This is OT, but I just looked up the lyrics to that song and they are really, really stupid. (they also mention weed–maybe that was dubbed over?)
As an side note, I find myself getting increasingly irritated with the butchering of classic Warner cartoons, even on cable networks supposedly dedicated to showing the toons to a nostalgic adult audience.
That’s true but misleading. It would just have been the generic penalty for selling banned literature. The specific problem they had was the use of morphine in game. My understanding is that Bethesda simply changed the name of the drug to address the censor’s concerns. There is still drug use and drug addiction in Fallout 3.
Ah, and the problem was actually with the classifications available to the censor. There is no higher restriction available for a game than MA15+ which means the censor does not have the ability to restrict the game to say 18 year olds and older. Basically, like my wife, the law still thinks video games are only played by adolescent boys.
I can’t speak to The Antiques Roadshow, but I’ve seen dogs’ bits and baby bums blurred out on U.S. television, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Regular Thai television is dismal. I never watch it, so I can’t guarantee they still do this, but they probably do: They at least used to pixellate out every instance of alcohol, tobacco and guns. Man, whenever they showed a movie like, say, JFK, where virtually everyone smokes, it really looks pitiful.
Classic example of this is 60’s TV networks showing The Rolling Stones playing “Satisfaction”. They would bleep the line “And I’m trying to make some girl”, thus turning it into the infinitely ruder sounding “And I’m trying to bleep some girl”.
My favorite censoring has always been the Comedy Central version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Cameron: We can’t take my car, my car’s a piece of TIN
Ferris: Well I don’t even have a piece of TIN, that’s why I have to use your piece of TIN. Can’t we just borrow one of your dad’s cars?
Cameron: If I touch one of his cars, he will crush my HEAD into jelly
very obvious dubbing makes it even funnier
The concern was “realistic” drug use. I guess it becomes no longer realistic if you don’t use real names for the drugs, so Morphine became Med-X (makes you take less damage). There’s a mod available that lets you switch the names back.
But yeah, Fallout 3 is definitely not a game for little kids, given the completely non-drug-related content in it.
One of my favorite examples is the Tenacious D song “Fuck Her Gently”. When they played it on my favorite radio station in high school (KDGE 101.1 The Edge, IIRC) they dubbed over all of the offensive content with carefully chosen sound effects. The final effect is freaking hilarious. That said, I can’t find this version anywhere now. 
I wonder what an edited version of The Departed would be like? Has anyone seen the “Fucking Short” versions of movies they put on Youtube, where they edit out everything EXCEPT instances of the word Fuck? Departed is still a full three and a half minutes long.
I always heard it as “And I’m trying to please some girl.” Also, the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” has the lines
That I don’t wanna get caught up
In any of that
Funky shit going down in the city
I’ve heard a radio version that changes that last line to “Funky kicks going down in the city.” Oddly enough, KLOS used to play the uncensored version not that long ago. I guess nobody noticed till like '04 or so.
As for egregious censorship in anime, the US does a lot of that, at least for syndicated and cable series. I remember watching the DIC dub of “Sailor Moon” and seeing an episode in which Serena (the dub name for Usagi) attended a formal party and fell off the balcony. Tuxedo Mask caught her and they floated down using her parasol as a parachute. DIC edited it so they were about to fall off the balcony one second and on the ground the next. I guess it was so stupid kids wouldn’t imitate the show. I thought it was unnecessary, but in retrospect, probably not – remember a few months ago when some boys who had been watching “Naruto” decided to bury one of their buddies in the sandbox like Gaara and left him to suffocate? :smack:
A few years later, 4Kids (or was it DIC?) dubbed “Dragon Ball” and showed it Saturday mornings. One of the characters, Oolong, was a panty-obsessed pig. I seem to remember a scene in which he jumped into a river and the other characters used panties on a fishing pole as bait to get him to come out. The dubbers digitally changed the panties into a wad of dollar bills. You would think 4Kids would have learned their lesson about editing teen-oriented anime for Saturday morning use, but I guess they didn’t. When they licensed “One Piece,” all instances of alcohol use were cut (news flash: pirates enjoy alcohol!) and digitally turned Sanji’s cigarettes into lollipops.
Here are a couple of example of BBC censorship from the 1940’s:-
Bing Crosby’s “Deep In The Heart Of Texas” . This was because “The melody was so infectious that the BBC banned it from broadcasts during working hours, to prevent factory hands from using their tools for banging against machinery to keep time with the music.”
And the Andrew Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola” was barred from being broadcast because it breached the BBC’s ban on advertising.
The broadcast version of American Graffiti was pretty ridiculous. No surprise that they cut out Paul LeMat’s “chickenshit” (“File that under C.S.” “C.S.? What’s that?” “Chicken stuff!!! That’s what it is!”), but when Wolfman Jack shook hands with Richard Dreyfuss, he couldn’t even call the melted popsicles “sticky mothers.” They dubbed in the word “popsicles” with the opening "p’ slightly clipped, so the line became “Sticky 'opsicles, ain’t they?”
Both “chicken stuff” and “sticky opsicles” became catch phrases around our household.
The first time I saw Blazing Saddles was the edited-for-television version. “Lili von Schtup” became “Lili von Scht”. (By the way, the bean-eating scene is even funnier without the sound effects.)
One time I was watching an American movie on a Mexican TV station. It was in English with Spanish subtitles. In one scene, the character shouted what seemed like a ten-minute string of profanity. The subtitle read “Maldito!”
I know this is horrendously off topic but the lyrics are supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. The song is mocking stereotypes of immigrants. (Although perhaps you figured that out and still think they’re stupid.)
Back to the topic, I used to hear a bleeped version of Three Days Grace’s “I Hate Everything About You” on television wherein the line “After every hit we take” became “After every … we take.” Until I heard an uncensored version on the radio, I always wondered why Three Days Grace had chosen to sing about taking a dump.
When I was in the USAF and stationed at Forbes Air Force Base, (near Topeka) in Kansas in the early seventies, I remember hearing Paul Simon’s song Kodachrome being played with at least one word censored from the song, specfically the word “crap”.
“When I think of all the _____ I learned in high school…”
It seemed like kind of a mild word to censor.
I recall seeing an edited version featuring the Rock Ridge song:
…Should we stay or up and quit?
It’s nearing time for a decision
Our town is turning into [loud MOOOOOO! from outside]
I later saw saw the original with the last word intact. It wasn’t as funny.
Not TV or film, but a book. When I read Foundation by Isaac Asimov I got to a heated exchange between two characters and did a WTF when I read this:
“When will their forces reach us?”
“Two months. Two unprintable months”
At the time I thought that the swear word really was “unprintable”, then it occurred to me it was probably censored from the original as it was published in 1951. Still, you’d think with later reprints they’d put the original word back in now the population is considered able to handle swearing (although saying that maybe they don’t know what the word is…).
Rayne Man writes:
Sounds like an urban legend to me. “Antiques Roadshow” runs on PBS, which has no problem with actual nude people, let alone paintings. I can’t see them pixillating anything.
Even American network TV doesn’t actually pixillate nude paintings. “Saturday Night Live” used this to comic effect back in the 1970s when Dan Ackroyd played a lounge-lizard-type commenring on paintings, and gleefully pointing out the naked bits.
I should totally start using ‘unprintable’ as an actual swear word. I believe one of Heinlein’s characters actually did something like that.
Someone in marvel comics must not have got the memo as Hawkeye’s real name is Clint.