I remember seeing ScarFace on network TV and I wondered why they even went through the trouble . . . .
Oh, and another Danny Devito movie: Twins. Devito makes a comment about Arnie being a ‘240lb virgin,’ and that got cut for TV. The ensuing conversation made no sense at all!
Four Weddings and a Funeral had to film several scenes twice, once for general release and once for American Network TV. I’ve often wondered what the Network version would be like - so much of the humour in that movie depends on well-used swearwords! At the beginning, Hugh Grant was originally supposed to say fuck 17 times (or however many times it is; a lot, anyway), but the American PR people wouldn’t countenance that. In the end they settled on ‘bugger’, on the grounds that most Americans wouldn’t realise it was a swearword anyway, and if they did, they wouldn’t know what it actually means.
Terminator’s scene where he yells at the landlord “Fuck you, asshole” was changed to “You’re a punk.” Don’t know why the guy was offended, if I remember the scene correctly, he did have a mohawk…
And ResIpsaLoquitor got my other one. Jay’s voice in Mallrats was utterly rediculous.
My personal favorite is in Ferris Buller’s Day Off, when he’s talking about Cameron:
“He’s so uptight, if you took a piece of coal and stuck it up his (real deep not-even-close-to-Mathew Broderick’s voice) *fist[/s], in two weeks, you’d have a piece of coal.”
And don’t even get me started on the edited for television version of Caligula. Talk about butchery…
Edited TV version of Caligula? Guess they need to fill those five-minute show gaps…
I wonder if the terrible, obvious dubbing is some kind of protest at having to do it at all. After all, it wouldn’t be difficult to get an approximate voice, would it?
The funniest thing is the fact that they had to edit out the drug references. This led to lines like “All it took was a phat chronic blunt!” becoming “All it took was a phat karate punch!”
I forget what movie it was, but I recall someone being referred to as “one bad motorscooter”. I’m half tempted to use that one in real life.
The worst butchery I’ve seen, though, was a showing of Robin Hood: Men In Tights on TNT or TBS or one of those. It was awful. Even in the title song, where the merry men are singing the line “We may look like sissies …” “sissies” was edited out. No overdub, just blank silence.
Sissies? That’s so offensive it has to be hacked from the movie? Yeesh. It’s kinda like when they showed “Blazing Saddles” with the N-word edited out all the way through.
I think that the most ridiculous one was JFK. I can’t remember what it was, but when David Ferry was calling Clay Shaw a CS Faggot it was something totally ludicrous, like Claim Jumping Joker or something even more stupid. It would be worth rewatching the whole thing over again just to hear that.
“Heineken? Freak that crap! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
I think it’s got to be The Big Lebowski.
It takes guts to change “Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass” to “Do you see what happens when you meet a stranger in the grass”
For any true Lebowski-phile, the TV version is a vision to behold.
For a while, Bravo kept showing an edited Glengarry Glen Ross. That’s 138 fuck-related words and 50 shit-related words that needed to be substituted. Utterly pointless. A lot of “kiss my act” and “forget you, John.”
Thankfully, I saw an unedited GGGR on IFC the other day. Hopefully, it will contiue to be shown on fuck-friendly networks.
Looked like a made for VH1 movie today while I was doing laundry. At one point this guy is says “fbleepk fbleepk F bleep C K!”
Those damned vowels.
Also, the edited version of the Bobby Knight story was pretty funny.
Tenebras
The airplane versions of movies tend to be even worse offenders than the American network versions. I’m struggling to remember specifics here, and failing rather miserably except to say that I know the airplane versions of “I Am Sam” and "The Story of Us were significantly marred by the dreaded dubbing.
LC
In the TNT broadcast of Fargo, we got to hear, “I got shot in the floozin’ face!”
“Yippie cay ay,Mr. Falcon”
Classic :rolleyes:
One of the worst language edits I recently heard was when CBS showed “L. A. Confidential.” They couldn’t get Russell Crowe to redub so periodically Bud White (Crowe’s character) would start speaking in a completely different voice.
Needless to say, the effect was rather jarring but it did add an unexpected bit of surrealism to the movie.
**Blazing Saddles** was also severely damaged in its TV version by the removal of all the gaseous sounds around the campfire during the notorious bean-eating scene. For shame!Slapshot - The scene where Newman taunts the opposing goalie (Hanrahan) about his wife being a lesbian cracks me up with all the bad dubbing and cutting when it’s on basic cable.
Die Hard With A Vengence - I read an article in Entertainment Weekly when the film came out that said when they originally filmed the sandwich board scene, it was blank, with the “I hate niggers” and “I hate everybody” messages added digitally in post-production. The article said it was done to prevent people from getting upset since they were filming on location around real crowds. Probably also to prevent paparazti (sp) from selling photos of Willis wearing the sandwich board with such an offensive message before the film came out as well.
The Longest Yard - It always seemed a pretty foul-mouthed movie to begin with, but when I finally saw it on pay cable…wow. The scene in the cafeteria is completely different on regular TV; a lot shorter and less funny.
But the ultimate, IMO, is Midnight Run. The dubbing is so extreme and badly done, it might as well be a different movie. Totally ruined by the changes.
BTW, I always liked “melon farmer”.
Blazing Saddles without the fart noises during the bean-eating scene is goofy. Horse whinnies? Silent But Deadlies all around? Sheesh.
Taking out all of the uses of “nigger” in that movie is even worse. I realize the word is very polarizing, but it is used to skewer the racists and bigots in the movie. They are the principle users of the word in the film; editing it blunts the satire of the film.
Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail. I had missed this when it was in the theaters, so when it finally made it to TV (this was in the days before cable and VCRs) I was looking forward to watching it. Almost all of Nicholson’s dialog was unintelligible, since after they silenced the obscenities not much was left.
LurkMeister, have you seen Cinderella Liberty with James Caan? Another Navy movie from the early 70s, they’re both based on novels by the same author.
The version they show on AMC isn’t as bad as the dubbing in The Last Detail, but a few scenes come close.