American show, Overseas Edit?

My co-worker, Rob, is an Australian national. He’s well traveled; we have spent many a lunch break discussing cultural differences.

Yesterday, Rob mentioned that The Simpson were a few minutes longer in Australia.

“What do they have in the extra time?”

“Naughty bits,” Rob responded. He said that he has seen an episode here in the US and then seen it back home. The Australian version had more material.

Is this common? What sort of programs are inflicted :stuck_out_tongue: on other parts of the world?

I know that a lot of programs in syndication are edited down to a certain length because they have to be a certain duration allowing time for commercials, etc. I noticed this when watching the Seinfeld DVDs. No idea how they decide what to cut out…

Many TV shows, including The Simpsons are edited for syndication. The full episodes appear on the DVDs (although this isn’t the case for all the shows). It isn’t “naughty bits,” though, except for at least one instance- there’s a scene in “Two Dozen and One Greyhounds” in which Santa’s Little Helper is racing against a girl dog. We seem him catch up to her, and then the camera pans out a little to show that he’s on top of her- literally. (Interestingly enough, this scene was too risque even for Fox, which replaced it with footage of the dog race from earlier in the scene.) In syndication and on DVD, the scene shows the duo only up to the shoulders, but a full-body version was animated that apparently appears in the New Zealand broadcast (and possibly the Australian one as well).

There are shows like Forever Knight and Silk Stalkings that shot different versions for different countries.

The bits that are cut aren’t usually naughty. They’re just conveniently close to the existing commercials. Sometimes it’s very badly done, so you get a joke’s setup but not the punchline.

In the reverse - I watched Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Extras on HBO this weekend. I saw the second season on the BBC - and there were quite a few edits. Most notably, in the BBC version there’s a part where Keith Chegwin goes on about how “blokes have nobs and girls have fannies.” On HBO he said that “blokes have dicks and girls have vaginas.”

Seeing as HBO doesn’t have commercials (and nor does the BBC) I found the extra bits interesting. Ricky Gervais is seen backstage, pensive and regretful about becoming a stock character with a catchphrase and catches Maggie’s eye. That wasn’t in the BBC version either… Seeing as HBO loves to run the nonsensical commercials about their shows when a program is a bit short, they must have put it in there for a reason…

This was probably done so it made more sense to American ears- although “fanny” is a slang term for “vagina” in the UK, Americans use it to refer to ones buttocks (which, of course, both sexes have).

Ah, yes. I just got this. Why they changed it, that is. If you don’t know fanny=vagina, it sounds like Cheggers is encouraging an epidemic of guy-on-gal anal sex. The scene is hilarious, but even funnier if you know Keith Chegwin used to be a kid’s/tween’s show presenter in the late 70s and 80s. And he turns out to be a dumb racist, sexist, homophobic dolt who can’t act to save his life. I guess a decent comparison would be a Ryan Seacrest type, though it’s not exactly congruent.