So, I’m watching TV the other day. Die Hard 2. I can feel brain cells rotting away as I watch but what the hell; it’s my day off.
Besides … I kinda enjoy the Die Hard movies. Things blow up in them. That’s cool.
But this is on USA or FX or one of those other quasi-cable channels where they still have to bleep out all the naughties. Most of the time it’s innocuous; sometimes it gets downright funny (as in the time they showed “Fargo” and every time Steve Buscemi said the word “fucking” they replaced it with “frozen.” Gave a whole new level of meaning to the film.)
My favorite line from Die Hard 2 (and from the first one as well) is at the end when Bruce Willis is amazingly setting a plane on fire with a cigarette lighter (don’t try this at home, kids) and utters the immortal lines “Yippe Kai yay, Mother Fucker!”
Except he didn’t. He said “Yippe Kai yay, Mister Falcon!”
Mister Falcon???
WHO THE HELL IS MISTER FALCON???
Gah damn … I don’t really mind them replacing naughty words like that. God knows … we have to think of the children. But GEEZ … at least either bleep it out completely or have it at least have something to do with the actual PLOT!
Mister Falcon is the guy you have come across when you “find a stranger in the Alps!”
Okay so rather than wait here smug in my importantance from trivial knowlwdge refferencesand wait for someone to beg for the reference I’ll give it now
When they showed Big Lebowski on TV the changed John Goodman’s immortal and stirring “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass speech” to “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps”. Topping the alltime WTF TV dubs of all time list.
I believe it was the code name for the major bad guy - he’d say into the walkie talkies “this is Falcon”. though how Bruce’s character would have known that is beyond me
My favorite is the TV cut of the Bill Murray/Geena Davis movie Quick Change, in which every instance of the word “fucking” is replaced with “viking.” And every instance of “mother fucker” is replaced with “melon farmer.”
You’re all just a bunch of viking melon farmers, as far as I’m concerned.
It was even worse in Johnny Dangerously. They took a pivitol scene from a central character in the movie and make him say things like “you fargin icehole,” and “why you miserable son-a-ma batches cork-sucker!”
That was part of the original movie – the broken-English-speaking Moroni twisted words into dirty-sounding but G-rated epithets.
They joked about it in the scene where the young Johnny helped Jocko’s gang rob Moroni’s nightclub: after Moroni delivered them a ‘nasty’ pre-emptive tongue-lashing, Peter Boyle (or maybe it was Dick Butkus) remarked, “Listen to the mouth on that guy!”
(Later in the movie, Johnny narrated the gang wars by noting that Moroni “continued to murder the English langauge, and anyone who got in his way”).
I love the Mister Falcon line. I saw it on CBS years ago. What really cracked me up was how much deeper his voice got on the redub. It sounded like they had Ving Rhames come in and do it.
It was very intentional. Alex Cox the director and some of his team came up these silly expressions as they knew the original cut would not make it onto TV/Planes etc.
