Movies on TV

Factual Questions
1

I have two questions about movies that are shown on tv

  1. Why are some movies that were made in the 80’s and then censored for TV not re-edited for the 90’s.

Example: In “Breakfast Club” or “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” there is a lot of censoring that just ruins watching the movie. Some words that are censored are “dick”, “ass”, “damn”, “Bitch”, etc. Words that were not allowed on network tv back then, but now are heard on almost every sitcom. Why don’t they take out these overdubs to fit today’s standards?

  1. Have you ever seen a movie only on TV, and think it was OK, but then when you saw the real version you realized how much you missed? I grew up watching Animal House on TV, never knowing that the professor smoked pot, or that Bluto saw the girls naked in the window before he fell. Same with all the pot references in Fast Times. They cut out some of the best scenes.

I was watching Die Hard 3 on network TV the other night, (which I had seen at the movies) and I knew to expect a lot of censoring. For instance, Bruce Willis has to go in the middle of Harlem wearing a sign saying “I hate Niggers”. On tv, it was digitally altered to say “I hate everybody”. If you hadn’t seen the movie before, you probably wouldn’t have gotten why it was so offensive to everyone around him.

I can see why they changed it, but it

2

Because that would require that someone find the original print and reissue it. TV stations buy their prints from distributors who package whatever they have in stock. Once they go to the expense of making it conform to the censorship standards, they don’t want to go to the expense of undoing it.

www.sff.net/people/rothman

3

Here’s another question: Why are some television shows given slightly different names when they’re released in syndication? One example: the show that I swear was originally called “Baa-Baa Black Sheep” is being rerun as “Black Sheep Squadron”.

4

Lumpy-
I’ve always assumed that they changed the names of shows that went into syndication while new episodes were still being run on the network. This is obviously not the case anymore.

5

Re: Baa Baa Black Sheep

Apparently the changed the name for second season

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0073961