The censoring due to brand names can be pretty funny. IIRC, Burger King wouldn’t allow their name to be used in broadcast versions of the Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance. So you have a song with lines like “In the sixty-nine my humpty nose will tickle your rear,” and then a line that goes “I once got busy in a <bleep> bathroom.” It was very comical.
Great, I got that song stuck in my own head. :smack:
I can’t remember which fast food chain used NSync as part of their advertising (I want to say Burger King), but they had a video tape with promotional stuff from NSync and Britney Spears (don’t judge me, I got the tape as a door prize at a party). One of the NSync guys had a t-shirt from the other food brand, which was blurred out (Another one was wearing an NSuck hat. This was the point where I started liking the band. Anyone who laughs at his own expense every once in a while, right?)
Ah, I just remembered! I can’t believe I forgot this before, but there was this anti-smoking television commercial in the West. I’m sure many of you have seen it. The theme song is Cat Stevens’ “Cats in the Cradle.” It shows a small boy watching a videotape of his father. Different stuff all edited together – cooking on a barbecue, clowning around, etc – but the father is always, always smoking a cigarette. He died from lung cancer, obviously. I think it even shows the teary-eyed kid touching the TV screen with his hand.
That commercial played in Thailand. Because of the rules against showing tobacco use, they pixellated out the father’s smoking. Got that? It was an anti-smoking commercial, and a touching one at that, but you can’t tell what the father was doing!
I think the Oscar for all time most ridiculous censoring has to go to Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie. A pot movie with the pot replaced with diamonds. Who did they think was going to watch it?
Japan has a number of odd censoring laws (or maybe just unwritten rules that the networks all agree to), but one that always seems exceptionally pointless is blurring out handcuffs whenever a suspect is being escorted by the police (only in news broadcasts, dramas can show all the handcuffs they want). What makes it so ridiculous is that the blurring draws your attention to the suspect far more than the actual handcuffs would. I often wonder what the reaction would be if some show did the “Unnecessary Censorship” skit and blurred out some innocent person’s wrists.
Oddly, this rule only applies to suspects in Japan. If there’s footage of a trial or arrest in America, they’ll just run the local footage as-is.
Elton’s John “The Bitch is Back.” Some radio stations beeped the word “bitch,” which kinda killed the chorus.
Oh the BEEP oh the BEEP oh the BEEP is back.
Stone cold sober as a matter of fact
I can BEEP I can BEEP cause I’m better than you.
It’s the way that I move, the things that I do
Huh. I’ve heard it changed to “trying to meet some girl,” which sounds very similar.
This reminds me of the blatant rewriting of the Tina Turner cover of this very song, from the tribute album, Two Rooms.
First, the original lyric:
Then, the replacement lyric:
Gee…PC much?
Totally from memory, but I watched From Dusk Till Dawn on Fox. It amused me no end to see the strip club called the City Twister.
It also struck me as odd they could show two hours of vampires getting decapitated, impaled on stakes etc, yet they felt obliged to dub over any cursing. Including George Clooney’s (?) line at the end, which includes about 7 variants of the word “Fuck.” They gave up enve trying to dub over the word, and just had an entirely new sentence spoken by a completely different sounding actor.
When planes showed “Rainman” they deleted the airport scene. Except for Quantis
Others have already responded to this question, but I just wanted to mention that it reminded me of when John Ashcroft was Attorney General and had curtains placed over the naked statues in the Justice Department.
I was watching the documentaries on the extended DVD version of “Iron Man” a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that in one scene of a meeting in someone’s office, a painting on the wall was pixellated. Also, there was an interview with someone who was a comic book writer or artist and behind him there is a display case with what appears to be a number of comic book character figurines, and some (but not all) were pixellated. I wondered if they pixellated all the ones that weren’t Marvel characters!
They blurred out the dogs’ naughty bits in an episode of Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe was working with a dog groomer.
I seem to remember there was a ton of stuff like this in the UK during the 70s and 80s with classic martial arts movies. There was a ton of media hype at the time about kids braining themselves and each with nunchucks and the like, so to this day (I believe) the official versions of all Bruce Lee’s movies that were released in the UK have the nunchuck scenes removed.
The UK had many qualms with nunchuks for many years- as well as references to ninjas in general (the Ninja Turtles were known as the Hero Turtles in the UK for many years).
Didn’t the US dub of Sailor Moon also completely rework the lesbian relationship between (I think) Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Neptune?
I only ever saw the US verison of One Piece and I don’t think them cutting the alcohol scenes hurt the show. I always wondered what was up with Sanji and those damn lolipops. It kind of sissified him.
And Hero Turtles 
Thats just silly.
Small nitpick: It’s Qantas, it stands for Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services.
So I have heard… unfortunately it was reworked into an incestuous lesbian relationship. :smack:
Oh, I’m reminded of a silly beeping:
In the early nineties, YTV ran the fantastic UK/Kiwi kids’ show Worzel Gummidge, which starred Jon Pertwee as a bad-tempered magically-alive scarecrow that had to be continually bailed out of trouble by a couple of sweet-natured children.
In one episode, Worzel took a short-cut through a cowfield on the way to see his sweetie Aunt Sally, arriving covered in muck.
Hoity-toity Aunt Sally looks him up and down and then declares, “You smell like a cowshed!”
There must have been addle-headed complaints, because an even more addle-headed censor rendered the repeats into “You smell like a cowsh[beep]!”
:dubious:
I remember in highschool hearing Adam Sandler’s “Piece of Shit Car” on the radio with all the curse words replaced with car horn noises. The censored version was funnier than the original.
Also in highschool I remember watching a censored version of a movie on tv. For the life of me I can’t remember what the movie was, but I remember two choice lines (changed words in caps).
“Kiss my HAND!”
“You can go to FRANCE!”
The France line in particular had me giggling. 