Best (really worst) network TV voice-overs to replace cussing

[Hail_Ants]

@missouri65

There’s an episode of All in the Family where Mike’s buddy stops in during the holidays. He’s a draft dodger who is just coming back from Canada. One of Archie’s friends, who lost a son in Vietnam Nam, is also invited to the holiday meal. Everything blows up at dinner. There’s a powerful moment where Archie yells at the young man and says something to the effect of “that g-ddamn war.” The first time I saw it on either Nick at Nite or TVLand, it was unedited. But then when I saw it again about a year later, it was edited to “rotten damn.” Completely ruins a moment in a tv show that was originally aired at least 35 years before.

I have very vague memories of watching that episode. Here’s the scene on YouTube. Pretty good stuff for 70s television. Oh, and yeah they dub “rotten damn” over top of “god damn” pretty obviously (I checked other uploads, they all had it)…

[Wheelz]

@cormac262

Or when they just omit part of the line.

Charles Napier in “The Blues Brothers”: “yer gonna look pretty damn funny eatin’ corn on the cob…with no fuckin’ teeth !”

becomes “yer gonna look pretty damn funny eatin’ corn on the cob” (WTF ?)

I came in to mention The Blues Brothers. There were some weird cuts like above, but other times they at least tried to match the lip movements of the actors. I’ll give them points for the effort, but the result often made no sense. For example the exchange between the two state troopers:

“I don’t believe it, it’s that shitbox Dodge again!”
“Bastards are ours now!”

became:
“I don’t believe it, it’s that screwball Dodge again!”
“Buzzards are ours now!”

Then there’s the classic:
“Shoot!”
“What?”
“Rollers.”
“No!”
“Yep.”
“Shoot!”

Really? “Shoot”?

[Intergalactic_Gladiator]

@PetW

In Die Hard 3, the villain forces John McClane to go into a predominantly black neighborhood wearing a sandwich sign saying “I hate niggers.”
Here’s the censored version, which really came off as hilarious since it invoked such rage in every black guy that he saw.

It’s fairly distracting because the board is obviously CGI’d either way. There should have been a better way to do that scene.

@tdn

The weirdest was in Ghostbusters. “Yes it’s true your honor, this man has no dick.” became “Yes it’s true your honor, this man is some kind of rodent, I don’t know which.”

There’s something in the setup where another one of the Ghostbusters calls the EPA agent “Wally the Weasel” instead of Dickless or something. I remember when Ghostbusters finally got to network TV and it was a pretty big deal. A lot of people were looking out to see what would happen here.

@Miller

Some movie - possibly Quick Change - saw a character o from being a “fucking motherfucker” to a “Viking melon farmer.”

I saw Quick Change while I was stationed overseas and then again on the plane ride home. The gangster growling “Open the fucking door” became “Open the viking door” which I thought was moderately clever though I wondered how you determine that it’s a viking door.

It seems to me that they film a lot of alternative takes and it would be easy to just do a “PG” version of the movie for the networks (and I know there are instances where they do this). I suppose it’s a matter of artistic taste when a director elects to not do this. I can imagine Quentin Tarantino saying “Forget them, I’m not going to take out any of my flipping swearing, bunch of lazy melon ballers.”

[Mean_Mr.Mustard]

Not a voiceover, but in a Redd Foxx sitcom he used to say “motherfather”.
mmm

[Annie-Xmas]

Another one from Blues Brothers: “We had a band that could turn goat’s piss into gasoline” became “goat’s milk.”

Dubbing “piss”? Really?

[nate]

In Vacation, Clark gets his family lost in a St. Louis ghetto and pulls the car over to ask a pedestrian for directions back to the freeway. Instead of the “Fuck yo mama!” response that is in the original version, the man says “Who I look like? Christopher Columbo?” in the TV version. It’s a classic line and probably better than the original.

[Morbo]

Weird Science, Chet’s line “But first, let me…butter yer muffin.” The clean version, sounding absolutely nothing like Bill Paxton: “But first, let me…better know ya, muffin!”

My favorite, though, was Casino on USA Network. They used “freak” for fuck every single time. Listening to everyone say it that way was surreal. “Freak, you, you freakin motherfreaker!” “Oh freak you, man, freeeeeak yooooou!”

[JohnT]

So I guess people are cool with people in movies on TNT telling each other to

“Forget you!”
“No! Forget YOU!”

?