(Couldn’t decide if this should go in General Questions or here.)
About five or six years ago I watched Taxi Driver. I’d seen it before, but it had been a while. One scene that really struck me was the one in which DeNiro and the gun dealer have their meeting in a hotel room. Something I hadn’t noticed the first time I saw it, back in the '90s, was that outside the windows of the room are the looming Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. It really undescored the violent subtext of the scene, though of course Scorsese couldn’t have anticipated that when he shot it in 1976.
But then I saw it again last year, and the towers were nowhere to be seen. When I noticed them before, they were unmissable; it looked like they were right across the street from the hotel.
Did I just imagine that the towers were there? It was vivid enough that I wrote a blog entry mentioning it at the time, so that seems unlikely.
Did Scorsese authorize an edited version, having the towers digitaly removed? That seems unlikely too, as I’ve read he was adamant about including the towers in that final scene of Gangs of New York.
When I saw it with the towers, I think it was on cable, but I’m not sure. The version without them was a Blu-Ray DVD.
That doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. I mean, the towers were there during the time period in which the film takes place. What could possibly be the rational for digitally removing them?
In the U.S., maybe. “Titty” comes through up here, along with the fucks and whatever else you got. Hell, I recall seeing full frontal nudity and masturbation (in the context of First Name: Carmen) on the CBC.
“Titty” doesn’t seem like something to get twisted up about.
Actually, being a cable station, AMC is under no constraints from the FCC to censor anything. Being an advertiser-supported network, however, means they do have to do some editing to keep the sponsors paying for advertising time.
Maybe it’s just me, but does anybody else find it a bit disturbing that the only thing that would make From Dusk 'Til Dawn broadcast-unfriendly would be the word “Titty”?
Kind of like giving The King’s Speech an R-rating, because of Bad Language™…
So I found my copy of my copyright 1999 Taxi Driver DVD and stuck it into my DVD drive. Woah! It’s my copy of Oregon Trail. So that’s where that’s been. Anyway, here is the first window view and here is the second window view. Is that them on the left side of the second view? It’s hard to tell.
Last time I saw From Dusk Til Dawn on basic cable a few months back, they CGI’d the sign, but still actually said the word titty, making it really bizarre. I was only flipping through channels and only saw a few minutes, so I don’t know exactly what else was/wasn’t cut.
