What are some of the craziest censorship instances on TV shows you have seen?
What are some of the craziest censorship instances on TV shows you have seen?
I do mean stuff like removed scenes from international airings, replacing objects like cigarettes or vine with any other objects.
The way they censored the gay out of Steven Universe in Russia was just comically stupid. There's a couple, Ruby and Sapphire, with Ruby being a more hot-headed butch type, and Sapphire being a cool-headed femme. So, Russia gives Ruby a goatee:
Even though, mind you, the dub still has a female VA for her. Anyway, last season of the show, Ruby and Sapphire get married. The showrunner didn't want them to be able to censor it as easily, so she put Ruby in a dress and Sapphire in a suit:
So, naturally, they put the goatee on Sapphire this time:
Which kind of just makes it double gay, I think?
In France, advertising alcohool brands on TV is heavily restricted. It wasn't a problem in the Simpsons since Duff was not a real brand of beer.
When Duff became a real brand, French TV had to blur every Duff logo and beep out every "Duff" pronounced on screen. Some episodes became unwatchable, Duffman became beepman, every beer became blurry...
I remember when Young Guns aired on a cable channel in the 90s there's a scene at the climax when Billy the Kid actually says "Murphy, you son of a bitch..." and shoots the baddie in the head.
So this cable channel edited it for him to say "Murphy, you sorry old buzzard...". But the headshot was still intact because this is America.
The most infamous would be South Park episodes S14E05 and S14E06 named "200" and "201". The central theme of the episodes: Censorship. Something South Park had been subjected to ever since its inception. And this time, they centered around the limits of what is allowed around depictions of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. For context: These episodes aired after controversies around such depictions in media around the world had people killed.
So in an attempt to protect themselves, the network engaged in censorship of the episodes and it is sometimes unclear, what was intentionally in there as a plot point from the creators and what was added by the network. Although some egregious examples are clear, such as the complete bleeping of Kyle's "I've learned something today" monologue at the end. While Stone and Parker inserted clear plot points like characters like Moses of all people asking, whether something was OK to show or say. I'm still uncertain whether the huge censorship bar over the Prophet is a plot point, or censorship or both.
The kicker: Prophet Muhammad had been shown in earlier episodes already, without sparking controversy and in "200" and "201" they even reference those episodes. As expected, they received death threats after the airing of the episodes and later pulled all five episodes with Muhammad depictions from their streaming sites (Super-Best Friends, Cartoon Wars 1+2, 200, 201).
I'm old, and I saw the Breakfast Club back in the 80's on like, channel 11. For years I couldn't figure out why Principal Vernon and Carl the Janitor went from hating each other to being friends.
Years later I saw it unedited and realized they cut out the whole scene with the two of them bonding and smoking weed. So much made sense at that point.
Disney consored Gravity Falls a lot before the episodes even aired. Alex Hirsch (the creator) had constant trouble for even some minor things.
The funniest bit was, when they had a flyer that literally said "not S&P approved", because S&P (standards and practices) wouldn't approve the flyer saying "bottles will be spun".
4Kids dubs of anime removing guns and all mentions of death. I recently watched the first season of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters and there's a scene where I'm pretty sure Bandit Keith was originally threatening Pegasus with a gun. Without the gun, it just looks so ridiculous. And what did 4Kids have against rice balls? Arceus forbid American kids should learn anything about foreign culture, we must pretend these are donuts.
TV censored version of Kill Bill hands down.
His name is buck, and he's here to party.
The VH1 edit of showgirls. Movie was cut shorter... Meaning what actual plot there was was even more chopped up .
And when they couldn't edit out the nudity, they "Ms painted" bikini tops on the actresses.
It's absolutely hilarious to see https://www.reddit.com/r/Corridor/comments/1bs47qn/showgirls_movie_edited_for_tv_vh1_no_joke/
Here is a reddit link
Here's an example
Dragon Ball has a scene in one of the earlier episodes where Goku gets desperate and confused when he finds out Bulma doesn't have balls. In Brazil, the panty removing scene was cut, but him screaming and waking up Bulma was kept, with the chatter being fully nonsensical "I was hungry and looking for food!"
I also remember seeing that a country, I think Thailand?, censors even male pectorals, so a lot of DBZ fights had big blurs over the characters.
One of my all time favourite movie watching experiences was me and my brother watching Robocop (the original) which we taped off ITV, must have been 9 or 10.
All the gratuitous violence was still entirely in place, but all the swear words were dubbed into more palatable versions. Strangest was that we specifically recorded it when it aired at about midnight anyway so way past the time the swearing was usually considered OK.
Me and my brother still call each other "buddy funkster" all the time.
Attack on Titan, in the anime they decided that having a mother tattoo her kid was too much (in a show where giants casually eat people alive) so they made her do an embroidery with the same symbol instead.
During season 4 where the tattoo was relevant for the first time (and they included it in the show), it was fun watching anime-only watchers complain it was a total ass-pull with no prior setup.
There's are two (that I'm aware of) versions of Deadpool that are shown on US TV. One is pretty normal, cut up mostly for time but with all the curseing and violence you'd expect, the other though has hilarious dubs over a good bit of the swearing (which is in theory easier when the main character is in a full face mask I guess?). The one that sticks out in memory is Deadpool's line "Suck a cock" is dubbed as "ha ha ha".
This Arcane scene : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU15Tk3UZwc
It's like they made 0 effort censoring it correctly 💀
There’s multiple versions of Brazil - the American version is just a little bit shorter. Those changes aren’t a big deal though. Howeverr, theres a made for TV version referred to as the “Love Wins Out” ending.
The movie is a parody of 1984 (absolutely hilarious and worth watching as are most things involving Terry Gilliam. I’ll spoil it a wee bit but the point isn’t these plot details.)
Basically, instead of Winston and Julia being lovers standing up to Big Brother, you have a delusional idiot who fucks up his pretty easy job in the evil totalitarian government by obsessing over and stalking a woman who has zero interest in him. His grip on reality is tenuous at best.
At the end, he fucks up and gets the Room 101 treatment. We’re treated to a fantastical scene as La Resistance comes in to save him, exciting bombings and car chases and reality bending visuals that are too ridiculous to be real. Him and the woman ride off into the sunset as badass rebels escaping the evil government.
That’s where the “Love Wins Out” movie stops. It’s clearly a hallucinatory dream sequence, and the actual ending reveals our “hero” has been tortured into insanity.
Like, the whole point of the movie is that she doesn’t like him, doesn’t know him, doesn’t want to know him. We don’t even know that she’s in La Resistance - it’s a great “unreliable narrator” film. But this TV version gives a character who exists to be an unlikeable moron the girl and a happy ending.
ISAIP episodes, those episodes pre-2010, with blackface jokes, basically it was showing how ridiculous blackface is to racists, the "execs decided it would be obliterated from most media besides clips on youtube. they are doing it "im a white person offended for black people "type of virtue signalling, not even poc is offended by this.
you know BSG wanted to say fuck instead frack.
also castlevania nocture, when they turned the captain lady intoa frozen shade, you can clearly see they dint want the frozens shades boobs to show in anyway, so its constantly always covered up.
On the tv airing of "How to Lose Your Guy in 10 Days," they have a scene where they are playing a bluffing card game call "Bullshit" where you can call bullshit on people who you think are bluffing. They replaced the word "shit" with "spit" so everyone is shouting "bull spit" at each other. I found this to be so ridiculously lame that it made it kind of funny.
This is in China, not so long ago 2019 or so... You can scan your TV and pay like 3 dollars a month or something usd for full access ... Anyway, watching gladiator. The opening scene with the battle. For some reason it was cut (loads of films are cut to shit there) like in between the opening battle scene. Like man on horse calling for war... Cut to.... dead people after battle... Might not have been that exactly, but there were a good few minutes cut at least and i never understood why, cos that the rest of the film was intact more or less and that scene alone didn't have much bearing. In that regard, censorship doesn't do much because you can't just redact random little bits out of context
In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Uncle Jokes", Robin says "Ground cow" in Asian airings instead of "Ground beef" during the cow with no legs joke, thus making it unfunny.
WTF, that's not the area I'd expect to "clutch pearls" over wine. (It's labeled in Russian, or another language with the same word for milk)
The Pokito (anime tv programming in Germany) had an awefull verstion of Naruro. Were they would sensor out the weapons.
I've not been privy to much censorship in my life (that I noticed) but I distinctly remember in Giants: Citizen Kabuto, there was a quest to slay some sheep and bring back their meat for food and the meat was green. As a 10 year old, I thought it was part of the lore. Since you were on another planet, it made sense to me... maybe these are alien sheep!
I only realized it years later when I had forgotten the game's title and asked about it, describing the green sheep meat, on a forum. I was told it was censorship and which game it was. Replayed it in its pure form and the meat was red.You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!
I remember watching the TV-edited version of "The Faculty" and there was a particular scene that stuck with me where the main guy runs outside in frustration and screams "PHOOEY!" instead of "FUUUCK!"
It's been a long time since I've seen the movie, much less the censored version of it, so that memory feels like a fever dream to me.
Simpsons itself has had multiple scenes cut out of episodes that are now really hard to find, in the worst cases it can be the entire end of an episode. The one that really sticks out is a scene where a celebrity ges jumped by cletus and a bunch of other rednecks and brutally shot to death with a lot of gore, the episode later got censored to end when cletus points a shotgun at him and eventually cut out the scene entierly making the episode rather abrupt.
In Germany for some inane reason the only way to get an uncensored Planet Terror with the helicopter chopping up zombies (and several other scenes, like Tarantino's balls rotting off) is by renting it. Good luck finding a video rental place nowadays.
You don't get it by buying the "uncensored" version. I was lucky that my first time watching the movie was as a rental.
Not crazy but in the 80s France imported a fuckton of anime from Japan without thinking about the original target audience.
Since they wanted to show that to kids, they had to censor a lot of stuff. The most funny was when blood was colored in black everywhere (only a black liquid gushing out of bad guys), or when characters were getting drunk on orange juice.
I watched From Dusk Till dawn on TV prime time in germany. The version was more than twenty minutes shorter, and context was lost so bad, that it even confused me after having watched the original 8 times.
The weirdest thing, characters were voiced over by different people than the rental version I knew.
The TV edit of Smokey and the Bandit is notoriously bad. You scum bum! https://youtu.be/ypLsFLB5WhM skip to 7:00 to get to the good stuff
Is Simpsons on the Disney Channel now?
This is a hate crime!
HFIL
7-Zark-7
