in to replace motherfucker.
Imagine a bunch of middle aged unemployed brothers sitting on milk crates drinking beers and shooting the breeze saying, “Damn these Mickey-fickeying Koreans coming in here and taking our jobs.”
Gah.
Any hood rat with an ounce of street knowledge knows that the acceptable euphemism is “Mother Hubbard.” I know – it’s still corny – but at least that has some basis in reality!