I don’t know if it counts as censorship since it wasn’t government imposed, but Spielberg’s digital replacement of the guns in ET with walky-talkies (“Freeze or I’ll talk on open frequency”) was one of the stupidest revisions in film history.
We have filtering software at the library where I work that refuses access to the damnedest things. A scholarly article reprinted on the web about pornography and violence is banned, but when helping a student do primary sources on the Manson murders not too long ago I unexpectedly pulled up several pages with the full gory crime scene photos without a problem.
I used to work for a company I’ll identify only as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and for a while edited- or tried to edit/produce- a newsletter. Everything had to be read by total Office Space type managers to make sure that
1- there was no (exact quote) “Dilbert style anti-corporate” humor
2- there was nothing controversial
3- there was nothing that could be considered sexually harassing
Number 3 was especially difficult because we were told in several workshops “If somebody considers it to be sexual harassment, then it IS sexual harassment”, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Consequently the planned monthly newsletter ended up coming out about twice per year (and I dropped out after the first issue).
While I was there the company extended spousal benefits to same sex partners (due, incidentally, to a multibillion dollar contract they had in San Francisco where this was required of the company). A matter of fact mention of this in the newsletter was scrapped as “too controversial”, while those forwarding email after dumbass email ranting against this received no disciplinary action.
An irony that I would not make if it were not something I could back up with everything including legal documents from the lawsuit it generated is this: One of the most outspoken critics of this policy, a woman who made no attempt to be silent on the issue in person or on e-mail, was a low level manager who found the same-sex benefits morally repulsive and who also attempted to ban Halloween costumes when a male employee (my then boyfriend in fact) came in campy drag (pink boufant, lime green 60s style pantsuit, etc.) one year. At the time she was waging this moral crusade she was pregnant with twins. Who were conceived out of wedlock. By her boss. Who was also her minister. And who was married. And who had fathered out of wedlock children before since being married. (He eventually resigned over the matter, citing “health reasons” (i.e. his wife assured him if he kept working with the woman he’d be dead) and she eventually sued him and his wife for child support payments and emotional damages (she claimed in the lawsuit she had turned to him for counselling over personal issues and he seduced her), but she never recanted on her moral indignation about the gay issue.
A local college would alter some dialog in the plays they’d produce. In a production of The Boys Next Door, which concerns four developmentally challenged men, one of the characters is told by his case worker he must return some things he bought from a store. The man has a brief monolog following this where he explains the store manager refunded his money and called him “a fucking nut.” This production changed that line to “a goddam nut.” Apparently blasphemy is more acceptable than vulgarity.
Having recently spent a few weeks in the States (I live in Australia), I would have to say the editing of swear words in the movies on TV are terrible.
I happened to catch Kill Bill, and in the very end scene when Bill says to Beatrice, You are a great girl but occiasionally you can be a real C***. In thise case they had dubbed - get this - Sorehead over the offensive word. Sorehead :smack: !!! Couldn’t they come up with anything better than that? It sounded like a 4 year olds insult I laughed my ass off at that.
It works best when they just delete the ‘offensive’ word without any dubbing.
One of my favorite moments was many years ago when Smokey & The Bandit was aired on network TV. Jackie Gleason’s line “I’M GONNA BARBECUE YOUR ASSSSSSSSSS!” was dubbed “I’M GONNA BARBECUE YOUR head in molASSSSSes”. If you’ll notice there’s a lot more letters in “head in molasses” than “ass” and this showed a bit, plus they changed “goddamned son of a bitch” to “doggone sun’va’gun” and other ridiculous changes.
I was watching part of Cold Mountain this weekend and they deleted sex scenes, which led to some real choppiness, but once again left in all violence.
Also, the reruns of Sanford & Son have been politically corrected to remove the ‘n’ word and other things deemed p.i. today. While it works fine covering up the ‘n’ word in some episodes- Aunt Esther asking Big Money Grip, who’s just claimed to be Lamont’s biological father, “WHAT DID YOU SAY SUCKA?” (where sucka replaced the n-word) it works okay. Case in point: the traffic court episode.
Lamont receives a traffic ticket that he doesn’t feel he deserves so he fights it. When he arrives in court (with Fred and all Fred’s chums in tow) things don’t go his way in front of the judge so Fred asks “can I say something your honor” and then proceeds to play the race card (even though the judge is black and it’s almost 2 decades prior to OJ) by accusing the court and the officer and the country of racism in trying to frame his son and inciting the mostly black people in the courtroom into a near frenzy. At one point Fred used the very famous to classic TV viewers (but understandably offensive to modern ears) line about the lack of whites in the courtroom that “There’s enough n&ggas in here to make a Tarzan movie!”
I still remember my grandfather, who was one of the least racist people I’ve ever known, spewing coffee across his TV tray the first time that episode was aired. It’s politically incorrect as all hell, but it’s a damned funny line.
In the end of the episode Lamont is acquitted and Fred, who wasn’t even on trial, is held in contempt of court.
I watched the episode on TVLand the other night. Fred steps up, says “May I say a few words?” and then it includes one or two innocuous comments, an inexplicable hysterical audience laughter following a not funny line and all the rest is cut until the verdict, and somebody watching it for the first time would have no idea why the judge was holding Fred in contempt just for asking to say something in defense of his son.
If you get a chance, watch the cable network version of the Bill Murray movie ‘Quick Change’. The word “Viking” show up in the craziest contexts in the name of censorship. "Please God! We need a cab! One lousy Viking cab! "
AFAIK, Fox never did, only Cartoon Network/Adult Swim bleeps that out. Hopefully, when it goes to Comedy Central in 2008, they’ll leave it intact (Hell, they show the South Pakr movie completly unedited sometimes.)
And someone mentioned Canadian rules, in general, being more lax than American ones. I remember listening to the Green Day song “Holiday” on a Canadian radio station a few times. Like US stations, they edited out that word “fags,” but unlike American stations, they also edited out the phrase “zieg heil.”
Aunt Esther usually said Sucka, but in that one episode she used the N word and Fred used it in the courtroom episode. (It was also used by Louise once- “N___a please!”- in an argument with George, and in a couple of more serious episodes about racism.)
Archie Bunker routinely used ethnic slurs, most of them dated now, though I don’t recall him using the N word except in a change of pace (and largely improvised) dramatic episode where he’s drunk, locked in a store room with Mike, and recalling a fight he had with a black kid in school. It’s also in this episode where you learn Archie was abused as a child but still adored his father- very powerful episode.
You’re right. Cable networks aren’t regulated by the FCC for content. And it seems as if the word “shit” is said on The Riches about 15 times per episode.
I was replying to Otto’s comment that in order to keep LOGO, he must subscribe to Showtime. I don’t subscribe to Showtime and Logo is available on my system. So it sounds as if he’s being extorted by his cable company.
Can anyone explain to this non-USA’ian, what the basis is(cultural/religious/whatever), on why quite graphic violence is deemed acceptable but reasonably innocous swearing, and fairly tame nudity/sex scenes are censored vigourously?
I’m not aiming at starting a massive debate about whether this is good bad or otherwise, but am curious about how this attitude came about?
After about 9pm or so you can see some pretty racy stuff on some shows her in Australia, and the whole superbowl thing was treated with some amusement, which just got funnier with the US’s public reaction to it. (Or was it an actual public reaction - or a very vocal minority?)
I can’t, but I can tell you it goes all the way back. In the 1950s you couldn’t show a couple in bed together (even Desi & Lucy who were married in real life and wore pajamas) yet at the same time you could see men getting shot every week on Gunsmoke. In a similar vein, David Selznick was fined $5,000 for including I don’t give a damn in GWTW but to my knowledge there were no fines for showing Scarlett shoot a deserter point blank in the face, the two times when Scarlett is almost raped, or any other war related or slavery related themes. (He did take the N-word out of the script when the black actors and the NAACP expressed major objections, but it’s seriously doubtful that there’d have been a fine- BUT he also changed the shanty-town resident who tries to rob and rape Scarlett from black (in the book) to white (in the film) and very possibly because the Hayes Code prevented any mention of miscegenation and this may have conceivably qualified. (I don’t know how Showboat got away with it.)
A few years ago NYPD BLUE was soundly denounced because they showed David Caruso’s butt. Nobody cared that they also show heroin addicts and street crime.
The cluelessness is so wide spread among high-ups, incidentally, that when the STARR REPORT was released (and America was made a laughing stock for actually debating removal of a president for [lying about- whatever] an extramarital indiscretion) the Congressman from my district, Terry Everett (R-AL), actually said that the report shouldn’t be made available on the Internet as it would allow Alabamians to access pornography and that’s illegal in much of the state. He didn’t get his wish and consequently Alabamians can now use the Internet to access pornography which of course they couldn’t before…
Of course people aren’t consistent or logical anywhere. John Cleese remarked that when A Fish Called Wanda came out he received thousands of hate letters from USA, the UK, Ireland and Europe all protesting the scenes in which dogs were killed in the movie even though it was clearly a “no animals were harmed” staged thing, but he said not one person complained about the death of the old lady! He claims to have used a (token amount) of his own money to found a “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Little Old English Ladies” (that’s probably not the name, but it was to that effect) to express sympathy for their cause.
I suspect it goes all the way back to the Puritan movement which so influenced the founding of the US. Violence has often been condoned or encouraged for various reasons (against the natives, against immigrants, against Nazis, etc.) – but sex has almost always been met with public disapproval (even in the Roaring 20s or in the Free Love 70s).
The only thing I can say here is to quote my (now sadly retired) First Amendment Law Professor, who said “The Supreme Court is just screwed up when it comes to sex.”
There’s really no other answer but that they just get these cases badly wrong, and the broadcasters are scared. Well that and the nutjobs, of course…
Fox showed From Dusk Till Dawn a while ago, and left the violence intact, only to dub over George Clooney’s line at the end where he says the word fuck repeatedly with the voice of a totally different actor. Oh, and they changed the name of the place from the Titty Twister to the City Twister. That made a lot of sense. I guess kids can watch vampires be shot through the head with crossbows and not get disturbed, but a four letter word will make their little heads explode.
It’s historical, of course. I suspect that if you took the average American and dropped him or her into a European setting they would go wildly protesting about all that nudity on TV (especially the guys). But trying to change any one of the laws or customs in a given place is always difficult.
My feeling about the disapproval of Sex and Nudity while allowing Violence (especially to monsters and the like) is that the former are realistic threats to the Established Order – you can have impressionable kids (and adults) engaging in Sex and being enticed into it by Nudity – in fact, it happens all the time, and you want to cut down on the incidence. But violence of the sort portrayed is unreal and unlikely to incite the viewers to similarly engage in ultraviolence. Especially against monsters.
Of course, in recent years, things have changed, with the Columbine shootings and similar cases of home-grown violence. The arbiters of social mores still haven’t caiught up yet, and , besides, that Law of Social Inertia I cited above (it’s hard to change the way a society does something, even if you could easily change individuals) works both ways, making it hard to introduce a new taboo (against realizable violence) when it’s something that’s been allowed for so long.
So we’re in this weird situation where, as folks have complained for quite a long time, you can’t show bare breasts or butts or – God forbid – genitalia. You can get suprisingly close to showing sex, but you can’t really show two naked people doing any sort of coupling. But you can show a movie about Hannibal Lecter/Lecktor and have it quite clear what sort of mutilation he’s doing, and, as long as it’s not too bloody, you can show people getting shot or knifed.
IMO, the worst kind of censorship is when a historic artifact is defaced in order not to offend modern sensibilities. One such example is the Cerne Abbas Giant - an enormous ancient chalk figure of a man with an erect penis. In Victorian times, the penis was neglected and allowed to overgrow. Ironically, when it was later restored, the figure’s navel was mistaken for the tip of the penis and it was put back nine feet longer than it was to begin with.
I’ve heard of similar things happening with nude statues, graphically sexual frescoes, mosaics and so on - being defaced in order to render them ‘polite’ It makes my blood boil to think that irreplaceable works of ancient art were deliberately damaged just because some people got all hot and bothered about nudity or sex.
I laughed my ass off at that.