Granted, this is not stop the presses news, and some of you may have noticed it yourselves.
I don’t have cable TV, so I have to wait until a boxed set is listed for sale on eBay, and then can enjoy a season’s worth over a week or so.
Having just received season 4, I was all too ready to stuff in a tape, sit back and enjoy my favorite crime family. But something was different. I needed to pull out a season 3 tape and watch the intro to be sure.
They cut the clip of the World Trade Center twin towers.
Don’t know if the music title is ‘Got Yourself a Gun’ or something else, but in the first three seasons, while the music plays, as Tony emerges from the tunnel, before he reaches the New Jersey Turnpike toll plaza, there’s a quick shot in his passenger mirror of the towers.
Ultimately, I have to ask, why take them out? Are we going to airbrush every piece of art, every photograph of the Manhattan skyline?
They aren’t taking out the towers for seasons 1-3, just 4 which I think is appropriate, if for no other reason to keep it current (it wouldn’t make sense seeing something in the mirrors that isn’ there).
I have no problem with revising openings, and new scenes being shot, to reflect current reality. The towers are gone. Haven’t other current shows done the same thing?
I would have a problem with going back and editing any view of the towers out of shows that aired prior to 9/11, as if the mere sight of them would cause mass hysteria. The events of 9/11/01 still sting, but I do expect the towers to be absent from current film work in Manhattan; it would be rather more jarring if they were shown still standing!
Cutting the towers out of the Sopranos’ opening shots is just a less labor-intensive way (than re-shooting) of updating the pre-9/11 opening. If I saw the WTC towers standing at the beginning of any TV episode, I’d assume the fictional time period had to be pre-September 2001, just as if I saw the Berlin Wall in a film, I’d assume the film was pre-1989 (or whenever the Wall fell).
As I recall from seeing the episode on HBO about five years ago (or so it seems), the first episode of season 4 had a flash of white at the point in the credits where the towers were shown, but in succeeding episodes the credits just skipped over that shot with no sign that anything was cut out. Does the DVD show this? I have to wait until after Christmas to check for myself. sigh
Personally, watching previous seasons on DVD the Towers shot in the credits can sometimes really jar me if I’m in the right mood.
Speaking of which, what’s the deal with the whole back thing and Notre-Dame? You have the hunchback of Notre-Dame and a quarterback and runningback for Notre-dame. Coincidence or Quasimodo’s prophecy at work?