I’m watching “Caddyshack” on AMC, a movie that I’m very familiar with, and I’ve noticed that they have muted some dialog but haven’t shortened the movie. For instance, when Judge Smails is golfing, he asks Danny about Ty’s round and says, “What did he shoot, 80?” The unedited version is “What did he shoot, 80? 75?” Next, Danny tells him to improve his lie, to which Smails says “Yes” and kicks the ball. In the unedited version, he says “Yes, winter rules.” In neither instance is the actual scene shorter, you just can’t hear the dialog.
What’s the purpose of doing something like this? Is it common for TV?
I see the problem there: watching anything on most cable channels such as AMC or Freeform or FX: they all butcher dialog in clunky ways. It makes it more family friendly somehow, but your examples are pretty weird changes. It is really frustrating if you could repeat the dialog from memory and suddenly a few words disappear. The only non-premium cable channels that don’t edit their movies are TCM and IFC, so I try to find movies on those channels.
I’d hypothesize that AMC is doing a little bit of “time compression” on the film, cutting out a second here and there, a non-key word in a line here and there, in order to make the film (plus all the commercial breaks) fit into the desired time slot. Even if it seems like all they’re doing is “muting” a word, they may also be removing a moment of film time in that empty sound space, as well.
AMC? Say no more. The non-premium general viewing channels edit out a lot of things because, as mentioned, people are offended by an amazing number of things. If you watch, “Terminator”, on one of those channels, almost half the movie is edited out.
Is it possible that they muted the dialog around the word “shoot” for violence? It could be simple automation error or misinterpretation around specific words.
It’s like with TBS decreed that the word “foreign” wasn’t to be used and WCW wrestling announcers started referring to “International objects” for illegal stuff used by the wrestlers.
I found a weird example of this on YouTube, in Anna Nalick’s “Breathe, 2 A.M.”; the second verse is
“May he turned twenty-one on the base at Fort Bliss
‘Just a day,’ he said
down to the flask in his fist,
‘Ain’t been sober, since maybe October of last year’”.
In the official video, YT mutes the words “flask” and “sober” for some reason, presumably related to alcoholism. Never mind that it’s trivially easy to find an acoustic version of the song with both words unmuted.
Years ago I stumbled upon an E.R. rerun on some local Toronto channel. While he was doing a run in a medical helicopter, Anthony Edwards said “Hell of a job, isn’t it?” and had to repeat it over the sound of the blades. They blanked out the “hell” both times. Seemed pretty extreme to me. It may have been on one of the faith-based networks (one of them had the odious side-of-bus billboard slogan of “Television You Can BELIEVE In!”) that specialized in utterly inoffensive sitcoms, Sue Thomas F.B.I., Touched by an Angel and Sunday morning hymn sing, so all I could do was roll my eyes at it.
I noted something similar with a local pair of Raleigh, North Carolina radio stations that ID as “Pulse FM”. A singer named “Jax” has a modest hit song called “Victoria’s Secret”, which multiple times asserts the company is “Sellin’ skin and bones with big boobs”. For some reason these stations are blanking out the words “big boobs”, although this phrase is left in even in the “clean” youtube video version of the song.
ISTR the swearing from the golfer in the background who kept missing the ball being a lot stronger than that. Or am I conflating that with a different scene? In either case, maybe they intended to mute the background cursing and missed it somehow?
