What are the oddest overdubs and edits you’ve seen done to make movies fit for broadcast? Any candidates for worst match between the voices of the original actor versus the dumb-down dubber?
Example: “Froggin’ ashpole” in FX’s broadcast of There’s Something about Mary.
The worst dubbing matches I’ve heard were done for budgetary reasons rather than censorship. On Polish TV, foreign movies keep the original soundtrack, but a guy voices over the Polish translation of all the lines. Yes, one guy reads all the parts. Seems like every movie uses the same guy.
Several years ago I saw part of an edited-for-television version of Slaughterhouse-Five. When the phrase “shoot his pecker off” occurs, the bowdlerized version changed this to “shoot his polly off.” OK, I can see a tiny thread of whackaloon logic here: a [wood]pecker is a bird, as is a polly [parrot]. But why “polly”? Why not some other bird-related and non-naughty phrase? Why not “shoot his budgie off” or “shoot his tweety off” or even “shoot his albatross off”? Hmm. I rather like “albatross” as a euphemism for “penis.” Gives a whole new meaning to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Last night I was watching the first Bridget Jones long-distance with my mother (we have a tendency to drop everything and call one another when we discover a Colin Firth flick is airing), and the last exchange was rendered thus:
RENEE ZELLWEGER: Wait a minute – nice boys don’t kiss like that.
COLIN FIRTH: Oh, yes they [NOT COLIN FIRTH] freaking [/NOT COLIN FIRTH] do!
For it’s sheer contrast, I always liked one of the opening scenes in Terminator in one broadcast. Arnie calls a punk “asshole”, which they replaced with a badly dubbed in “scum” - but they don’t do a thing about the visuals of him bloodily ripping the punk’s heart out. The contrast was . . . jarring.
Long ago NBC showed While You Were Sleeping. There a bit where the (Jewish) guy is talking to his god-son, using some Yiddish terms - every single one was dubbed in a different voice - like they’d just dubbed it that day or something. A Few Good Men is always fun - a close up of Jack Nickelson emphatically not saying 'Forget you!".
This goes way back, but when the movie “The Godfather” made it to network TV (about 1975?) they replaced “son of a bitch” with “son of a buck”. Just about everyone who saw it thought this was incredibly stupid.
Fast forwarding to just a few years ago, a non-cable station said it was going to show “The Godfather” entirely uncut. They did just that. Both Don Corleone and Sonny Corleone are shown being shot up in all its graphic gore and the coarse language is all there. HOWEVER, when it came to the wedding night scene where we are supposed to see Michael’s new bride Apollonia (Simonetta Stefenilli) topless, they did that electronic obfuscation bullshit. :mad: Sure, they didn’t edit the gore or the rough language, but a topless woman for 10 seconds ??? :mad:
Possibly the best censoring of a movie occurred when “Hot Shots” was being shown on TNT. At the beginning of the movie, Charlie Sheen leaves the “wise one” on the Indian reservation. We only see this guy at the end. Charlie says “oh wise one I have brought the Triple A batteries you wanted”. The uncensored subtitle reads “It’s about fucking time !!”. (which is pretty darned funny).
Anyway, the censored obviously-edited subtitle looked like this: http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/wolf_meister/hotshots.gif
It was hilarious and you knew they did that on purpose to get a good laugh.
My favorite has always been ABC’s hatchet job on Mallrats when they edited it down to TV-PG for broadcast. You can see a few of the edits here. The best is Jay explaining to TS how he got rid of the two contestants for the dating game show. It shows them writhing on the floor stoned, and in the original he says, “All it took was a phat chronic blunt!” The re-edit has the same scene, but he says, “All it took was a phat karate punch!” You have to admit it’s clever.
It’s pretty amazing they even try to show a Kevin Smith flick on a channel where they have to censor language. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was on a few weeks ago. There’s a scene where they pick up George Carlin’s character hitchhiking. He was holding a sign that in the original said something like “Will give blow jobs for rides,” but they just blanked out “blow jobs,” leaving the sign nonsensical.
Can’t wait to see what they do with the interspecies erotica in Clerks II.
Even a movie as innocuous as American Graffiti was loaded with edits for broadcast. Okay, “File it under CS…chicken stuff, that’s what it is!” makes some sense. But when Wolfman Jack shakes hands with Richard Dreyfuss and gives him a palm full of popsicle juice, he can’t say “Sticky mothers, ain’t they?” No, we get a clumsily spliced “Sticky -opsicles, ain’t they?”
I’ve never seen a TV broadcast of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but have always wondered how they would overdub Steve Martin’s ten-fifteen almost back-to-back utterances of “fucking.”
I haven’t watched it personally, but the current run of “The Sopranos” on A&E inspired a local TV columnist to write about the dubbing. He said it was very disconcerting and pretty much killed the drama of the episode. I don’t recall if the dubbing was done by the actual actors. The alternate Bada Bing scenes were apparently shot simultaneously with the originals - the girls wearing body stockings or bikinis.
Has anyone else ever seen The Breakfast Club on TBS? It’s almost like watching a whole other movie - it’s like watching the slow cousin of the original movie, that’s what it’s like.
My favourite act of television censoring of all time, though, was for Showgirls when they literally DREW a bra onto Gina Gershon for the scene where she is sitting at her makeup table. You can tell they just animated a black bra on her to cover her raspberries. Delightful!
In the episode of Six Feet Under where Nate and Lisa go camping with another couple, the women are talking about their sex lives, and the woman tells Lisa that she’ll often scream for her husband to “come on my tits!”. Lisa and Nate have a conversation about this later.
In the Bravo edit, they’ve dubbed it with “come and get it!”. The scenes make no sense whatsoever after that, because they’re acting like it’s a moderately racy thing to say during sex.
The Sopranos is pretty much unwatchable on A&E, between the bad bowdlerization and the commercials.
I can’t wait until they show Deadwood on basic cable. Al Swearingen will be reduced to a bit part, and Mr. Wu will just about have to go entirely. In fact, they’ll probably be able to show the whole series in about fifteen minutes.
I was disappointed while watching Hustler White on here! yesterday to learn that they had excised the amputee penetration shot. I tried to figure out why they would cut the shot but I was stumped.
I’ve seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on TV and it’s been completely butchered. They try to fit it in a two-hour slot, so even with no commercials they’d still have to cut 40 minutes. Entire scenes are taken out, including the whole bit with the Civil War armies facing off across the bridge. And you could almost take that out, exceptthat’s when Blondie and Tuco share their halves of the secret about where the money is buried. That’s the whole point of the second half of the movie, but then Tuco’s running around a cemetery looking for a grave he shouldn’t know about.Plus, the final scene is considerably shortened and interrupted by commercials. It’s nothing to do with language, violence or nudity, but if you ever want to see how bad editing can ruin a movie, watch the last 20 minutes of this, cut and uncut.
The skanky cousin says something like “I know how to french kiss.” The daughter says something like “everyone knows how to do that” and the cousin says “Yeah, but daddy says I’m the best.”
