Pepper. You mean Pepper.
And when was Pepper NOT undercover as an exotic dancer/streetwalker/call girl?
Creepiest dropped line is from Scrubs, the first episode.
Dr. Cox pushes an elderly woman up to JD in a waiting area and starts ranting about something. He finishes with “And if you push a stiff around a wheelchair, nobody will ask you to do anything.” Dr. Cox then walks off and the syndicated version goes to commercial.
The aired and DVD version has the woman winking at JD and saying “I’m not really dead.” One version is a joke with a patient who may have been playing along, the other has the unsuspecting viewer wondering if Dr. Cox really was pushing a corpse around the hospital.
You’ll be pleased to know that joke is kept by FXX.
The old snpp.com, which has since been ported to simpsonsarchive.com, has episode summaries for every episode and most if not all scripts, including the bits that were cut for syndication clearly marked.
Cuts made in shows to fit local time slots are usually called “syndication cuts”; try searching with that term.
A lot of older shows have “sets” of syndicated episodes where the scenes cut out of a particular episode in one set are not the same as in another set. For example, on The Phil Silvers Show (aka Bilko), there is an episode where someone in the platoon is on The $64,000 Question. In one syndicated version, they leave in a scene at the beginning where a sailor answers a $64,000 question by reciting a poem, but cut out the scene where the soldier answers a $32,000 question; in another, the first one is cut while the second one airs.
Ask any reasonably diehard Simpsons fan about syndication cuts. Since the show is animated, it has a lot more individual scenes (usually just a few seconds long) than most live-action shows, so it is easy to remove a number of scenes to make the show fit without it seeming obvious that cuts had been made. Something done with later Simpsons episodes is, since animation is done at 24 frames per second but broadcast (in the USA, at least) at 30, every five frames (1/6 of a second) has a pair of duplicate frames; by removing the added frames and adjusting the audio, they can reduce it by quite a bit.
TV is not the only place where this happens. A long time ago, a movie theater far, far away had Superman on one screen, and Raiders on the other. Lobby the size of a postage stamp, six shows a day, 800 seats in the small house, 1600 in the big house. Envision having to dump, clean and fill in 15 minutes. It rained heavy in the month of Monsoon, and the ten PM show would sell out at 2 PM. The solution was in the older Norelco projectors, which had a transmission to go between film’s normal 24 frames per second to Todd-AO’s 30 frames per second. The projection speed would get sped up for the ending credits, with a bonus that the audience would march out of the theater faster to the sped up music.
Imagine the scene where Spock tries to take control of the *Enterprise * being cut from the ***TOS ***episode “Operation: Annihilate.” That’s what happened the first time I saw it (in syndication; I was a second-generation Trekfan). We came back from a commercial, and there was Spock lying in Sickbay, saying “I apologize for my earlier effort to take over the ship.” Whoa! I thought. When did **that **happen? I **missed **something?!? :eek: :dubious: 
I was watching Everybody Loves Raymond on TVLand and got annoyed at the length of the commercial breaks. So I checked the times via the DVR; one break had nearly six minutes of commercials.
I went back and added up the actual program times: something like 16 1/2 minutes for an episode.
mmm
As with “Charlie’s Angels” – any excuse for some undercover work involving T and A.
One joke I remember being cut out in syndication was in the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror V. “Time and Punishment”.
Terrified at the idea of being Re-Neducated, Homer is running from dogs and has the bright idea to pull some wieners from his pockets. “These wieners will give me the quick energy I need.” And he eats the wieners to get a speed burst to escape the dogs That joke is cut from the syndicated version.
Since terentii brought up Star Trek, I remember the run on TechTV that included the footage that was normally cut. Every episode ended 10 minutes longer. They’d run at least three so they’d get realigned on a 30 minute boundary–though often it was a huge marathon of 6 or more episodes.
When G4 took over, they also ran commentary (from people calling in, even) on the bottom of the screen, which was my first exposure to this type of stuff. They called it Star Trek 2.0 (and TNG 2.0).
BTW, terentii: how do you say your name? I’ve always read it as teh-RENT-see, but I now notice it could be TERR-ent-too (Terent II).
Teh-REN-tee. It’s an old Russian name.
The Simpsons had a unique case where occasionally the show would use an abbreviated opening in syndication (no chalkboard gag, no driving through town, and sometimes a very short couch gag) which would save about a minute of screentime. However this didn’t happen on every episode.
I believe they cannot cut the credits out due to union rules . But I guess the rules don’t cover how fast they are run.
Happens a lot with Friends. They also occasionally will cut the opening scene before the opening song, which really gripes me.
Or how small they are. I like to watch credits, a habit developed long before you could look up the information online.
I seem to recall a passage stating (paraphrasing) that with just one minute cut from each episode of THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW- those minutes would add up to equal the length of ONE WHOLE SEASON!
theres a episode of pokemon where in a plan to steal pokemon james drinks a potion and turns in to a girl physically he ujst had longer hair and boobs …
4kids cut that scene out and any references to it … the episode makes no sense …
I never even knew that All In The Family had a short, epilogue scene at the end until I bought the DVDs. And I’ve been watching the show in syndication for as long as I can remember.
Andy Griffith had 249 episodes. Chop one minute from each, that would give you 249 minutes (or 4 hours and 9 minutes).
249 / 21 minutes = 11.8 episodes. Andy usually had 28-32 episodes per season.
So, not quite. Maybe a third of a season.
But still semi-amazing.
mmm
One minute? You think they cut a mere one minute from reruns? Esp. one that old?