Interesting Censorship Thread - Yipee Ki Yay Mister Falcon

[The Cunting Death]

I caught a broadcast tv edit of Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back that obviously cleaned up Jay's language (I think they actually redubbed it themselves) but the drugs were mostly left intact.

I was watching Zack and Miri on Comedy Central and about a good half of the movie was muted or blurred out. It got so bad that I just ordered the bluray

 

[Larry Anon]

I was watching Zack and Miri on Comedy Central and about a good half of the movie was muted or blurred out. It got so bad that I just ordered the bluray

They've also made a tv broadcast version of The Big Lebowski. Seriously, what's the point of that? There should be a threshold where tv broadcasters realize that they have to change too much of the movie and just pick something else. The REASON The Big Lebowski is so funny is because of the excessive swearing and clever uses of the word 'fuck.' When I saw the broadcast version, I was laughing, but I was laughing at all of the stupid changes, and not the movie itself. I can't imagine a person seeing it for the first time on tv would like it at all.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Freak you freak you sam rothstein freak you! - Sharon Stone in the Bravo edit of Casino

Never forget Showgirls painted on bras and panties

 

[School of Fish]

Some censorship of anime that used to air in the 1990's and the early 2000's was weird.
Take Sailor Moon as one example. The old DiC/Cloverway dub is infamous for censoring much of the content of the show for western viewers in order to meet many of the standards and practices guidelines then. The original Sailor Moon DiC/Cloverway dub did stuff like toning down the much of the really graphic violence (like when the main characters died for the first time) and even skipping some episodes. When Cloverway took over, they did at least tried to have the rest of the show to be less censored when they dubbed the show but there was still censorship anyway because well again standards and practices for shows geared towards younger audiences was somewhat more stricter then.

Now what makes the old dub bizarre is that even though they did cut out a lot of stuff in the DiC/Cloverway dub, for some really bizarre reason they actually didn't cut out a scene in one episode where Ami aka Sailor Mercury (Amy in the DiC/Cloverway dub) found fighting against herself and Ami meets herself that it totally naked (Ami's "other" self had no clothes on at all) as part of some allegory of internal conflict and we see in this scene that the naked version of Ami tells the real Ami to not give up and she gains her confidence again and so she defeats the villain of the day after that. I'm also not kidding by the way, the original dub never censored this scene because they censored a lot of things in the old dub but the strange thing about this is that you'd think that the censors would either cut out or edit this scene in order to not face any backlash but they pretty much left it as it is when it was first broadcasted on Cartoon Network at the time.

 

[millais]

The early American film distributors often bowdlerized European silent films to the point of chopping them up beyond recognition. For instance, they found the "class warfare" theme in Fritz Lang's Metropolis so objectionable that they recut the entire film into a much more simplistic and hokey mad scientist/robot uprising plot.

 

[Larry Anon]

The early American film distributors often bowdlerized European silent films to the point of chopping them up beyond recognition. For instance, they found the "class warfare" theme in Fritz Lang's Metropolis so objectionable that they recut the entire film into a much more simplistic and hokey mad scientist/robot uprising plot.

That version was literally cut down from 3.5 hours to 80 minutes, and most people have only seen the 80 minute version. They are STILL finding more footage from Metropolis in various archives. I think the most complete version (Kino) is around 2 hrs 45 minutes.

 

[millais]

That version was literally cut down from 3.5 hours to 80 minutes, and most people have only seen the 80 minute version. They are STILL finding more footage from Metropolis in various archives. I think the most complete version (Kino) is around 2 hrs 45 minutes.

The American cuts were the most egregious with the political/morally motivated censorship. I think the original European theatrical cuts were mostly due to European distributors' concern regarding runtime.

Only at the premiere opening was the film screened in its entire, uncut state.

I think I have seen the version you mention. It has much of the "Thin Man" subplot restored.

 

[Larry Anon]

The American cuts were the most egregious with the political/morally motivated censorship. I think the original European theatrical cuts were mostly due to European distributors' concern regarding runtime.

Only at the premiere opening was the film screened in its entire, uncut state.

I think I have seen the version you mention. It has much of the "Thin Man" subplot restored.

Yeah, and they have a bunch of 16mm footage that they found in South America in it. The 16mm footage looks really out of place and crappy, but it's all they had to work with. I think they found another ten minutes of footage last year, but haven't released it.

 

[neverendingmidi]

Back in 2005 I bought a manga called Red River (Anatolia Story, Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori, etc.) in Malaysia as the Kinokuniya bookstore had the most recent release of the Viz version. There was one page where the female character was shown in an outline, about as naked as the DIC version of Sailor Moon transformation, and some censor in Malaysia had taken a sharpie and drawn a black line over where the character's boobs were and across her waist.

I kept that version just because the sheer WTF made me laugh every time I saw it.

 

[John Titor]

Shawn of the Dead replaced every instance of fuck with funk in this scene. The cherry on top is when Nick Frost called the roommate a "prink".

In Xenosaga, Albedo goes on a siloloquy and cuts off his own head. He uses a knife in the Japanese version, in the American version they removed the knife making it look like he just ripped off his own head with his bare hands. I like the censored version in this scene because how metal is that?

 

[TungstenCarbide]

I just remembered that censorship in Italy hit Steven Universe, too. There are several cuts here and there, EG when Steven enters the Pizza restaurant to show Lion to his friends: in the original dialogue Ronaldo misunderstands and asks Steven if he's pregnant, that scene has been cut. Pearl being stabbed by her holo-copy in episode 16 has been cut too. The episode where Steven, in full make-up and basically in drag, takes Sadie's place on the stage has never been aired in my country. When Ruby asks Sapphire to marry her, the word 'marry' is never said. The line is, more or less: "Will you be with me?" or something. And in the following episode they are all talking about a 'ceremony', or a 'party' even though Bismuth's voice actress lets slip a 'marriage' during one of her lines.

 

[BrunoMattei]

 

[XYZpdq]

I was watching Zack and Miri on Comedy Central and about a good half of the movie was muted or blurred out. It got so bad that I just ordered the bluray

Comedy Central had a particularly half-assed edit of Rocky Horror. iirc the blurred everybody in statue form after they got hit with the sonic transducer, but missed when Little Nell's nipples get out through the holes in her shirt.

 

[Preferred Penne]

Let's cut through the crap, Vaughn. I only got one thing to say to you.

STRIKE THIS guy OUT!

 

[Kari Kamiya]

In Xenosaga, Albedo goes on a siloloquy and cuts off his own head. He uses a knife in the Japanese version, in the American version they removed the knife making it look like he just ripped off his own head with his bare hands. I like the censored version in this scene because how metal is that?

I think this sums up it up quite nicely:

 

[SamTheEagle]

I saw Final Destination 2 on the Sci-Fi/SyFy/whatever channel. A character explains that the universe is out to kill them because they were supposed to die or something.
"Bull stuff!" says a guy in response. "I'm calling bull stuff!"
"Sit your butt down!"
"My butt is still alive!"
Later in the movie, a guy dropped something and angrily shouted, "Judas Priest!"

After Final Destination, the movie Dirty Work came on. If I remember right, Chris Farley clearly chews someone out, but the censors replaced his insults with an unintelligible scream.

 

[TungstenCarbide]

One of my friends just told me that a bunch of episodes are missing from the Italian version of Adventure Time, and a lot had been censored, that's why he is contemplating about terminating his Sky subscription. I checked and the missing episodes are:
S05e09: Your Fault
S05e18: BMO lost
S05e19: James Baxter The Horse
S06e01-02: Wake Up - Escape From The Citadel
S06e04: The Tower
S06e06: Breezy

He told me that while he understands why they would be scared about airing certain episodes in Italy, EG the ones where Finn loses his arm (even though this creates continuity issues), he doesn't understand why pretty innocuous episodes like the horse one were axed. Especially because apparently the kiss between two female characters hasn't been cut.

 

[No creativity]

- when in the 2000s the network Mediaset bought the rights of Saint Seiya, they cut away the most part of the fighting scenes, and sepia-colored all the scenes were characters were bleeding. There are no copies of the old masters anymore, so in the new DVD box sets (that use the Mediaset version of the series) a lot of violent scenes I remember seeing when I watched the show as a kid aren't dubbed in Italian, but are in Japanese with subs.

Meanwhile Fist of the North Star was being aired compeltely uncensored a couple of channels away so the cool kids could see heads blowing up whenever they wanted to.
Also weirdly enough while cartoons were, and are, being censored videogames are completely untouched. They thought 12 year olds watching violent cartoons would scar them for life but the fact that they could rip people's heads off in Manhunt was completely fine.

 

[Munchingonfish]

- when Sailorstars was airing, a psychologist said that Sailor Moon could shove children on the path of gayness...so in the Italian edition the Sailor Starlights were changed from girls disguised as boys to boys who switch place with their twin sisters when it's time to fight. This also solved the issue of Seiya constantly hitting on Usagi.

Almost every millennial woman who is still an open Sailor Moon fan is some cat lady with pronouns in their bio. This psychologist wasn't wrong.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Freak you freak you sam rothstein freak you! - Sharon Stone in the Bravo edit of Casino

Hell, the entirety of the TV edit of Casino is comedy gold.

Also, the A&E edit of The Sopranos was hilariously bad. Especially since A&E has additional censorship standards that are bizarre as fuck.

Like you can't even say "ass" on A&E even though it's acceptable on a TV-PG network show....

Now, I noticed that the A&E edits of Season 1 weren't as draconian as the later seasons and they actually got a lot of the actors to do the re-dubs in Season 1 (like changing "fucking" to "freaking" and similar fare) and that's because the TV edit of The Sopranos was originally going to air on either FOX or FX, but A&E undercut them at the last second and got the rights for a while.