IIRC, doesn’t the edit to Die Hard With A Vengeance make it so a bunch of black guys take offense and become violent because John McClane — expresses a dislike of people in general? Minus the edit, sure, they react as if a racist who’s using a slur is looking for a fight; but with that change, they’re, what, just wrong?
And then there is this gem from SNL in the 70s that gets nearly every racial slur in one skit. I have seen it rerun as recently as the last 5 years, whenever Richard Pryor died.
Same on Antenna TV, a broadcast network.
It seems to me most of these movies and shows are on basic cable right? They’re not subject to FCC guidelines, but they do self-censor to keep the sponsors and audiences placated. There isn’t any of this censoring going on on subscription networks such as HBO and Showtime, is there?
Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) a less than nice Jewish girl, told me it means “fuck”.
as an extreme example I knew a guy who lived in Saudi Arabia for a few years. For some odd reason they showed Three’s Company but it was so heavily edited he said you could not even follow the plot . Seems very odd that they would even show that sitcom to begin with.
Smokey and the Bandit movie Jackie Gleason says “sumbitch” a lot but on regular cable they made it “scumbum” but you can tell someone else overdubbed it.
Well then yes, that is even more weird.
HBO , Showtime, etc. don’t censor anything. I remember as a college student visiting someone and I saw a naked woman on TV and figured it was HBO and I was correct.
Makes perfect sense to me. Not saying I agree with it, but the difference is obvious.
He died only the one time, 12 years ago. But SNL sometimes has reruns on at 10:00 PM on Saturdays, and within the last couple of years they showed an episode from the 70s he hosted.
Yep, my first few experiences with that movie were on TV. I never understood what was going on in that scene.
I recently watched The Fortune Cookie on TCM. A spoiler for a 52 year old movie follows. In it Cliff Osmond; playing a private detective named Purkey; calls a friend of the character played by Jack Lemmon a coon. It’s in a successful attempt to goad that Jack Lemmon’s character into revealing that his disability is fraudulent.
TCM aired the slur intact. To the best of my knowledge TCM does not censor for content, although they will adjust scheduling to put more problematic material later at night.
Sometimes it’s done for effect. Like when Skyler White on Breaking Bad told Walt “I bleeped Ted”. That show had plenty of cursing and violence, but they bleeped that line to give it more force.
Cable channels don’t have to censor anything. If they do, it’s because they’re afraid an army of housewives will call and complain and threaten to boycott. And TV execs don’t want to have to deal with that. But this is the 21st Century. I suggest we get an army of housewives to call whenever they do censor something. “It’s a travesty to the artwork! This is America, what about free speech! You’re treating me like an idiot, as if you’re hiding dirty words from me! Keep up this censorship and I’ll take my TV watching eyeballs to another channel!” Who’s with me?
Not obvious to me. Damn means condemned to hellfire. If God is the only creature that can sentence something or someone to the fires of hell, then goddamn is only directly stating something that is otherwise implied. It amounts to the same concept with both expressions.
One of them arguably comes up against one of the Ten Commandments.
The other, not so much.
I recently watched several episodes of ‘All in the Family’ on the Hallmark channel.
The only word they bleeped, near as I could tell, was ‘fag’.
‘Coon’, ‘spic’, ‘spade’, ‘dago’, ‘hebe’, and others were left un-bleeped.
I also remember an episode of ‘Cheers’ where a bleep occurred that had me stumped. I concluded, after several rewinds, that the word was ‘ass’.
mmm
Oh PUH-lease!!! With every TV character breaking Commandments in plain sight on every program with the killings and the adultery and the coveting and whatnot, taking the Lord’s Name in vain is something we just CANNOT allow? Really?
When WTBS had the James Bond catalog, they used to bleep out ‘honky’ in Live and Let Die.
And what if the character on screen is in fact sincerely witnessing that whoever or whatever is being addressed is worthy of divine smiting? Is that still “in vain” (unless you are a strict Sermon-on-the-Mount observant)?
In the last stage showing of West Side Story I watched (2017), they no longer pronounced it hard “Puerto Ricans”, just “PR’s.” But they also showed breast mashing and (clothed) pumping, so I’m not sure it’s an improvement.
actually they even do that in books these days
In the god father I bought the cop that becomes mike coroleones personal enforcer went to jail for beating a pimp called nig— barnes to death
in the latest reprint they used his real name ………