h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was surprised to find, playing on a US cable network at 5pm, The Big Lebowski. "This will be edited for TV, surely" I thought and I was right. Gone was EVERY Swear word to be replaced by Freakin', Hell, Jeez and occassionally just silence.

Where this was too much to juggle - the scene was just cut. (Thus the fabulous 'I am a walrus' sequence didn't get beyond Walter muttering to himself "That freakin' witch - jeez!) and the sequence in the car, where Walter explains 'the ringer' and the kidnappers hang up and ring back - was parred down to just ONE phone call - eliminating The Dude's rant to Walter.

Now American cable networks are curiously puritan when it comes to this sort of thing so I can't say I expected anything less.

However it left me wondering two things:

1) have you ever had a favourite movie of yours decimated for a TV viewing? How bad was it? Any funny anecdotes?

2) Why on earth would a network show such a determinedly rude (and utterly hilarious) film so early in the afternoon? Why not put on something less potentially offensive and screen the movie proper at a time more suited to an adult audience?


Clive

P.S I've cross-posted this over on Ask as well so I can get as many anecdotes and views as possible.

>I've cross-posted this over on Ask as well..<


aargh!

I did a bad thing?

Some of us are .

To get this thread on track, it would probably be amiss if nobody pointed out all the changes that get made to anime when it's translated into English. I'm particularly thinging about *Yu-Gi-Oh* here, but a lot of this is applicable to most Japanese shows that wind up in America.

*Guns. This show often features characters having guns pointed at them. The guns are always removed from the American dub, despite the fact that nobody ever dies from a gunshot.

It's interesting that a lot of *Looney Toons* and *Tom & Jerry* shorts from the 1950s to 1970s feature characters regularly shooting each other and themselves with guns, and often dying (sp?) as a result. These are apparently now being cut, or the episodes banned, amid fears that children are easily influenced by what strangely-drawn taking animals get up to. What puzzles me is that most of the people doing this banning would have grown up watching those very cartoons, and it evidently didn't make them crazed shooters.

But really, what's wrong with having guns in a TV show?

*Death. Characers are sometimes threatened with death in the original Japanese, but for the English dub, are threatened with being sent to something called the 'Shadow Realm.' Actually, this was in the original, but not used so much - also, they just called it Hell.

*Dragonball* was apparently a much worse offender, since the numerous death threats become threats to be sent to another dimension. This could even apply to entire planets (though why sending a planet to another dimension is such a bad thing for everybidy on it is a mystery). This even applied when the main character died and went to Heaven, complete with halos; Instead of heaven, it was just 'another dimension.'

Once again, what's so bad about having characters dying or being threatened with death? It happens all the time in the *Harry Potter* books, and yet children are encouraged to read these.

*Religion. A particularly strange change I've noticed in a lot of TV and movie adaptations from other media/languages is that if a character says "Oh my God!" in the original, this will be changed to "Oh my gosh!" Why is saying "Oh my God!" so bad? Everybody does this, it's a commonly heard phrase. Also, does ANYBODY in the real world actually say 'gosh'?

Religious imagery is also frequently removed, notably crosses and hexagrams. Since America is full of fundamentalist Christians, I would have thought they wouldn't particularly mind seeing the odd cross on TV.

And it doesn't seem to fear of offending anybody. I remember as a kid, I watched the *X-Men* animated series on occasion, and one episode had a mutant named Nightcrawler who looked rather like Satan, but was a devout Christian; this gave him comfort in a cruel world, and by the end, Wolverine was praying in a church despite supposedly hating God. More recently, an episode of *Justice League Unlimited* had the heroes' enemy, 65 years in the future, explaining how her faith had giver her a similar degree f comfort in her life. (A couple of other episodes got skirted the God taboo by having a character exclaiming "Good Lord!"). If such material is considered acceptable in TV series based on comics, why not other media?

Hmm, I do seem to have gone on, don't I? I'll stop now. Well, I'll stop after one more minor point.

A couple of weeks ago, I half-watched an episode of *Bones* which involved the characters trying to find the killer of a college student who had appeared on a porn site. What was interesting was that when they watched the video, the quality was on a par with DVD, and there was npo blurriness. Also, the girl's breasts were blocked by the website logo. Weird.

I think Eric Idle said it best:

http://odeo.com/audio/123587/view



I don't know if it's true or not but it seemed to me that UK television has become a bit more conservative since I was there time. What's the British equivalent of the FCC?

Would have thought otherwise: certainly a lot of sex on British TV these days.

we watched Rome last night (UK Drama)
hadn't seen it before and thought we were getting some kind of freebie porn channel

"What's the British equivalent of the FCC?"

That would be http://www.ofcom.org.uk/ I wouldn't say they were as "pervasive" as the FCC.

My own personal favourite of this type is the current constantly played song "This ain't a scene" by Fall Out Boy.

The chorus goes "This ain't a scene, it's a goddamn arms race", repeated several times.

Due to the quaintly delicate sensibilities of our colonial cousins the word(s) "goddamn" becomes a period of silence.

Unfortunately, to my (and other people's) ears, the next two words don't sound like "arms race"... they sound like "arse face".

Which leaves one hearing "This ain't a scene, it's a [expletive deleted] ARSE FACE!".

Which is priceless.

SoRB

Ahh, have you seen the brilliantly edited version of Beetlebum by Blur, which is presented with full audio but all cigarettes in the video are airbrushed out? Strange thing to do in a song about heroin addiction.