I had the closed captioning on the other day (wet vaccing the TV room) and was quite surprised to read “circle jerk”–this was in the middle of the afternoon on TNT (which always dubs or bleeps the “naughties”). I wondered if that got dubbed something else or simply omitted in the audio.
I once saw American Beauty on AFN (American Forces Network) and was surprised to hear that while terms I’d consider pretty mild like “dick” and “jerking off” were dubbed over, “fag” was not.
I hesitate to blame this on the military, as I don’t think they can afford to have movies specially edited for broadcast. I’m pretty sure they just use whatever edited-for-television version already exists.
Former radio guy stepping in. I may be able to help.
We had a little rule in the station, and it was this: “I can call you an asshole, but I can’t talk about your asshole.”
It all has to do with context and whether or not you were referring to the actual body part or bodily function in question.
Take “The Shield” on F/X. Vic Mackey can call somebody a worthless piece of shit, but you’ll probably not hear anybody talking about actually taking a shit. The former only refers to a guy using a derogatory term. The latter refers to the actual bodily function, which the FCC is more regulatory on.
I agree it’s the dumbest rule structure ever known to man, but I also personally believe the FCC keeps it extra-vague so they can penalize those that don’t play ball with their arcane witch-hunts.
Blazing Saddles was running on ABC Family the other month – one does wonder what family ABC has in mind – and it struck me that it really makes no sense whatsoever to put that movie on broadcast. So many things had to be cut – swearwords, the “N” word, Dom Deluise’s song-and-dance (hint: it was NOT called the “French Mistake”), Governor LePetomaine’s secretary – that there really isn’t any point to watching it.
This is something most Christians seem to misunderstand in their own faith. In the bible when it mentions “taking the Lord’s name in vain” it doesn’t mean you can’t yell God or Jesus when you are pissed, it means doing things in God’s name. Like starting a war or killing someone saying God told you to when he didn’t. I am still amazed to this day how many people don’t understand this :rolleyes: .
The other day on MPT (PBS), I was watching an episode of “Chef!”, and the word ‘cock’ was bleeped. As part of ‘cock-up’, meaning error. A very common, inoffensive term. Weird.
They occasionally show “The Godfather” on Spike, I believe, and it bugged me because of one part.
When Moe Greene and Micheal are meeting in Las Vegas, at one point Moe says about Fredo “He was Banging Cocktail Waitresses two at a time”. But Spike apparently can’t handle “Banging” and replaces it with something else, making it sound totally stupid(Honking?).
The Stern show used to leave in “pussy” and “dick,” but only when it was an insult directed at someone. If someone talked about their own “pussy” or “dick,” the delay would kick in.
That reminds me of a story. Years ago in school, when it came time to teach us about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, our history teacher got the brilliant idea to show us the movie Mississippi Burning. Obviously, she hadn’t seen it, and chose it based strictly on word-of-mouth, because she was totally unprepared for the torrent of obscenities that came from the charater’s mouths. She turned it off after about 10 minutes. The level of profanity was absolutely ridiculous. I swear they said “fuck” at least once per minute; by the time the teacher turned it off, us kids were keeping a running count of how many swear words we heard