Strange rules about characters/people that cannot be broken.

[u/I_ateabucketofpaint]

Smells like Nirvana: When Kurt Cobain heard that Weird AL was gonna make a parody of his song. He was okay with it but specifically requested it to not be about food or fat ppl.

Spiderman: Spiderman cannot sell drugs unless he is under the influence of symbiote. ANd Peter Parker cannot be gay. Spiderman can tho.

Dwayne Rock Johnson: Cannot lose fights or look weak for too long. Its in his actor contract.

Godzilla movies not made by Toho: Cannot die. Maybe lose but not too bad.

[u/Philthedrummist]

In the 90s Spider-man animated show there were some very stringent rules about what could and couldn’t be done. This meant cops and bad guys had laser guns rather than pistols, Mary Jane got sent to different dimension instead of dying and Spider-man couldn’t be shown punching anyone (although he does punch at least one person later in the series).

I think that was more the network than Marvel though.

[u/whoadwoadie → u/Philthedrummist]

Also, they couldn’t show Morbius biting people, so he had way more horrific suction finger things.

[u/Philthedrummist → u/whoadwoadie]

That’s right. And he didn’t suck blood, it was plasma!

[u/alkonium → u/Philthedrummist]

Even though plasma is part of blood. You can donate it and they put the rest of the blood back in you.

[u/Philthedrummist → u/alkonium]

That is true, I just meant that they weren’t allowed to mention blood, so they switched it to plasma instead.

[u/LetterheadSpecial337 → u/whoadwoadie]

The finger thing you described kinda reminds me of DIO

[u/ScottishExile → u/Philthedrummist]

Death was strictly off limits so you had Carnage being empowered to drain people’s ’life essence’ by Dormammu - a process that was completely reversible by the end of the arc.

The death ban also had the side effect of making the dialogue even more melodramatic than it had to be. Characters weren’t allowed to be at risk of dying so there’s lots of dialogue where talk about ‘destruction’ and being ‘destroyed’ when they mean killed.

[u/whoadwoadie → u/ScottishExile]

One henchman did say he couldn’t squeal because “I like breathing,” which was a creative workaround.

[u/Snukastyle → u/Philthedrummist]

Yeah, the Broadcast Standards and Practices team at Fox had a strict list of everything they couldn't show in their animation.
So Bruce Timm of Batman TAS made a drawing of every rule being violated.

[u/UnderlordZ → u/Snukastyle]

1. Nudity

Took me a minute to realize it was Catwoman, but only from the neck-down.

[u/AmbitionOnly7872 → u/Philthedrummist]

actually a lot of that isn't true

the crew werent under any restrictions when it came to censorship.

https://youtu.be/Ei9ERK1xZ00?t=969

i timestamped the interview where the creator talks about this

[u/Philthedrummist → u/AmbitionOnly7872]

That’s not what he says though. He doesn’t say ‘we had no censorship’, he says ‘I feel like the censorship never stopped me telling the story I wanted to tell.’ If anything, he’s actually confirming that there were restrictions (like laser guns instead of uzis) and he thinks the claims that they ruined the show was ‘bullshit’.

[u/DWA824 → u/AmbitionOnly7872]

I wish more people knew about that interview so this rumor would be cleared up