I wonder why they even try with some movies. For instance, WGN (I think) showed The Jerk. Now that’s a movie that revels in sophomoric, low-brow humor, and is, in my opinion, one of the 10 funniest movies ever made. The most egregious example of bad censorship was how the station handled the name of Navin’s dog, Shit Head. The TV station just cut out the “Shit” from “Shit Head.” During the scene where he’s chasing his dog (after nobly telling him to leave), Navin is yelling “Here, [pause] Head! Come back, [pause] Head!”
And of course, I do know it was Harry Chapin who wrote that song. :smack: Guess I had the word “cat” on my mind.
That showed in Thailand. In the days before pixellation, they smeared Vaseline on the naughty bits. The vampire strippers in that movie all looked like they had nuclear breasts. (They’re actually getting better about nudity censorship here, with an actual movie-rating code just started last month, but it’s hit or miss, sometimes coming down simply to which cinema you happen to be in.)
I recall watching The Jerk on network television one time in the US. Shithead got changed to Stupid. Didn’t match Steve Martin’s lip movement at all.
Another example: They pixellated out every Buddha image in the film Music and Lyrics (the ditzy Britney Spears-style singer seemed crazy about them), but the clips running on the several TV monitors out in the lobby left them intact!
I once saw a network broadcast of The Blues Brothers where they beeped all the bad words, going so far as to change the line “we had a band that could turn goat piss into gasoline” to “goat milk.”
Yeah. Haruka (Sailor Uranus) and Michiru (Sailor Neptune) were turned into the extremely close cousins Amara and Michelle. I thought Amara was a stupid name for her because part of the character’s appeal was that you couldn’t tell right away if she was male or female, because she was supposedly butch. The name “Haruka” can be for either a male or a female, apparently. Not so with the dub name-- anyone here ever met a guy named “Amara?” :rolleyes:
Most people are probably familiar with the BBC-friendly version of The Kinks’s Lola, where “champagne tastes just like cherry cola” than its original, where it “tastes just like Coca-Cola.”
The cooler of comic books two super-archers, Hawkeye, is in “real life” Clinton Barton. I put “real life” in quotes because he never put any particular effort into having a secret identity; he just wore a mask because it was part of the hero uniform.
ETA: I just read post 60 and need to :smack:.
Going back to The Big Lebowski, I recently saw the edited-for-television version. When Jackie Treehorn offers the Dude a drink, the Dude says “John Fogerty would”.
I know I remember him saying “Does the Pope shit in the woods?” in the screen version.
They also went to the unnecessary trouble to pixellate out Maude Lebowski’s bum, which in the screen version is glimpsed briefly and dimly in the dark as she’s un-hooked from her artist’s flying harness.
Speaking of anime imports, does anyone remember Battle of the Planets from the '70s? The Japanese original had a great deal of violence (including many deaths), plus a hermaphrodite villain. All of this was cut from the American release, with the 7-Zark-7 character created and given lengthy intro sequences each episode to fill time.
Additionally, the original took place entirely on Earth; all the space-related stuff was created out of whole cloth for the US release.
I’ve heard the '80s release, titled G-Force was closer to the original, but I’ve never seen it.
(bolding mine) Elwood?
What are they doing to the cartoons?
I heard a version of “Hash Pipe,” also on MTV, that partially censored the word “asswipe” in its chorus. I suppose that wouldn’t have been so surprising…except they censored the “wipe” part, not the “ass” part. I think that’s the only time I’ve been truly stunned by something on MTV in the last 10 years.
Apparently only in Baltimore - we saw all the naughty bits here in California!
For example, Elmer is about to shoot Daffy, camera cuts to Bugs (and not a reaction shot, but just a single frame of Bugs) during the sound of the blast, then cuts back to a post-shot Daffy, all in an effort to prevent the kiddies from being traumatized.
Fuckin’ kiddies.
Maybe they bleeped it because the whole line is fucking stupid. By censoring a random word, you have to stop and think what it would be and not focus on how bad the line is.
I grew up in Pakistan from 1967 to 1987. For the last seven of those years on television there would be no physical contact shown between men an women. Period. Whole episodes of British and American TV shows would be dropped because there was an implication that sex had taken place.
There were pickets at the TV stations demanding that “Different Strokes” be taken off the air as a show that corrupted the morals of the young. The Gary Coleman character talked back to his adoptive father too much apparently.
Of course the number of things that would get cut for religious and political sensitivity are too many to mention. Like any movie or show depicting any military dictator in an unfavorable light. Anything bad about the Chinese.
I’d be the first one to admit that you can’t censor Gary Coleman enough.
Oh. Yuk.
Guess it’s better that the kiddies don’t know what guns can do before the first time they happen to come upon one?
My Channel 9 shows two episodes of Law & Order: SVU on Sundays at 8 & 9 p.m. The censor apparently has a thing about the word “balls,” demanding it be silenced not only in reference to body parts, but in phrases like “having to balls to do it” and even “ballsy.”
They also beep out “Putting things where the sun don’t shine.”
In the softcore movie “Hotel Erotica” (not to be confused with the softcore TV series of the same name) there’s a scene with two women having lesbian sex in a very strange manner. They’re both on their hands and knees, facing away from one another, and they bump their butts together rhythmically as if they were engaged in some kind of intimate aerobic exercise – but that’s all they do, bump the butts, there’s no grinding and there’s no device involved as in Jennifer Connolly’s scene in “Requiem for A Dream.”
In a subsequent airing of “Hotel Erotica” the scene is cut. And given that the rest of the movie is full of fake sex scenes involving sexual techniques that actually work, all I can figure is that is that they feared the scene would confuse young lesbian viewers. Except, since when did censors ever give a shit about anything like that?
Anyone who has been duck hunting can tell you that if you shoot a duck at close range with a shotgun, its beak will not comically spin around its head a few times, leaving said duck with a charred black face and a snappy comeback.
Said duck will instead explode in a puff of feathers.
This is not a recommended practice or desireable outcome. Peking Feathers is not a particularly tasty dish. Nor is Canard a la projectile de fil, for that matter.
On a more serious note, I always thought that most of the Warner Bros. cartoons tended to get censored in some places these days because of… erm… “quaint” ideas regarding ethnic minorities?